‘Here,’ he said, and held his glass to her lips. ‘You look like you could do with a drink.’
He tipped up the glass and watched her drink it all down.
The champagne fizzed into her stomach, her head spinning—but not because of the alcohol.
Jordan could not recall ever being this excited. Or this mesmerised. This was different from ten years ago. Different from last Friday night.
Tonight, she accepted dazedly, was going to be an experience which would change her life for ever.
When he tossed the empty glass onto one of the sofas, then ran the back of his right hand across the hard tips of her breasts, a violent tremor rippled down her spine.
‘Do you know how sexy you look?’ he murmured, as he trailed his fingers down over her tautly held stomach. ‘But you’d look even sexier if you moved your legs apart a little.’
When she just blinked, he smiled a rather cold smile. ‘I thought we’d agreed on total surrender for tonight? Total surrender means doing as you’re told when you’re told. Of course if you’ve changed your mind about wanting your fill of me, that’s your choice. Get dressed and leave. I won’t stop you. But if you decide to stay, then we do things my way.’
The ruthlessness in his voice shocked her. But it turned her on at the same time.
‘You seem to have lost your tongue,’ he went on. ‘But, since you’re still here, I take it you agree with my conditions for tonight?’
Jordan swallowed, then licked her parched lips.
‘That too,’ he said, his coal-black eyes fixed on her mouth. ‘But later—after we’ve had a relaxing bath. You stay right where you are till I run the water.’
‘Gino—no,’ she choked out, her excitement already at fever pitch.
‘No, what?’ he shot back.
‘Don’t leave me like this. I can’t bear it.’
He glared at her with something akin to hatred. But then his eyes dissolved in a blaze of molten desire. With a tortured groan he caught her to him, his arms enfolding her into a rough embrace, his mouth brutal in its possession of hers.
She melted against him with a naked moan, glorying in the savagery of his kiss. If he’d been tender with her she might have started crying. This way she could lose herself in his wild passion, as well as her own.
The buttons on his shirt were pressing painfully into her chest. But she didn’t care. She welcomed the pain…and the madness.
Soon his tongue in her mouth wasn’t enough. She needed him inside her. Needed to be filled as only he had ever filled her.
Somehow she freed her mouth from his, her breathing like a marathon runner nearing the end of a race.
‘Do it to me,’ she cried.
His eyes glowered down at her, then glittered in a way which sent a shiver running down her spine. ‘Here?’
‘Yes,’ she practically sobbed.
He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off her feet, turning her round and carrying her over to the floor-length window. There, he stood her in the centre of it, her bottom and shoulders pressed up against the cool glass.
Jordan gasped when he lifted her arms upwards and outwards.
‘Take hold of the curtains,’ he ordered her. ‘And don’t let go.’
Her hands trembled as they clasped the edges of the velvet swags. What must she look like, standing there like some pagan sacrifice? Could she be seen from the windows of the building opposite? Were people watching them?
‘Move your legs further apart,’ Gino ordered, as he stripped off his shirt and tossed it aside.
Jordan closed her eyes, then did as she was told. Her hands clutched tighter at the velvet, so tight that it was a wonder she didn’t bring the curtains down around her.
The sudden feel of Gino’s breath on her face had her eyelids fluttering back open.
‘I want you to watch, my love,’ he murmured, leaning down to run his tongue-tip around her startled mouth. ‘And to witness. Everything.’
‘I…I am not your love,’ she cried, shuddering when one his hands slipped between her legs.
‘You are tonight.’
‘No,’ she denied, even as she trembled with desire.
‘This tells me differently,’ he murmured against her panting mouth. ‘This tells me that tonight you are mine.’
His eyes held hers as his hand continued with its most devastatingly intimate exploration. Jordan tried to fight the feelings his skilful touch evoked, tried not to melt at his watching her like that. But it was a futile effort. Her whole body stiffened as it rushed towards a climax.
Gino’s abandoning her barely a breath before her release brought a perverse cry of protest.
‘Patience,’ he growled, and went back to undressing in front of her.
Jordan’s shoulders sagged, her upper arms beginning to ache. But the sight of Gino naked had her spine straightening again.
‘You like what you see?’ he taunted as he came back to her.
Jordan could no longer speak. She just wanted him inside her. She didn’t care who might be watching them—didn’t care about anything but his flesh filling hers.
It did. Quite roughly. Surging up into her body with such force that she was momentarily lifted off the floor. His hands lifted to press against the glass on either side of her head, his mouth grazing her hair as he thrust into her, his chest rubbing against the tips of her breasts.
Jordan had never experienced a coupling so passionate or so primitive. Not even with Gino himself, all those years ago.
It spun her out of her head, out of her body. She was there, but not there. Gino had said he wanted her to watch and to witness everything. That was exactly what it felt as if she was doing: being both participant and observer.
Is that really me there, spread naked against the window, keeping myself a willing captive for this man?
I am doomed, she thought hysterically. Doomed!
‘Gino,’ she cried out as she came. ‘Oh, Gino…’
Gino heard her call out his name. Felt her flesh start spasming around his.
What little was left of his control shattered, his mind exploding along with his body, his thoughts spinning out into the stratosphere.
She had to still love him to let him do such things to her, he reasoned wildly in the heat of the moment. Had to. The girl he’d known all those years could not have changed that much.
And if she loved him, then she didn’t love Stedley. She was just marrying him because she was getting older and wanted children. Women always wanted children.
He could give her children, if that was what she so desperately wanted. They could work something out—some arrangement: they could be lovers, or live together. He hadn’t given any deathbed promise that he would not live with a girl who wasn’t Italian.
Some common sense had returned, however, by the time she let go of the curtains and began to sag downwards.
She didn’t necessarily have to love him to enjoy what he’d just done to her, he conceded, as he withdrew and scooped her up into his arms. She wasn’t the same girl she’d been ten years ago. She’d changed.
He’d changed, hadn’t he?
She’d told him how