‘He said that, did he?’ she challenged. ‘Condoned this frankly—obscene suggestion you are putting to me?’
‘It is not a suggestion,’ he denied, ‘and nor is it obscene. You are still my wife in the eyes of the world, and you will maintain good appearances at all costs, Sara,’ he warned. ‘Or so help me I will let you go, and keep the child!’
Thereby threatening to walk her right into Alfredo’s neatly baited trap! she realised, and didn’t know whether to scream in frustration or weep in defeat. ‘I won’t sleep with you, Nicolas,’ was what she eventually said, and spun abruptly on her heel.
‘Where do you think you are going?’ he demanded.
‘It’s time for Lia’s afternoon nap,’ she informed him stiffly.
‘Fabia will see to the child,’ he ordained. ‘We have unfinished business to discuss here.’
‘Except I prefer to see to Lia myself.’
‘And I am telling you you cannot!’ he snapped, then made an effort to get a hold of himself. ‘This is more important. So leave it,’ he clipped. ‘The child is as safe with Fabia as she could be with anyone.’
She spun back to stare at him. ‘Even her own mother?’ she challenged. Then, as a sudden thought struck her, she felt tears of hurt spring into her eyes. ‘This is another punishment, isn’t it?’ she accused him bitterly. ‘It’s just one more Sicilian vendetta whereby you cruelly separate me from my baby for some nasty reason of your own!’
She had to be crazy speaking to him like that, she realised hectically as he took an angry step towards her. But she held her ground, eyes ablaze, her fingers tightening on the coil of wire and secateurs in a way that made his eyes widen in real surprise because it was so obvious that she was ready to use them on him if he gave her reason.
‘Put those down,’ he instructed.
She shook her head, mouth drawn in at the corners and defiant, like her blue eyes, her whole stance!
‘You will not like it if I am forced to take them from you,’ he warned darkly.
I know I won’t, she acknowledged to herself. But for some reason I can’t allow myself to cower away from you! Not any more—perhaps never again! she realised with a start, and knew the words would have surprised him if she’d said them out loud.
But maybe she didn’t need to say them out loud, she noted breathlessly. Because something altered in his eyes, the anger darkening into something much more dangerous: a taste for the battle—not this mental battle whereby she was daring to defy him, or even the one involving a silly pair of secateurs that he could take from her with ease if he so wanted to, but a far more complicated one which set the tiny muscles deep down in her stomach pulsing, set her heart racing.
‘Taking me on, cara?’ he drawled.
Her fingers twitched. ‘I’m not going to let you walk all over me, Nicolas,’ she returned. ‘Not again. Last time you broke my spirit—’
‘You never had a spirit,’ he countered deridingly, taking a deliberate step towards her. ‘You used to jump ten miles high if anyone so much as frowned at you.’
She had to steal herself not to take a defensive step back. ‘Well, not any more,’ she said determinedly. ‘I am a mother now. And I shall fight you to the end of the earth if I have to but you will not separate me from my baby.’
‘This has nothing to do with the baby.’ He dismissed that angle, taking yet another carefully gauged step.
Her breasts heaved on a short, tense pull of air, but she held her ground.
‘This is about you standing there—’ he used his darkened eyes to indicate the defiant pose she had adopted ‘—daring to take me on …’
Another step. She quivered. He saw it and sent her a taunting smile. ‘The coil of wire,’ he suggested, ‘would make an adequate garotte but would require a lot of physical strength for you to succeed with it. I would throw it to one side if I were you, amore,’ he advised, ‘and concentrate on the scissors instead.’
‘Secateurs,’ she corrected him tensely.
His mocking half-nod acknowledged the correction. ‘Now with those you could do me some damage,’ he observed. ‘Not much,’ he added. ‘But some—enough maybe to make this new spirit you talk about feel better.’
‘I have no wish to damage you at all!’ she shakily denied. ‘I just want you to stop trying to bully me all the time!’
‘Then put down the weapons,’ he urged, ‘and we will talk about my—bullying.’
She shook her head in refusal, and the odd thing about it was that she had a feeling he would have been disappointed if she had given in to him. He was enjoying this; she could see the beginnings of amusement gleaming behind the taunt in his eyes.
‘Then make your move, cara,’ he softly advised. ‘Or I will undoubtedly make mine …’
Then he did—without any more warning, her half-second hesitation all he allowed her before his hands were suddenly snaking out to capture her two wrists, fingers closing tightly around them then forcing them up and apart until he had her standing there in front of him with her hands made useless; then his body was taking up the last bit of space separating them, chest against wildly palpitating chest, hips against hips, thighs against thighs.
‘I like it—the spirit,’ he murmured. ‘I used to like the soft clinging vine you used to be but I think I may like this more spirited creature a whole lot more.’
‘I don’t want you to like me,’ she mumbled in protest.
‘No?’ He challenged that. The word challenged it, his eyes challenged it, and the sensual curve of his mouth challenged it. ‘I think,’ he said very softly, ‘you want to be kissed into submission.’
‘I do not!’ she denied.
But it was too late; his mouth covered hers, covered it and moulded it, moulded it and parted it, and, on parting it, brought every sense that she’d been severely containing bursting into quick, clamouring life.
Her wrists he kept up and level with her head; her fingers were still clenched tightly around her ‘weapons’, as he’d called them. His big chest moved against her chest, making her breasts swell and tighten. His tight hips pushed knowingly against her hips, and the terrible, wonderful sinking feeling she experienced inside made her groan in denial. A denial he scorned by doing the same thing again. And again. And again—until the groan changed in timbre, gave her away, just as her breasts gave her away, her breathing, the way she sank powerlessly into the kiss.
Then her fingers slowly opened, the two clattered thuds which echoed on the tiles at either side of them announcing the final surrender, and she was tugging her wrists, urgent to free her fingers so that she could slide them into his hair, hold his mouth down on hers, move closer—even closer because her legs had turned to liquid and she needed his support to remain upright.
He let her have her way, set her wrists free so that her hands could find his head while his own hands lowered to clasp her lightly around her slender ribcage just below the trembling swell of her breasts. She gave a sensually unsteady sigh and wound her arms around his neck, moving her body closer to the source of its pleasure, sighed again as his hands began stroking her body, moving downwards until they found her hips where they closed and lifted her against the steadily growing evidence of his own passion.
It went on and on, and the one word which kept repeating itself over and over in her head was beautiful. This was so beautiful. The man, his touch, his kiss. Beautiful.
When he lifted her into his arms she did not protest. When he carried her