The Italian's One-Night Consequence. Cathy Williams

eyebrows shot up. He refused to let her hide behind the cup of coffee scenario. ‘You want me. And I want you. I’ll accept the offer of coffee, but I’m not interested in a push-pull game of one step forward followed by two back.’

      ‘Nor am I.’ She tiptoed forward, filled with a sense of heady daring, and brushed his perfect mouth with hers.

       CHAPTER THREE

      AFTER A BRISK walk away from the city centre, they found themselves in a tree-lined avenue filled with mansions.

      ‘I don’t live in one of these.’

      Maddie didn’t look at him as she said this but her cheeks were flaming red. She wasn’t lying, but she was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that she had played fast and loose with the truth.

      She consoled herself with the obvious justification that launching into a garbled, long-winded explanation about inheritances and distant relatives was not relevant, given they were not going to be in one another’s lives for longer than this one night.

      Which brought her full circle, questioning what she was doing. A one-night stand? Her proud, stubborn, fiercely independent mother would have had a heart attack on the spot, because she had drummed it into her only child that you had to choose carefully when it came to giving your body to someone else.

      ‘You’ll make mistakes,’ Lizzie Gallo had told her daughter, ‘but it’s still important to go into every relationship thinking it could be the one.’

      Reflecting now on that advice, Maddie had to concede that her mother might not have ended up where she had, if she’d a one-night stand with Maddie’s father rather than running away with him, only to be abandoned the second he realised that the fortune he’d banked on Lizzie’s father providing wasn’t going to be coming his way.

      Disinheritance in the name of love hadn’t been his thing. He’d stuck around just long enough to determine that there was going to be no reconciliation between daughter and rich daddy, and then he’d scarpered.

      ‘But I gave it my all,’ her mother had said, in one of her rare moments of honesty—because Lizzie Gallo had never been someone to moan and look backwards. ‘And, for me, that was the main thing. You climb into bed with someone for a few hours and, believe me, you won’t feel great when you climb out of it so that you can do the walk of shame back home.’

      Well, that, Maddie reflected, sneaking a sidelong glance at the virtual stranger who had somehow managed to ensnare her into jettisoning all her principles, had not exactly served her well when it came to Adam.

      She’d thrown herself into her relationship with Adam and given it everything. She’d been so in love with the idea of being in love that she’d missed all the warning signs of a relationship that had been made anywhere but in heaven.

      This time... This time she knew what she was getting into. No girlish fantasies and romantic daydreams about Prince Charming only for Prince Charming to turn out to be Mr Toad. She was with a guy who wasn’t interested in laying down roots and who’d made it perfectly clear what he wanted.

      She felt the bloom of longing between her legs and swallowed down a rush of powerful excitement.

      The houses they were passing now were getting smaller and finally, at the end of the elegant road, she swung up the only drive that was unkempt.

      ‘Not what I expected.’ Leo glanced at the edifice of what must once upon a time been a rather charming cottage but now looked like something from the Land that Time Forgot.

      ‘What did you expect?’

      Maddie unlocked the front door and pushed it open into a hallway that was worn, but still carried the hallmarks of the house it had once been. A flagstone floor, an old-fashioned wooden umbrella stand, a sturdy banister leading upstairs, and worn paintwork with great big discoloured patches from where she had removed dark, lugubrious paintings.

      ‘Something a little less...imposing...’

      ‘Does that bother you?’

      ‘Why should it?’

      She’d turned to look at him and Leo could not resist the urge to touch, to feel the smoothness of her cheeks. He ran an exploratory finger over her striking cheekbones and then outlined the contours of her full mouth. When she shivered, he smiled with undisguised hunger.

      ‘I don’t know how you do what you do to me,’ he murmured, trailing his finger down towards her tee shirt and stopping just where the shadow of her cleavage began, ‘but all I want to do right now is rip those clothes off you and take you right here, right now...’

      Maddie’s breath caught in her throat and she unconsciously arched her body up, so that her small, high breasts pushed towards him in a bold invitation for him to touch.

      It was clear she wanted him—so badly that it was a physical ache—and her whole body shuddered as he slipped his hand underneath her tee shirt and then cupped her breast briefly, before tugging the lacy bra to one side so that he could feel the softness of her skin and the tightness of her nipple.

      Positioning himself in front of her, Leo reached under the shirt with both hands, pushing up her bra completely to free her breasts, all the while keeping his eyes firmly pinned to her face, because he was absolutely loving the mesmerised hot burn of desire in her bright green eyes.