The Ranieri Bride

ve glorious months, once fulfilled your every emotional and sexual need.

For three long years he’d never been able to achieve quite that level of sexual excitement again—or give anywhere near that much of himself emotionally again.

She owed him. She owed him in so many ways that it was almost like an orgasm in itself to just stand here relishing the different ways she was about to repay the debt.

‘You have something to offer me as incentive to change my mind?’ he prompted softly.

She gave no answer. Her eyes remained lowered. The heat inside him began to increase.

‘Yourself, maybe?’ He gave her a clue as to where he was going with this. ‘Perhaps you are wondering if that sensational body hidden beneath the grey sack still has the power to turn me on…’

Did it?

Freya shocked herself by actually pondering the disgusting suggestion. Would sex with him buy her back her job?

Something sizzled inside her. It was an even more shocking sensation called…temptation.

Well, fight it! she snapped at herself. Remember what this is really about: Nicky—not the humiliating price of sex!

But the atmosphere between them was really beginning to fizz the way it used to. The sudden awareness of him as a full-blooded, very physical and sexual being with the sensual touch of a—

Freya sucked in a breath, slender throat working as she tried to keep her mind on track. He’s a bastard, she told herself. A true, cold-hearted, ruthless Neanderthal who thinks nothing of sacking me from my job in one sentence, then suggesting we have sex in the next!

But what could she do? What could she say to put the swine in his place? Her job was her only source of income. She depended on it as others did on water to drink. Without it she was useless as a caring provider for Nicky, totally defenceless against anything else Enrico decided to do to her to make her bend to his will.

Call his bluff—walk away—her common sense challenged her. You said it down there in the ladies’ room: even Enrico could not be so archaic as to sack you because you refuse to give him what he wants.

‘L’alimentazione della donna è nel suo silenzio,’ he murmured softly.

A woman’s power is in her silence, she translated.

Not so she’d noticed, Freya thought bitterly. She’d never felt weaker in her life.

Then he reached out to curve long fingers beneath her chin and lift it. Eyes clashed with eyes. Intimacy, familiarity licked like a flame through her insides and filled her with the knowledge of what he was going to do next.

‘No,’ she gasped out in shaken protest.

But too late. His dark head was already moving closer, his mouth already parting to cover hers. And it did it in that oh, so gentle, persuasive way it had always used to, before they began making love.

Response sent a tight sting running right through her middle. She tried to fight it. She kept her fingers clenched tightly beneath her arms and refused to kiss him back, even if she could not pull her mouth away.

But she could taste Enrico, the man she had loved and lost but never forgotten. He kissed her the way Enrico had always kissed her, with a slow and agonisingly sumptuous patience until the pleasure of it filled just about every sensual crevice she possessed. The gentle tip of his tongue found its way into one of those crevices, parting her lips and making her tremble as she fought the need to respond. Long fingers began sliding from her chin to her nape, and the way he tilted her head back that bit more was quite simply Enrico at his slow, seductive best.

Pull back, Freya told herself. Don’t let him do this.

But she couldn’t pull back. And the slow slide of his tongue across the inner tissue of her mouth was exquisite. A dizzying dip into what felt like drug-induced pleasure. Then her hair came loose to tumble free as a bird down the tension in her back and he drew her closer. The moment her front made contact with his the fight was over for her. It was as if he’d thrown a switch and turned her on like a light.

It was wrong, it was bad, but she still couldn’t stop herself from being drawn into the kiss like a fool with no brain who couldn’t pull back from the brink.

She groaned as she felt her fingers unclenching. Tense and trembling, they unwrapped themselves from around her ribcage and began feeling their way up the smooth cloth of his jacket, then continued on in a tense drift across the thin covering of his white shirt.

Enrico muttered something in soft, thick Italian, parting his thighs so he could draw her even more into the bowl of his hips—and she let him, felt his muscle-tight promise pushing against her stomach, felt its tempting, tantalising length and hardening strength cause a knock-on effect inside her, dragging at finely layered sexual muscles and sending her hips moving against him in response.

‘Feeling the pull, cara?’ he murmured against the soft moist hungry warmth of her mouth.

The slow lick of his tongue took her answer away. She released a helpless little groan instead. The fine tremors attacking her were all-knowing and wanting and uncontrollable. Reaching between their bodies, he flicked open a couple of shirt buttons, then took her hand and fed it inside. It was like being allowed to briefly touch heaven. She felt the pleasurable prickle of chest hair against her palm and the muscle-bound warmth of his golden skin. Then he was taking her other hand and feeding downwards to where he wanted it and held it there, while his long fingers stroked sensually down the length of her fingers, making wetness pool in the cup of her sex.

Enrico wondered how far he intended to take this.