She mumbled a protest and closed her eyes tightly shut, her body stiffening instinctively within the grip of his hands while she waited for the expected burst of panic to go rolling through her.
But it didn’t come; instead she felt pleasure, a too long subdued, aching kind of pleasure that flared up from the very depths of her dark memories to rage in a pulse-singing rampage that had her lips parting and moving in hungry rhythm with his.
What’s happening to me? she wondered deliriously. I should be fighting him like a lunatic. I need to fight him!
But she didn’t fight him. Instead her hands flew up, clutching at his wide shoulders, then shifting in a hectic jerk to clasp him around the back of his neck. Her fingers tingled as they ran urgently into his hair, revelled in the muscles cording his nape as she drew him closer. She gave herself up to the intense pleasure she discovered in the warm, moist hollow of his hungry mouth.
Someone groaned, she wasn’t certain who, but in another moment she was standing, her chair pushed out of the way and her body pressed against the full length of his. Sandro’s hands were stroking her, moving in sensually urgent caresses from underarms to waist, then back up again, his thumbs brushing against the s
ides of her breasts. They responded by pulsing into tight, tingling life, ecstatic to join in with the whole wild conflagration.
She was on fire—that quickly and that violently—she was on fire for him, could hear his fractured breathing, could feel the fire burning through him, too, as he pressed himself even closer, letting her feel the strength of his desire, letting her know by the way he deepened the kiss even further that he was very aware of what was happening to her.
Then he was putting distance between them, prising his mouth from hers to hold her at arm’s length while his eyes spat a bloody kind of anger at her and his kiss-swollen mouth pulsed with an undisguised passion.
‘Well, that was a revelation,’ he mocked with silken cruelty.
But she was much too shocked to appreciate the mockery. She just stared at him, dazed and shaken, still lost within her own stunningly passionate response to what had begun as a punishment and ended up as the most intensely erotic kiss she had ever—ever experienced.
‘Keep this up, mi amore,’ he continued in that same taunting vein, ‘and reparation is going to be well worth the years I have waited to get it!’
She flinched, his cruelty finally managing to get through the haze. ‘I can’t bear this,’ she breathed in stark confusion.
‘Correction,’ he clipped. ‘You are bearing it very well, if my senses are telling me the real truth of it.’
And, to punctuate the humiliating point, he kissed her again, capturing her mouth but waiting only long enough for her lips to cling helplessly to his before he brutally separated them again.
‘See what I mean, cara?’ he drawled. ‘You want me so badly you cannot hide it any longer.’
Letting go of her altogether, he watched her sway dizzily, her long lashes fluttering dazedly over her darkened blue eyes.
Then, drily, he remarked, ‘Tonight should be interesting.’ On that strategically-placed barb he strode coolly for the door, tossing casually over his shoulder, ‘And just in case you consider trying it,’ he warned, ‘the lift will not be operational to this floor until I return. So don’t start any fires, cara—not while I am away at least.’
And with that he was gone, leaving her with that tasty little tit-bit to chew over.
Tonight, he had said—and said it calculatingly. Which, in turn, could only mean one thing.
Weakly she sank back into the chair. It was all getting worse by the minute.
It didn’t matter one bit to him that she had just bared her very soul to him. He wanted reparation and he was determined to get it. And reparation could only come in one form as far as he was concerned.
Sandro fully intended to make their marriage a real one tonight.
Consequently she was in a state of high anxiety by the time he returned that evening. Out of sheer desperation she had kept herself busy throughout the afternoon—clearing their lunch away, tidying her bed but refusing to so much as take a step towards the other bedroom Sandro had used the last time she had been here. Then she went to search out something to cook for dinner, something mind-consuming enough to stop her driving herself into hysterics at the terrible sense of helplessness that was just too familiar to her to deal sensibly with it.
It didn’t matter that she knew without a doubt Sandro would never, ever use force on her; that awful feeling of utter helplessness still ate away at her nerves as she stood rolling gnocchi—tiny bite-sized potato dumplings—and prepared her own fresh pasta—all learned during her time at Vito’s restaurant. She could cook French food too, and English, of course, and she wasn’t too bad with Chinese dishes—again picked up during various restaurant jobs.
But this was an Italian man’s kitchen, so the ingredients in it were mainly Italian. So gnocchi it would be for starters, dropped into a rich, hot butter sauce and followed by a pasta bake, packed with mushrooms, onions and peppers in a creamy sauce and topped with mozzarella cheese.
‘Mmm,’ a light voice said. ‘This all looks and smells very wifely.’
Joanna spun round from the sauce she was grimly stirring. ‘I am not sleeping with you tonight, Sandro!’ she told him shrilly.
She looked hot, she looked bothered, she looked just about ready to fall apart at the seams. She had tied her hair back in an unattractive tight knot on the top of her head, and she had changed out of the jeans and dragged on the most unflattering items of clothing she could find in the wardrobe: white wide-legged trousers and a long black jumper that was suffocating her in the heat permeating the kitchen.
He, by contrast, looked cool and at ease and as usual, very stylish, even though the jacket to his suit had gone, along with his tie, and the cuffs of his shirt sleeves had been unbuttoned and left to hang loose about his strong brown wrists.
‘What are you making?’ He walked forward, ignoring what she’d said to him. ‘Gnocchi?’ he quizzed, glancing over her shoulder to see the tiny dumplings gently simmering in a pan on the cooker. ‘I married an Englishwoman with an Italian heart!’