The Italian's Future Bride

‘Well, turn away now, Villani,’ she responded frozenly. ‘Because it’s the lastgift you are going to get from me!’

She gave a push at his wide shoulders and obligingly he rolled away to lie on his side, watching as she scrambled off the bed, then began hunting the littered floor for something to wear to cover up her nakedness. Catching sight of her dress lying there on the floor in a brazen swirl, she shuddered, hating the sight of it, and made a wild grab for his shirt instead.

‘You sound very certain about that.’

‘I am.’ Rachel had to fight with the shirt sleeves, which had become tangled inside out.

‘We were really great together…’

‘Well, you’re such a great lover,’ she flicked back. ‘Better than most, if that gives your ego a boost.’

‘Grazie.’

Get lost!she wanted to scream at him. A gift—agift !

The shirt slithered over her now shivering body and she dragged the two sides together with fingers clutching at the fine cloth like tense claws.

Flushed, angry, and aware that any second now she was going to explode on a flood of wild, uncontrollable I-hate-myself! tears, ‘Is there another bedroom I can use?’ she asked, chin up, blue eyes refusing to do anything other than look directly at his smooth, sardonic, lazily curious face because she was determined to get away with at least some small part of pride intact.

‘You don’t need one. This bed is easily big enough for the two of us.’ He was supremely content in his languid pose.

Refusing to get into an argument with him, Rachel turned to walk towards the bedroom door.

‘I don’t do one-night stands,’ he fed gently after her.

She stopped, narrow shoulders tautening inside his oversized shirt. ‘Neither do I…’ she felt constrained to reply.

‘Good. So we understand each other.’

‘No.’ Rachel swung round. ‘Idon’t understand!’

He was already off the bed and reaching for his trousers, so casual about his nakedness that she had to fight not to blush. He was incredible to look at: all golden and glossed by hard muscle tone, made all the more blatantly masculine by the triangle of black curls that swirled between his burgeoning pectorals and then drew a line down his torso to the other thick cluster curling around the potent force of his sex.

The stupid blush broke free when she recalled what that part of him had felt like erect and inside her. She tried to damp it all back down again but it was already too late because, as he was about to thrust a shockingly muscled brown leg into his trousers, he glanced at her and went as still as the dead.

Her breathing went haywire, her old friend panic rising up from places she did not know it could rise up from—her tender breasts, her taut nipples stinging against the cloth of his shirt and that terrible hot spot still pulsing between her legs, which made her draw in her muscles in an effort to switch it off.

He dropped the trousers. And she knew why he had. Seeing the way she was looking at him had turned him on like the floodgates opening on a mighty dam. What she’d thought potent before was suddenly downright unbelievable. He started walking towards her and she actually whimpered as she put out a trembling hand in the useless hope of holding him back, while her other hand maintained a death grip on the shirt to keep it shut across her front.

‘No, please don’t.’ Her little plea came out all husky. Already her legs were threatening to collapse. ‘We-we’ve made this situation messy enough as it is without adding intimacy to it—please!’ she cried out when he just did not stop.

‘I have just come inside you with the most amazing pleasure I have ever experienced,’ his dark voice rasped over her. ‘Intimacyis here,mia bella . It is too late to switch it off.’

But it wasn’t—it wasn’t! ‘I don’t want—’

‘Oh, you want,’ he refuted. ‘It has been vibrating out of you from the first moment we met. And I would be a liar if I did not admit to feeling the same way about you—so quit the denial.’

‘Sex for the hell of it?’ Rachel sliced back wildly.

‘Why not?’ Capturing her warding hand, he used it to draw her in close. ‘We are stuck with each other for the next few months while this thing plays itself out, so why not enjoy what we do have going here which is not part of the lie?’

‘If I walk out of here dressed like this and tell anyone waiting out there that I changed my mind because you just were not good enough—that should finish it,’ she suggested wildly.

‘Are you telling me that my finesse is in need of practice?’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Since we both know that you seem to be pretty much a natural sensualist, Carmichael, I give you leave to teach me all you know.’

‘What is that supposed to imply?’ Rachel stared up at him.

He grimaced and she didn’t like the cynical gleam that arrived back on his face. ‘Either someone taught you how to give a man unbelievable pleasure or it just comes naturally to you,’ he enlightened. ‘I was attempting to give you the more honourable benefit of the doubt.’