The Italian's Future Bride

‘I wasn’t ignoring you. I was—’

‘Smiling at every other man at this table but me.’

The idea that he might be feeling left out and jealous sent a different kind of sting singing through her blood. Her eyes must have showed it because his thumb arrived to rub across her lower lip in an intimate, very sexual proclamation that brought a telling flush to her cheeks.

But she could not pull back or break eye contact. It was too much like being plugged into an electric current again—lit up from the inside and sensually enlivened. He knew it, he built it until her breathing quickened and her eyes darkened. She could feel Daniella watching them. She heard someone else murmur dryly, ‘Time to break up the party, I think.’

‘Good idea,’ he murmured and leant forward to replace the thumb with his mouth in a brief promise of a kiss that brought him smoothly to his feet.

They travelled back to his apartment in absolute silence. They rode the lift in exactly the same way. Rachel kept her eyes fixed on her feet again but refusing to look at him did not ease the sexual pull taking place. They walked along the hallway towards the bedrooms still accompanied by that highly strung clamour of perfect silence.

When they reached the door to his bedroom they paused. Still he said nothing and still she was fighting it until—

‘Well—?’ he asked softly.

Rachel drew in a tense, sizzling, battling breath, tried to let it out again but found that she couldn’t. Her senses were singing out a chant of surrender and in the end she gave in to it, turning to reach for the door handle to his bedroom.

Without saying a single word he followed her inside and closed the door. Now she’d made the decision to come in here she did not go for modesty but just turned to face him and, with the light of a looming sexual battle lighting her blue eyes, she began to undress right there in front of him. His face was deadly serious as he watched her for a few seconds before he began to undress too.

Clothes landed on the floor all around them. Her dress pooled in a slither of blue silk at her feet. It was all part of the battle that they did not break eye contact.

Rachel walked towards the bed on legs that no longer wished to support her. Indeed they preferred to tingle and sting like the rest of her body, making sure they did not give her a moment to change her mind about this.

No chance—nohope of a last-minute reprieve. She wanted him so badly she couldn’t think beyond the need.

He took up a position on the other side of the bed and the tip of her tongue crept out to curl across her upper lip as she let her eyes glide over him. Big, lean, hard and aroused. Her breasts grew heavy and her nipples peaked, the wall of muscle around her lower stomach contracting as she tried to contain the ache.

She lifted the duvet. He did the same. They slid into the bed together and arrived in the middle of the mattress in a limb-tangling clasp of body contact.

Then he kissed her. No, he punished her for putting them through twenty-four hours of denial.

That night Rachel learned what it was like to be totally taken over, excruciatingly sapped of her will by a man with a magician’s touch. He wove sensual spells around every

pleasure point. He drove her wild until she cried out. Then he possessed her, deep, tough and ruthlessly, staking claim in this final act of ownership that had her clinging and trembling and sobbing out his name as she tumbled into release.

And so began four hellish weeks trapped inside heaven.

When Raffaelle had said they were to be as if they were glued together, he’d meant it. Wherever his business took him, Rachel went with him, hopping from London to Milan, Paris, Monaco then back to London then Milan again. In one short month she learned what it was like to become a fully paid-up member of the jet set and how it felt to be recognised as the woman who’d managed to pin the very eligible Raffaelle Villani down.

Everywhere they went he took her out into public places—more restaurants, more theatres, nightclubs and private parties—all very select venues where they could be displayed as a couple.

It was almost all glitz and glamour. There were those in his close circle of friends who were the kind of people she could relate to mainly because they were easy to like. Then there were the other kind who hovered on the fringes of it all who would have sold their grandmothers to be included as a member of his inner set.

Then there was the seemingly endless stream of his ex-lovers from all over the world who had no problem with telling her what they used to be to him and thought it fine to discuss the ins and outs of having a lover like him.

‘Have they never heard of the word discretion?’ she tossed at him after one particularly vocal beauty had seen nothing wrong in singing his sexual praises to Rachel—in front of Raffaelle. ‘Or does it stroke your ego to hear someone talk about you as if you were a stallion put out to stud and therefore free to be debated for your sexual prowess?’

‘I don’t like it,’ he denied.

‘Then don’t smile that smug smile while they list your assets.’

‘It is not a smug smile, it is a forbearing one. And you sound like a jealously disapproving wife.’

‘No, just a lover who does not think you are so great in bed that you deserve so much attention,’ she denounced.

‘No—?’

She should have read the intimation in thatno but she missed it.