The urgency in his voice as he spoke her name drew Erin’s eyes upwards.
‘Just what happened … outside, I thought …’ A nerve clenched in his lean cheek. ‘Was I wrong?’
She shook her head. ‘No …’ She ran the tip of her tongue across the outline of her dry lips and lifted her chin.
Their glances locked, the tension vibrating between them like an overstrung violin string. Erin felt herself drawn in, mesmerised by the rampant hunger in the velvety depths.
The sexual inertia that started in her toes took a heartbeat to engulf her entire body. She closed her eyes, but could still see his face.
She wanted to be in his arms; he wanted her to be there.
‘No … no, this is …’ Breathing hard, he stepped away from her his hand held up as though to ward her off.
She reached a hand in confused protest and Francesco shook his head. ‘No, when you touch me it is like throwing a flammable liquid on a smouldering fire. Not something I have a problem with, tesora mia,’ he admitted with a strained grin. ‘But right now we need to finish what we started. What we started outside before my family crashed our private party.’
Heart thudding like a hammer in her chest from a combination of anticipation and trepidation, she nodded and got to her feet. It was then she actually felt the blood slowly draining from her face; it really was the strangest sensation. She could see Francesco’s lips moving, but she couldn’t hear anything above the roar of the blood pounding in her ears.
Feeling strangely disconnected from what was happening, she was conscious that her knees were sagging and the floor was rushing up towards her.
The next second she found herself flat on her back on the sofa in the living room.
‘If you move an inch I will kill you!’
She turned her head in the direction of this fierce threat. ‘It wasn’t my fault I fainted,’ she protested weakly.
‘Nothing is ever your fault!’ he thundered. ‘You are taking years off my life.’
‘You look all right to me.’ He looked perfect and it wasn’t hard to see why other women were drawn to him.
Erin had experienced firsthand the magnetic charge of Francesco’s rampant masculinity. She was pretty sure that every female with a hormone in her bloodstream got a sexual buzz just looking at him.
And mostly they wanted to do more than look, she thought. They wanted to spear their fingers into his silky dark hair and breathe in the warm male scent of his body.
Once upon a time allowing herself to think this way would have sent her into a spiral of rage and pain, but now it didn’t.
Now she had total belief in his integrity. ‘I love you, Francesco …’ Why hadn’t she said this before? ‘I just wish that I’d told …’
‘Erin … you don’t have to say it. I already know.’
‘I.I don’t understand,’ she faltered, confused by his driven, strained manner.
His deep-set eyes slid from hers. ‘That day when I went looking for you … your mother, she told me.’
‘Told you what?’
‘We were apart for eight weeks, you were feeling vulnerable and alone. I.’ A nerve along his jaw clenched as his dark eyes slid from hers. ‘I really don’t need to know the details.’ That, he reflected grimly, would be more than he could bear. ‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is how you feel now. And I think … I think you love me?’
It was a wary question and not an arrogant pronouncement. This was not the Francesco Erin knew.
‘I do love you, Francesco,’ she admitted huskily.
A hissing sigh of audible relief escaped his clamped lips. ‘Then that is what matters,’ he announced, his mouth firming with determination. ‘Not things that … you may not think so now, Erin, but we have something very special, something which is incredibly rare. And if you are worried that I will throw this up into your face in the future, do not be.’ He moved his hands in a sweep designed to illustrate that a line had been drawn under the subject. ‘I swear on all that is—’
Erin, who had been listening to him with an air of bewilderment, cut across him. ‘I might be more relieved if I knew what you were talking about.’
He looked pained. ‘I understand, Erin—there is no need for you to lie to me.’
She could only assume that this understanding he claimed was responsible for the rigidity in his lean body and the nerve ticking like a time bomb in his hollow cheek.