The Italian's Christmas Secret

THE WALLS SEEMED to close in on her and Keira was suddenly ac

hingly conscious of being alone in the kitchen with a half-naked Matteo, while outside she could hear the rain howl down against the shuttered windows.

With a shaking hand she put her mug down, her eyes still irresistibly drawn to the faded jeans which hugged his long and muscular thighs. He must have pulled them on in a hurry because the top button was undone, displaying a line of dark hair which arrowed tantalisingly downwards. Soft light bathed his bare and gleaming torso, emphasising washboard abs and broad shoulders.

She realised with a start that she’d never seen his naked torso before—or at least hadn’t really noticed it. She’d been so blown away when they’d been having sex that her eyes hadn’t seemed able to focus on anything at all. But now she could see him in all his beauty—a dark and forbidding beauty, but beauty all the same. And despite all the stuff between them, despite the fact that they’d been snapping at each other like crocodiles this afternoon, she could feel herself responding to him, and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do about it.

Beneath her nightshirt her nipples were growing even tighter and her breasts were heavy. She could feel a warm melting tug at her groin and the sensation was so intense that she found herself shifting her weight uncomfortably from one bare foot to the other. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came.

He stared at her, a strange and mocking half-smile at his lips, as if he knew exactly what was happening to her. ‘What’s the matter, Keira?’ he queried silkily. ‘Can’t sleep?’

She struggled to find the correct response. To behave as anyone else would in the circumstances.

Like a woman drinking herb tea and not wishing that he would put his hand between her legs to stop this terrible aching.

‘No. I can’t. This wretched storm is keeping me awake.’ She forced a smile. ‘And neither could you, obviously.’

‘I heard someone moving around in the kitchen, so I came to investigate.’ He stared down at her empty cup. ‘Is the tea working?’

She thought about pretending but what was the point? ‘Not really,’ she admitted as another crash of thunder echoed through the room. ‘I’m still wide awake and I’m probably going to stay that way until the storm dies down.’

There was a pause while Matteo’s gaze drifted over her and he thought how pale she looked standing there with her nightshirt brushing against her bare thighs and hair spilling like dark silk over her shoulders. Bare-footed, she looked tiny—a tantalising mixture of vulnerability and promise—and it felt more potent than anything he’d ever experienced. She was trying to resist him, he knew that, yet the look in her eyes told him that inside she was aching as much as he was. He knew what he was going to do because he couldn’t put it off any longer, and although the voice of his conscience was sounding loud in his ears, he took no notice of it. She needed to relax a little—for all their sakes.

‘Maybe you should try a little distraction technique,’ he said.

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Doing what?’

‘Come and look at the view from my study,’ he suggested evenly. ‘It’s spectacular at the best of times, but during a storm it’s unbelievable.’

Keira hesitated because it felt as if he were inviting her into the lion’s lair, but surely anything would be better than standing there feeling totally out of her depth. What else was she going to do—go back to bed and lie there feeling sorry for herself? And they were leaving for Rome tomorrow. Perhaps she should drop her guard a little. Perhaps they should start trying to be friends.

‘Sure,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘Why not?’

His study was in a different wing of the house, which hadn’t featured in the guided tour he’d given her at the beginning of the week—an upstairs room sited at the far end of a vast, beamed sitting room. She followed him into the book-lined room, her introspection vanishing the instant she saw the light show taking place outside the window. Her lips fell open as she stood watching the sky blindingly illuminated by sheet lightning, which lit up the dark outlines of the surrounding mountains. Each bright flash was reflected in the surface of the distant lake, so that the dramatic effect of what she was seeing was doubled. ‘It’s...amazing,’ she breathed.

‘Isn’t it?’

He had come to stand beside her—so close that he was almost touching and Keira held her breath, wanting him to touch her, praying for him to touch her. Did he guess that? Was that why he slid his arm around her shoulders, his fingers beginning to massage the tense and knotted muscles?

She looked up into the hard gleam of his eyes, startled by the dark look of hunger on his face.

‘Shall we put a stop to all this right now, Keira?’ he murmured. ‘Because we both know that the damned storm has nothing to do with our inability to sleep. It’s desire, isn’t it? Two people lying in their lonely beds, just longing to reach out to one another.’

His hands had slipped to her upper arms, and as his hard-boned face swam in and out of focus Keira told herself to break away and escape to the sanctuary of her room. Yet her body was stubbornly refusing to obey. All she could seem to focus on were his lips and how good it felt to have him touching her like this. She’d never stood in a storm-lit room with a half-dressed man, completely naked beneath her frumpy nightshirt, and yet she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She could feel it. Smell it. She swayed. Could almost taste the desire which was bombarding her senses and making her pounding heart the only thing she could hear above the loud hammer of the rain.

‘Isn’t that so?’ he continued, brushing hair away from her face as the pad of his thumb stroked its way over her trembling lips. ‘You want me to kiss you, don’t you, Keira? You want it really quite badly.’

Keira resented the arrogance of that swaggering statement—but not enough to make her deny the truth behind it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do.’

Matteo tensed, her whispered assent sharpening his already keen hunger, and he pulled her against his body and crushed his mouth over hers. And, oh, she tasted good. Better than good. Better than he remembered—but maybe that was because her kiss had lingered in his memory far longer than it should have done. He tried to go slowly but his usual patience fled as his hands began to rediscover her small and compact body. Before she had been incredibly lean—he remembered narrow hips and the bony ladder of her ribcage. But now those bones had disappeared beneath a layer of new flesh, which was soft and tempting and just ripe for licking.

Her head tipped back as he rucked up her nightshirt, his hand burrowing beneath the bunched cotton until he had bared her breast. He bent his head to take one taut rosebud in between his lips and felt her fingers digging into his bare shoulders as he grazed the sensitive areola between his teeth. Already he felt as if he wanted to explode—as if he would die if he’d didn’t quickly impale her. Was the fact that she’d borne his child the reason why he was feeling a desire which felt almost primitive in its intensity? Was that why his hands were trembling like this?

‘Do you know how long I’ve been wanting to do this?’ he husked, his fingers sliding down between her breasts and caressing their silken weight. ‘Every second of every day.’

Her reply was a muffled gasp against his mouth. ‘Is that why you’ve stayed away from me?’

‘That’s exactly why.’ He let his fingertips trickle down over her belly and heard her catch her breath as they travelled further downwards. ‘You needed to rest and I was trying to be a...gentleman,’ he growled.