Julie sprang up off the bed, her face burning with the heat of her anger.
‘James was a decent, kind and gentle man. He was worth a thousand men like you and your half-brother—arrogant, selfish, emotionally barren men, who think they can buy whatever they want.’
‘What? You dare to put me in the same category as Antonio?’
‘Why not?’ Julie shot back. ‘You both carry the same blood in your veins, after all.’
‘Why, you—’
He was bending over her, dragging her to her feet. Frantically Julie fought to break free of his manacling grip on her wrists.
‘I loved James,’ she told him. ‘But someone like you could never understand that.’ Her voice caught and then broke.
Stifling an oath, Rocco released one of her wrists to cup her chin and lift it, so that he could look into her eyes. She looked like a martyr, all trampled pride and virtue, defending a lost love.
‘You say that now,’ he told her savagely, ‘but you were still prepared to give yourself to me.’
‘No. I loathe the thought of you touching me.’
‘Like this, you mean?’
He was going to regret this when he had calmed down, Rocco knew, but right now his pride was asserting its need to be assuaged in a way that was driving out everything else.
Whilst she protested, he bent his head and silenced her with the pressure of his mouth on hers.
Julie told herself that she didn’t want him, that she truly did loathe him, but some irresistible form of alchemy was taking place, transforming those feelings into their exact opposite. Her free hand lifted to his jaw—rough with nearly a full day’s growth of beard, prickling the tender pads of her fingertips—to keep his mouth on her own.
Her heart was jerking in hot, tight spasms that echoed the speed with which the dull, heavy weight of the ache in her lower body was growing.
Rocco had released her other wrist to tangle his hand in her hair. He spread it flat against the back of her head, holding her beneath his kiss whilst his tongue prised open her lips.
Her heart shuddered, and burst into a flurry of heavy beats. The dull ache low down in her body spread to her thighs. Her tongue found his and she explored it with delicate little touches of her own tongue. She and James had never kissed like this. She had wanted to, but James had never initiated the intimacy.
Her heart slalomed as Rocco curled his tongue round her own, stroking it rhythmically, making her whole body move against his in an answering rhythm.
When had he last found this kind of sensuality in a kiss? Rocco wondered, already knowing the answer to his own question. Her response to him was sending rivers of molten desire speeding through him, destroying every obstacle in their way. Wasn’t it more a matter of admitting that he had never found it—had never known that it could be found or that he wanted to find it—until now?
Rocco cupped the side of Julie’s face with his free hand and kissed the tender spot just behind her ear, stroking it with his tongue tip.
Violent shudders of pleasure rocked through Julie’s body. She turned her face into Rocco’s hand, caressing his fingers with her tongue, feeling the need inside her building to a hot, tight pulse.
Frantically she pushed Rocco away, catching him off guard.
‘What is it?’ His voice was raw and thick with arousal, and his hands returned to her body, shaping her waist, moving upward towards her breasts.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Julie told him desperately, too caught up in the intensity of what she was feeling to hold back the truth. ‘I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to want you so much. It’s too much.’ She trembled visibly.
The heaviness of her longing lay within her like an alien life form, possessing and controlling her. She looked at his hand, wondering what he would do if she reached for it and placed it against her sex, where the pulse of her desire had gone from a small flutter to a fierce, almost painful clamour. She felt lost, afraid, and terribly alone, in a place that was totally alien to all her previous experience, taken there by her desire for a man she didn’t want to want.
How the hell did she expect him to back off after saying something like that to him? Never mind when she was looking at him in the way that she was—as though all she wanted was to be possessed by him? Rocco wondered grimly. He felt his self-control give way beneath the combined weight of her words and his own desire.
‘You are too much,’ he told her thickly. ‘Too much for me to resist.’
His hold encircled her, his hands sweeping up over her ribcage beneath the silky-fine knit of her top, pushing aside the decorative rather than practical barrier of her bra. His heat invaded her skin, branding his touch upon it. Her breasts, turgid now with desire, welcomed the cupped pressure of his hands, whilst the kisses he skimmed along the length of her neck and into her shoulder set off a reaction that burned its way through every sensory nerve ending her body possessed, so that her whole body vibrated visibly in mute shudders to the music of his touch, like an instrument played by a master musician.
Here on this island, with its buried veins of molten lava that ran so deep and possessed such danger, she was, Julie recognised distantly, finally discovering the hidden depths of her own passion. Like someone standing on its edge, looking down into the sleeping heart of the volcano, oblivious to its true nature, she had stood for so long on the edge of her own passions that she had overlooked how powerful they were.
Now, like lava running hot from deep down inside the earth, this man—a man whose blood and history had made him part of this island of volcanic uncertainty—was deliberately inciting her own fevered desire to the point where she could no longer control it. She could feel the need building up inside her—overpowering, commanding, demanding that she give herself over to it and to the man who had aroused it.