He smiled, too, but something in it made her expression lose a little of its upper-class defiance. She began to step back but Nick caught her by the wrist and tugged her toward him.
“There’s been a change in plans, princess.”
“Let go of me!”
He did, but only to slip his hand around the nape of her neck. Tendrils of the softest gold tumbled over his fingers.
“I’m the potential investor,” he said softly, “not my old man.”
“That is not what my father told me!”
A muscle knotted in Nick’s jaw. She was staring at him through eyes so deep a blue they were almost violet. He’d stunned her, he could see that. Hell, he’d stunned himself.
He might be a peasant, but he was also a man. And she was a woman. A woman who needed to learn that this was the twenty-first century, not the sixteenth.
Nick’s gaze dropped to her lips, then rose so his eyes met hers.
“Trust me, princess,” he said in a voice as rough as sandpaper. “The only Orsini you’re going to deal with is me.”
Alessia Antoninni, the Princess Antoninni, shook her head. “No,” she said, and he silenced her the only way a man could silence a woman like this.
He thrust his hands into her hair, lifted her face to his and kissed her.
CHAPTER THREE
TIME seemed to stop.
Alessia was too stunned to react.
A stranger’s powerful arms around her. His mouth on hers. The heat of his body, the leanly muscled male strength of it…
Then she gasped. Fury and indignation transformed her into a virago. She twisted her head, slammed her hands against his chest, knotted those hands into fists when he failed to let her go.
A mistake, all of it.
His hand slid up into her hair so that there was no way to turn away from his kiss. One big palm slid down her spine, stopped at its base and brought her tight against him.
Was he insane?
He was kissing her as if he had the right to do it. To take whatever he wanted because of who and what he was, and to hell with propriety or their surroundings or the fact that they’d met only minutes ago and already despised each other.
Her hands flattened against his chest again. She pushed at that wall of hard muscle and when that had no effect, she tried to squirm free.
Another mistake, worse than the first one.
Instantly, she felt the thrust of his aroused flesh against her belly.
Her heart thudded.
She began to tremble, and his lips moved on hers, the angle of the kiss changing so that she had to tilt her head back. Was that why she suddenly felt dizzy and the ground took a delicate tilt beneath her feet?
She heard a sound. Was it she who’d made it, an almost imperceptible whimper overlaid by Nicolo Orsini’s raw, ragged groan?
Her hands moved. Slid to his shoulders. Into his hair. Her lips began to part….
And then it was over.
He clasped her arms with such force that her eyes flew open, and as they did, he set her away from him.