Enthralled by Moretti

Through half-opened eyes, he watched as she sucked and licked him. She knew just how to rouse him down there with her hands and her mouth and he let her.

She might be a liar; he might not be able to trust her as far as he could throw her—because who could ever trust a woman who made a habit of fabricating her life story?—but she certainly knew just which buttons to press.

He tugged her away from him and sank onto her. Her breasts, with the bra pushed up above them, were full and ripe and irresistible. With a groan of satisfaction, he covered them with his mouth, until the pouting buds were wet and hard and he continued, giving her no respite, until she was wriggling like an eel, desperate for more.

Her hair was all over the place and her cheeks were flushed, her mouth slightly parted, showing her perfect, pearly-white teeth. She had sunbathed in the nude by the pool in Italy, and her body was a perfect honey colour.

How well he knew this body. How much of it he had explored and committed to memory, from the freckle by her nipple to the tiny mole on her upper arm.

He pulled down her panties, flattened his hand between her legs and then stroked her down there, harder and faster, until he could feel her orgasm building beneath his fingers. He didn’t stop and when she came he watched: watched her eyes flutter; watched her breathing catch in her throat for a few seconds; watched her whole body arch, stiffen and finally slacken as the waves of pleasure finally subsided, leaving her limp.

‘Alessandro...’ She reached for him and he stayed her hand, circling her wrist before releasing her and standing up.

For a few seconds, Chase was completely bewildered. When he began to zip up his trousers, she clambered into a sitting position and looked at him speechlessly.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

‘We were making love.’

‘I was proving to myself that the way you responded to me wasn’t yet another lie.’

‘How could you say that?’ She itched to pull him back to her but he was already turning away, doing up his buttons and taking his time, as cool as a cucumber. ‘I never, never, pretended with you. Not about that...’

Alessandro steeled himself. She had made him cry once. The memory of that rose uninvited like poison from the deepest recesses of his mind. He had given a lot to her and her betrayal then had rocked his foundations. Never again.

‘So it would seem.’ He turned around to look at her. She was utterly dishevelled and utterly bewitching. ‘I came here to get answers from you and I got them, Chase. Now the time has come for me to tell you goodbye. It’s been... I would say fun, but what I’d really mean is...it’s been a learning curve. You can congratulate yourself on teaching me the dangers of taking people at face value.’

‘Alessandro!’

‘What?’ In the process of heading for the door, he half-turned towards her. His eyes were flat, hard and cold. There was a tense silence that stretched between them to breaking point.

Chase found that she didn’t know what to say. She just didn’t want him to go. Not just yet. Her body was still burning from where he had touched her, where he had deliberately touched her, turning her on, bringing her to a shuddering orgasm just to prove to himself that the attraction she’d claimed to feel for him was real. It was humiliating, yet she still couldn’t bear the thought of him walking away. How on earth had she let it go this far? How was it that the control she had spent eight years building, the ability to arrange her life just how she wanted it without reference to anyone else, had been washed away by a man who had always been unsuitable and inappropriate?

‘Nothing.’

He looked at her for a few seconds, shrugged and then he was gone. Just like that.

Chase was left staring at the empty doorway. He was gone and he would never be coming back. She disgusted him. Her awful life, her sleazy ex-friends...

And he’d had the nerve to look contemptuous because once upon a time she had given in to the temptation to make it all go away by pretending to be somebody else! She might not have known about his wealth back then, but she had known with some unerring sixth sense that he would not be the kind of guy who would find any woman who came from her background attractive or in any way suitable.

And of course, she hadn’t been suitable. She had been married, for starters. But she had seized that window of forbidden, youthful pleasure and now, all this time later, she was paying heavily for it.

She spent two hours returning all the stuff Brian had hauled off shelves and from drawers back to their rightful places. She washed a lot of it. The thought of his hands on her things made her shudder with distaste.