Angel of Darkness

He stared down at her and then released his breath in a slow hiss. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this cara. You can’t fight me and win. Surrender would be so much sweeter for both of us. Capitulate with grace and you will discover how generous I can be—’

‘I can live without emeralds and d-diamonds from Cartier,’ she had to force the assurance past her convulsed throat.

‘But I don’t think you can live without me.’ Angelo said with velvet clarity.

Kelda went white and then red, functioning on the most basic of responses. What she felt was pretty much what she thought. And what she felt was cold, hard fear followed by a sudden flaring surge of sexual awareness so intense that her whole body heated.

‘You need me—’

‘No,’ she argued fierily, ‘never. I have never needed any man.’

Angelo was unimpressed. He curved a lean hand almost negligently to her taut spinal cord. ‘Until me,’ he countered thickly, his lean, lithe body tensing against hers as her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. ‘And I haven’t even kissed you yet...’

‘Let go, Angelo,’ she said breathlessly.

‘I think I will.’ His stunning eyes skimmed with hungry sensuality over her and then he drew her close with controlled power and took her mouth with slow, drugging intensity.

She was a good strong swimmer but she drowned in Angelo’s arms. Six years melted away and she was back, back where her body told her she belonged, back where the world contracted into the crazy thunder of her heart and the mad race of the hot blood in her veins. A sensation akin to a hot wire being jerked tight knifed through her stomach, and with a stifled moan she arched her back in response to a pleasure than was close to pain.

Angelo said something rough in Italian and he was tugging her down in the lush meadow grass. The two buttons on her back that secured her top came adrift, fabric drifting down her arms over her wrists in a soft whisper, and all the time he was making love to her mouth with a naked and devouring passion that excited her to the brink of madness. Her fingers were dug deep in the springy depths of his hair, tracing the shape of his head, luxuriating in the silky strands, holding him to her.

He pulled her hands away and lifted his mouth from hers and then he just looked at her, a feverish flush of colour accentuating his striking cheekbones, his breathing pattern audibly fractured.

Her breasts were small, high and perfectly formed. Her nipples were shamelessly distended rose-pink buds. Angelo released his breath in a long, sighing groan as though he was afraid to touch her. She knelt there in front of him, quivering all over, every heated inch of her flesh ready to take fire.

The silence was electric. A voracious hunger vibrated like a physical aura between them. ‘If I touch you...do you vanish?’ Angelo whispered unsteadily.

‘Do you?’ Without any need for thought to precipitate the action, she leant forward and all fingers and thumbs embarked on unbuttoning his silk shirt. When it was open, he trailed it off with scant ceremony.

She looked at him exactly as he looked at her: with a driven, utterly consuming absorption. She dragged passion-glazed eyes possessively over the bronzed breadth of his muscular chest. A tangle of rough dark curls clung damply to his golden skin, arrowing down into a silky furrow over his flat, hard stomach.

She couldn’t swallow, she couldn’t move, but she had never wanted so badly to touch another human being. It was a fire in her blood more potent and more powerful than any fever. Angelo reached for her in the same moment that she was about to reach for him. He hauled her on to his hard thighs and shaped her breasts with his hands. A stifled cry was dredged from her as he caught her nipples between thumb and forefinger and gently pulled on them.

She had not known that she would be so incredibly sensitive there that one touch and her whole body would become one gigantic yearning ache. But Angelo must have known by instinct.

‘You are so glorious,’ Angelo murmured against

the corner of her lips. ‘So perfect...bella, mia cara.’

His passionate mouth took hers and she shuddered with excitement as his clever fingers toyed with her swollen flesh. Nothing existed but the urgent, increasingly desperate hunger of her body to be submerged in his. He lifted her up as though she was a doll, unzipped her trousers, effortlessly peeled them away. Then he closed his hands over the ripe swell of her hips and buried his mouth hotly against her breasts.

It was electrifying. Her fingernails dug unwittingly into his broad shoulders as he licked and stroked and tantalised her to the edge of insanity. His hand cupped the apex of her thighs, his fingers splaying firmly against the damp scrap of silk and lace that was all that separated him from her.

‘You are mine,’ Angelo told her, lowering her into the grass with raw determination. ‘Tell me that, before I bury myself in that exquisite body...’

Her lashes lifted. She focused on blazing golden eyes and melted to the consistency of honey all in one go. ‘Yours,’ she framed in a whisper of sound torn from the very depths of her.

‘Always,’ Angelo attached with savage emphasis.

Her desire for him was so powerful, he could have made her say anything, do anything in that instant but then the outside world intervened. She heard the low mutter of male voices, a soft burst of laughter and she went rigid.

‘Gently, cara,’ Angelo soothed. ‘We’re behind a twenty-foot wall.’

Shaken up, Kelda stared up at him in sudden torment. Beyond him she saw the peach and cherry trees, and mental awareness returned. For a split-second, still agonisingly controlled by her aching body, she wished it away again. She wanted him so much, she wanted to die if she couldn’t have him. And she knew then without any helpful prompting from him what feeling suicidal felt like.

She knew then why she had always been afraid of Angelo. Why Angelo, alone of all men, threatened her peace of mind. You took fascination and obsession and a devastating physical desire and whatever the recipe produced, it was not hatred.

Through heavily lidded eyes Angelo dealt her an oblique look, the hard planes of his strong features shuttered. He reached for her discarded top and was smoothly feeding her arms into it before she grasped that, while she had been wildly out of control and lost to all reason, Angelo had never planned, it seemed, to consummate his desire for her in a peach and cherry orchard.