The Heat Of Passion

deception?

'I think it's time we went to bed.' Jessica froze. Carlo reached down for her hands and drew her up slowly, almost tauntingly. 'You're trembling.. .why? You've been married for years; you are not without experience.' Predictably, the reference to her marital status darkened his glittering eyes, hardened his mouth and roughened his syllables. 'That doesn't make any difference!' iDio...' he swore, running a familiar forefinger down the buttons lining her silk blouse and then pausing to flick up to the top one and slide it loose, allowing himself access to the shadowed valley between her breasts. 'Of course it makes a difference. Were you a faithful wife?' He towered over her. His broad shoulders blocked out the light. She felt trapped and cornered and told herself that that was why she could barely get air into her lungs. A blunt fingertip, very dark against her pale skin, hovered and she stopped breathing altogether. 'Of

c-course I was '

'Really? I find that hard to believe,' Carlo murmured softly as his fingers hit on the next button. 'Why?' she gasped half an octave higher. 'You weren't faithful before the wedding... why afterwards?' he prompted. 'If you had been my bride, I would have killed you. I certainly wouldn't have gone ahead and still married you.'

I would have killed you. Said softly, conversationally; but with incredible certainty. A buzzing sound filled her eardrums as a hand brushed across the swell of breasts. All of a sudden she felt light-headed and di but her breasts felt full and heavy.

'Did you tell him about what happened between us'

Carlo asked-

'Yes!'

'So you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I bet you didn't,' Carlo guessed with cruel and merciless amusement. 'I doubt if you gave him a blow-by-blow account... he'd never have recovered from it.'

'I don't want to talk about this!' Jessica slung at him

tremulously and then, belatedly registering that her

blouse was now hanging open, she backed away from

him so fast, the side table behind her dug painfully into

her hipbone. 'Carlo...I met you again less than five

hours ago '

'Who's counting? I'm not. I would have been at this

stage four and a half hours ago if you hadn't been so stub

born '

'That's disgusting!' she threw back in raw outrage.

'But truthful. ..don't you know yet how the male mind works?'

She was starting to find out. Carlo was surveying her with smouldering golden eyes, hot with unhidden desire. And the sexual charge her mother had once mentioned was like fireworks in the heavy atmosphere. She edged round the table beneath that tracking, utterly ruthless

gaze. 'Carlo... please... not tonight... I mean ' the

tip of her pink tongue snaked out to moisten her lower

lip ‘—I mean, you can't really want to do this '

'I do.' He bent down and shattered what remained of her fast-fleeing composure by letting his own tongue follow the path her own had taken along the full curve of her sultry lower lip, and heat surged between her thighs in a sensation long buried but never forgotten. She leapt back as though he had struck her and sent a lamp flying, her heart thumping like a jack-hammer against her breastbone.

He ignored the crash and caught her arm before she could.busy herself reaching down for the broken pieces.

‘I want a bath!' she exclaimed in desperation.

'And maybe you'd like me to go downstairs and smoke even though I don't smoke while you prepare yourself for bed like some blushing bride!' Carlo whipped back

with lancing satire.

'Yes.. .what a good idea,' Jessica slung back at him bitterly. 'And maybe if you're very lucky you can find a whore in the bar, because clearly that's the only kind of woman you're accustomed to!' she completed with the shrill edge of hysteria in her shaking voice.