A light knock sounded on the bathroom door and she froze in dismay and then sat upright, water sloshing noisily round her as she hugged her knees in an instinctive need to shield her nakedness. ‘I’m not dressed!’ she yelped in warning to whoever was in the bedroom beyond.
‘It’s not a problem,’ Lucca told her, his dark honeyed drawl roughening the syllables. ‘I sent a meal up to you on a tray but you didn’t answer the door when it was brought so I said that I would take care of it.’
‘I’m not hungry…’ she mumbled.
Dark eyes narrowed to gold glittering intensity, Lucca surveyed her. As he’d walked through the door, he had been treated to a tantalising glimpse of delicate white breasts crowned with succulent pink peaks. Hunger hotter than a bonfire held him taut. There she was clutching her knees and, as always, shorn of every artifice. Yet she radiated megawatt appeal. Her baby-fine hair was tousled, damp would-be curls forming above enormous green eyes and a lush mouth as sexy as sin.
‘I am,’ he said almost fiercely.
‘Oh, you have the tray, then,’ Vivien urged jerkily, fighting to drag her mesmerised eyes from his and failing. He had incredibly beautiful eyes that were bronze in some lights and flamed gold in others. And when he looked at her, a melting sensation formed in her pelvis and thinking rationally became too much of a challenge. He had shed his jacket and tie, undone the collar of his black shirt. He looked dark and dangerous and lethally attractive and little quivers of helpless feminine appreciation were shooting along her nerve-endings.
His sculpted mouth quirked. ‘Why aren’t you telling me to get out?’
She knew why but was too gutless to tell him. Her mind had already filled with fantasy images in which he would pluck her out of the water, carry her off to bed and sate the uncontrollable craving that he had always unleashed in her.
Lucca tipped his handsome dark head back. In her unshielded and hopeful gaze he had read the answer he had already divined from her silence. In time-honoured style, it was once again his cue to take sexual charge so that she did not have
to feel responsible about what she was doing. Lucca was surprised to discover that on this occasion he wanted a greater input from her. Why not? Why should he make it all so easy for her? After all, he had already engineered the entire situation to lead to just such a denouement. Having deliberately dissuaded her from going home to be with the nerd, he had had every intention of seducing her back into his bed for the night. But he was now stubbornly determined that she make her own choice and act accordingly…
‘If you want to share my bed tonight, I’ll be in the room next door and you can come to me.’ Lucca surveyed her dismayed face with grim amusement.
Shocked embarrassment made her fine skin flush red and her mouth had dropped open in disconcertion. ‘How…how the heck can you say such a thing to me?’
‘Life’s short. I’m trying to save us both from growing old and grey while we wait for you to make a decision and act. Either you want me enough to take a risk, or you don’t, cara,’ Lucca delivered silkily. ‘The decision is yours.’
Feeling horribly mortified, Vivien listened to the door close on his exit from the adjoining bedroom. He had gone. Blinking in confusion, she stood up in the bath and hauled a towel round her streaming body. She was shaking. He knew her so well. He had recognised her shameless eagerness, realised that she was sitting there in the bath just waiting for him to reach for her. And instead of just doing what he had always done before, instead of doing what came entirely naturally to a male of his dominant temperament, he had derided her passivity and thrown down the gauntlet.
She had never been much good at taking risks. For that reason, everything she had already done that day felt very unreal because she had gone out on a limb to approach Lucca, not just once, but twice. And where had her newly discovered sense of daring got her? It had ripped the lid off all the pathetic little lies she had been telling herself for two years. It had forced her to face just how miserable she really was without Lucca. It was also now persuading her to consider a path to reclaiming her marriage that she had not previously considered.
In spite of Bliss Masterson’s wondrous beauty and perfection, Lucca was still attracted to his wife. Instead of being priggish about his blunt way of expressing that news, should she not be grateful for the fact that she could still interest him in that department? After all, if Lucca had found her unattractive there would be no hope whatsoever of achieving a reconciliation. So did that mean she just fell back into his bed?
Wasn’t it much too soon for that? Lucca did not suffer from her inhibitions, she reminded herself ruefully. He had a very high sex drive. They were still married and it was her fault they had broken up. She had devoted her entire day to telling him that she wanted him back. She could hardly complain that he had put the most literal interpretation on her request. And when Lucca challenged her to take a risk on him wasn’t he giving her the hope that they could have a future again?
This was not the time, she told herself urgently, to brood about the reality that she was not the sexy siren type. This could well be her one and only chance to save their marriage and she could not afford to surrender to her own shyness. Having put back on her bra and panties, she hesitated. It would look a little foolish if she got fully dressed just to go next door. After a lot of anxious thought, she yanked the silky tasselled throw off the foot of the bed and anchored it round her like a beach towel.
Before her nerves could seize up, she left the bedroom to blunder through the door of the next room only to find that…it was in darkness and empty and she appeared to be in the wrong place. He wasn’t in the room across the corridor either. Hunt the husband, Vivien thought hysterically. Could he have changed his mind?
‘No need to sack the house from top to bottom, I’m in here…’ Lucca drawled sardonically from somewhere behind her.
Taken by surprise, Vivien whirled round. Her toes caught in the trailing fringe on the throw and tripped her up. With a startled yelp she fell her length in the corridor and knocked the breath from her lungs.
‘Dio mio… Are you all right?’ Lucca leant down to close his hand over one of hers and haul her upright again.
‘Absolutely fine!’ Vivien gasped, writhing with discomfiture and almost in tears of frustration. It was a challenge to be bold in an area where she had never been confident. And, forced to dress in the equivalent of a sofa cover and flailing around his feet like an idiot, she felt she had hit a new lowest ebb.
For the sake of efficiency, Lucca scooped her up and carried her back into his room, where he settled her carefully down on an area of floor where there were no obstructions.
‘So what now?’ she framed, hovering like a school-girl.
‘I unwrap you before you break a leg.’ Closing long fingers into one corner of the throw, Lucca spun her deftly round and removed the offending item before she had even quite grasped what he was doing.
‘Oh!’ Stripped of her main source of concealment, Vivien crossed her arms over herself and got her first proper look at him.
Lucca was clad only in a pair of boxer shorts. A vibrant image of lean, bronzed masculinity, he made her mouth run dry and she found herself staring. Wide brown shoulders lent definition to powerful pectoral muscles roughened with curling tendrils of black hair above a stomach flat as a washboard. Something akin to a flock of butterflies broke loose in her tummy and the high-wire tension keeping her still leapt up another notch.
‘It feels…so strange being here with you again,’ she confided breathless with nerves.
‘I’d call it erotic…’ Lucca countered, strolling fluidly closer to anchor a sure hand into the fall of her tumbled fair hair and tip her head up. ‘I feel like a sultan with a slave. I feel that anything I want I can have tonight.’