Gianni loosed a low-pitched laugh and tilted his arrogant dark head back against the white pillows. ‘Your parents…you told me they were crazy about each other. Your father was called Leo and he was a Londoner. Your mother, Suzanne, was French—’
‘French?’ Milly rolled over in surprise to stare at him.
‘You’re practically bilingual. Didn’t you find that out yet? You spent the first eight years of your life in Paris.’
‘You’re supposed to start at the beginning. Do you know when my parents got married?’
‘They didn’t…they weren’t into matrimony.’
Milly was stunned. ‘You mean, I’m…?’
‘Yes.’
She slowly shook her head. Her throat tickled, and then the laughter just bubbled out of her.
Gianni leant down, curved his hands to her shaking shoulders and tugged her up to his level. ‘What’s so funny?’
Struggling to get a grip on herself again, Milly released a rueful groan. ‘It’s just so ironic. In the world I’ve been living in for the past three years illegitimacy is a very serious issue, and now I find out that I was born out of wedlock too! Tell me about Leo and Suzanne,’ she urged.
‘They were pavement artists.’
‘Pavement artists,’ Milly repeated weakly, and then she smiled. ‘I like that.’
‘Suzanne was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver in Paris. Your father never really got over it, and that was the end of your settled home life. He took you roving all over Europe with him. You didn’t see the inside of too many schools, but you adored your father and you always talked as if you’d had a wonderful childhood.’
Milly gazed up into Gianni’s lean bronzed face like a child listening to an enthralling bedtime story. ‘I’m glad.’
‘But then you always were a sunny optimist.’ Gianni skimmed a lazy forefinger lightly through the glossy strands of blonde hair tumbling across his forearm and stared down at her with glittering dark golden eyes.
Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thud heavily. Her stomach clenched. The silence lingered and Gianni’s eloquent mouth tipped into an indolent smile that welded her attention to him.
‘I’m a real pessimist about most things,’ Gianni shared softly. ‘But in one field I’m rarely disappointed…’
A curious languor had crept over Milly. Her body felt weighted, yet incredibly alive, every sense feeling somehow keener, sharper. What a wonderful voice he had, she thought absently, as a little tremor ran down her taut spinal cord. Like sinfully rich chocolate. Sin… Her abstracted brain began to play with the word. Sinfully stunning, sinfully sexy…
Hot pink staining her cheekbones, she attempted to concentrate on what he was saying—which was a little difficult, she discovered, when he wasn’t actually saying anything!
Slumbrous golden eyes framed with lush ebony lashes rested on her. And, like a tidal wave, Milly felt an enormous rush of yearning well up inside her. She remembered that sensational kiss. The cymbals…the fireworks. Unwittingly, she began to lift her head, push up on one elbow, soft lips tremulously parted, her slim length beginning to curve towards him as if he was a magnet and she was a nail.
‘And you have never once disappointed me in that field,’ Gianni informed her huskily.
Milly hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, and couldn’t have strung two rational thoughts together. ‘Didn’t I?’ she managed breathlessly.
‘In that one corner of our relationship I had total and absolute control.’ Gianni’s wide, sensual mouth curved into a wickedly charismatic smile that squeezed her heart in a sneak attack.
The dim light accentuated the smooth dark planes and hollows of his chiselled features. His bronzed skin was vibrant against the pristine whiteness of his shirt. With one long, lean and powerful thigh raised in a very masculine attitude of relaxation, Gianni was so physically arresting he just took her breath away.
In fact, she was so tense her muscles hurt. Yet she couldn’t make herself move, couldn’t drag her eyes from him, couldn’t suppress the increasingly desperate craving holding her so still. Gianni bent his dark head slowly. His breath fanned her cheek. He let his tongue dart between her parted lips and she jerked and moaned and reached up for him, her hands spearing fiercely into his silky black hair.
He did it again, and her whole body leapt, electrified. Just one kiss, just one kiss, she promised herself, like an alcoholic craving what she knew she shouldn’t have.
‘Oh Gi-anni…’ she gasped on the back of an aching sigh.
He pressed his mouth to her cheek, her brow, her lowered eyelids, teasing her with feather-light kisses until she strained up to him even more. ‘Any time, any place, any way I want,’ Gianni murmured thickly. ‘I don’t have to say anything, I don’t have to do anything. I just start thinking about sex and you are so tuned in to me you just melt…’
He kissed her, and it was like being shot to heaven on a rocket. She melted to boiling point in seconds. He made love to her mouth with an intimacy that shook her. He delved and tasted and skimmed until she was burning up, clutching at him, living from one second to the next on the single terrifying thought that he might stop.
Peeling her hands from him, Gianni lowered her back to the bed. He sat up and ripped off his shirt in one impatient movement. Struggling to get air back into her constricted lungs, Milly was totally transfixed. He had a torso like a Greek god. Wide brown shoulders, rippling pectoral muscles roughened by a triangle of black curling hair and a stomach as flat as a washboard.