‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.
‘This is the only bedroom,’ Isla admitted, sidestepping the question. ‘There used to be two but my uncle knocked them into one after he found out that they couldn’t have children. He felt the empty bedroom next door was a constant reminder they didn’t need.’
The arctic chill in the air cooled Alissandru’s face. ‘There’s no heating up here,’ he remarked abstractedly, wondering how on earth anyone could live with such a privation in the depth of winter.
‘No,’ she conceded. ‘But I can light the fire for you,’ she offered, biting her lip when she saw him struggle to kill a shiver and recalling the heat of the Sicilian climate, as foreign to her as extreme cold appeared to be to him.
‘I would be very grateful if you did,’ Alissandru said with unusual humility.
Isla thought ruefully of all the to-ing and fro-ing up the stairs carting logs and coal and stiffened her flagging resolve. He was a guest and she had been brought up to believe that, if it was possible, guests should be pampered.
‘I’ll go for a shower...if there’s hot water?’ Alissandru studied her enquiringly, recognising that there was nothing he could take for granted in such a poor household.
‘Lots of hot water,’ Isla assured him more cheerfully. ‘But you have no luggage so let me see if there’s something of my uncle’s that you could borrow,’ she added, heading for the chest of drawers by the window.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Alissandru asserted, his nostrils flaring with distaste at the thought of wearing another man’s clothing.
‘My uncle wouldn’t mind and he’s tall like you,’ Isla argued, misinterpreting his response and assuming that he had sufficient manners not to want to be a nuisance. She rifled through several drawers and produced a pair of worn jeans and a husky sweater that looked as though it had seen better days before the last world war, settling both items on the bed. ‘You’ll be more comfortable in these than in that suit. I’ll go downstairs and sort out something for dinner.’
‘Thank you...’ Alissandru forced out the words. ‘Considering what I said when I arrived, you’ve been surprisingly kind.’
A delicate coppery brow raised as she spun back to look at him. ‘I don’t think you consider what you say very often,’ she admitted with a sudden spontaneous smile of amusement that lit up her heart-shaped face like a glorious sunrise. ‘And you’re completely out of your depth in this environment, which makes me more forgiving. I was just as ill at ease in your home in Sicily.’
‘Dio mio... I thought we made you welcome.’
A tide of colour rose up beneath her fair skin, making Alissandru study her in fascination and move several steps closer to stare down at her.
‘Oh, my goodness, of course you did. I stayed in a wonderful bedroom and the food and everything was incredible,’ Isla babbled, belatedly conscious that she might have sounded rude and unappreciative of his hospitality and alarmingly aware of his proximity because he was so very tall and powerfully built. ‘But it wasn’t my world and I was a fish out of water there. I’d never even been abroad before, never seen a house like yours except on television...you know, everything in your home was unfamiliar...and rather unnerving, to be honest.’
Alissandru scanned the tiny pulse flickering wildly just above her delicate collarbone and he wanted to put his mouth there. He was convinced that her heart was hammering out the same fast nervous beat because naturally she recognised the heightened sexual awareness that laced the atmosphere between them. Of course, she did, he told himself cynically. She was twenty-two, no longer a teenager, precocious or otherwise, and an adult woman in every sense of the word. With that thought driving him, he lifted a hand to tilt up her chin, gazing down into startled dark blue eyes and the surge of pink suddenly brightening her cheeks. She blushed. When had he last met a woman who blushed? It was simply that fair skin of hers, doubtless telegraphing the existence of the same erotic thoughts that were currently controlling him.
Would she, wouldn’t she? Alissandru asked himself but he rather thought the answer to the suggestion of sex would be yes. He always got the answer yes from women, couldn’t remember when he had last been rejected, and the chemistry between him and Isla Stewart was indisputable. He didn’t like it, indeed he despised it, but the same powerful drive that had hardened him to steel with arousal was what kept the human race alive and it was appallingly hard to resist for a man unaccustomed to having to deny such a normal urge. He pictured her spread across the bed with its ugly patchwork duvet set...pale and lush and pink and freckled? Sex would be one useful way of keeping warm and it would provide entertainment into the bargain, Alissandru rationalised with ease.
Alissandru slowly lowered his handsome dark head, giving her time to retreat. But Isla was frozen into immobility, disturbingly preoccupied by the tightening of her nipples and the low pulse of heat thrumming at the centre of her body. Once or twice before she had experienced such glimmerings of awareness with other men but the attraction had always vanished the moment they actually touched her, convincing her that the fertile scope of a woman’s imagination had to explain a lot of encounters that were later regretted. Yet now, when her every cautious instinct with his sex urged her to back away from Alissandru, sheer curiosity kept her where she stood because she wanted, inexplicably needed, to know if it would be the same with him.
And he kissed her cheek and her temples and brushed his mouth with astonishing gentleness across hers in an exploratory sortie. ‘Tell me now if you want me to stop.’
Isla quivered inside her skin, entrapped by feelings she had never felt before, her body alight from those fleeting caresses, the sudden heat in her pelvis making her squirm. And the scent of him that close... Oh, dear heaven, how did she describe that faint evocative scent of cologne and musky masculinity that made her positively quiver with powerful awareness?
‘Do it,’ she heard herself urge wantonly, and the breathless sound of her own voice shook her.
With a smothered laugh, Alissandru crushed her parted lips beneath his own and sensual shock engulfed her because with one passionate kiss he inflamed her, and her hands lifted to curve round his neck to steady legs that had turned bendy as straws. He scooped her up against him with a strength that initially disconcerted and then, ultimately, thrilled her. His tongue darted into her mouth, flicked, dallied, twinned with hers and extraordinary sensation exploded throughout her body, switching it onto an altogether higher plane of response. A choked little sound escaped low in her throat, and he set her down and stepped back from her, so aroused by that hoarse little noise she had made in the back of her throat that he had to call a halt.
‘I need that shower. I’ve been travelling all day, gioia mia,’ Alissandru intoned thickly, hot golden eyes locked to her flushed and embarrassed face. ‘Now I look forward to the evening ahead with anticipation.’
And with that unanswerable assumption that Isla knew full well that she had encouraged, he vanished into the bathroom. Her bare feet slapped down the stairs in a hasty retreat and she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror at the foot, hair a messy bonfire of curls, her face hot enough to fry eggs on.
Why had she encouraged him? A foolish thing to do when he had to stay the night and was the kind of man accustomed to easy, casual sex. At the wedding, Tania had gossiped about Alissandru’s many affairs and even though Isla knew she shouldn’t have listened, she had because at the age of sixteen she had been mesmerised by his looks and commanding charismatic presence. But she was twenty-two now, she reminded herself ruefully, and supposed to be beyond such silliness. Even so, she couldn’t lie to herself. When the opportunity had presented itself, she had grabbed at it and him, desperate to know what it would feel like when a man of his smooth sophistication and high-voltage sensuality kissed her. And now she knew and she also knew it would’ve been better had she not found out.
He knew how to kiss—he really, really knew how to kiss—but of course they weren’t going to take it any further. She was related to Tania and he had hated her sister, it seemed, as much as her sister had hated him. No, nothing more would happen, she told herself, striving to feel relief at that conviction instead of shamelessly disappointed. As Tania had once said, her kid sister needed to get out there and find a life, but Tania had been so much more confident and experienced, freely admitting that she much preferred the company of men to women.