'Let go of me!' she seethed, and when her demand was ignored something snapped inside her. Determined to break that controlling hold, she went wild, arms flailing, legs kicking. Vito lifted her off her feet with frightening strength, shook her once in mid-air, making her feel maddeningly like a rag doll, and brought her down again in a similarly controlled landing.
'If you want to behave like a wild animal,' Vito intoned in even addition, 'I will be more than happy to supply you with a cage.'
Shocked and winded by the merciless speed of his response, she clashed with glittering golden eyes. The collision left her breathless. The final token struggle, she conceded dully, was over. Not surprisingly, she had lost. She had never won many points with Vito. If she was strong-willed and stubborn, Vito was doubly so. With a knife at his throat, Vito would disdain retreat. His temperament was as fiery as her own but his was controlled by the cool of intellect, not by passion. And in any confrontation he would always triumph on the ruthless edge of that streak of cruelty that was uniquely his. And now it seemed that he had her precisely where he had always wanted her… absolutely and irrevocably within his power.
Abruptly her thought-train was broken by the awareness that Vito had not yet freed her from his hold. Forced into rawly intimate acquaintance with every sleek, hard angle of his lean, muscular length, she attempted to edge out of reach. An imprisoning hand splayed across her hipbone, reinforcing the physical contact she was suddenly desperate to avoid.
'Leave me alone!' she demanded wildly.
Ruthless fingers knotted and twisted into the tangled fall of her hair, tipping her head back.
'You're behaving like an-'
'An aroused male?' Vito vented a low-pitched laugh that did something inexcusable to the level of support offered by her knees. 'But I am. Very aroused.'
'V-Vito… no!' But he had already pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse flickering wildly in the hollow of her throat and she moaned, beginning to tremble like someone caught unexpectedly in a violent storm. Somewhere in the bemused reaches of her brain she was recalling that she had this one weak spot where Vito was concerned. When he touched her… oh, God, when he touched her! The tip of his tongue delved provocatively between her mutinously closed lips and withdrew again. A choked whimper broke low in her throat, sudden raw and delicious tension of a different kind jerking her every muscle tight, driving every single rational thought from her swimming head.
Involuntarily her whole body was reaching up and out, reacting to the lure of an anticipation that dug painful claws of need into her flesh. Slowly, unbearably slowly, so that her hands clutched pleadingly at his broad shoulders, he brought his mouth down to the now opened invitation of hers.
He kissed the same way he made love: with fire and passion and unholy sexual intensity. Her every skin cell came alive in one gigantic whoosh of feeling. Her skin was clammy, her breasts were swelling and her nipples were pinching into aching tightness. Liquidity ran in a river of drowning weakness through her limbs and she would have sagged if he hadn't been holding her upright. For long timeless moments, she was in a hot, swirling darkness where only the primitive demands of her own body held sway. He moved against her, lithely erotic as a jungle cat, letting her feel the thrusting evidence of his masculinity. She gave up on the unequal fight and folded into the heat and hardness of him, abandoning herself to the savage potency of his hunger as he swept her off her feet and carried her out of the room.
'Take the rest of the day off.'
She heard that. She heard him speaking to someone.
That penetrated the haze of passion even as she registered that Vito sounded most unlike his usual cool, controlled self. Some physical sense of where she was penetrated as he brought her down on some unyielding horizontal surface, and her eyes flew wide open, trained to his darkly handsome face above hers, taut and flushed and determined with the force of a hunger she too well understood.
'It's like the first time all over again,' Vito swore huskily. 'Except this time you still have too many clothes on.'
After an arrested pause, Ashley stared up at him in horror, delivered from the voracious grip of passion by a deluge of powerful emotions. Caressing fingertips were exploring beneath her T-shirt, and, before she could quench it, her body betrayed her all-over again. A long sobbing sigh escaped her as he shaped her breasts, an expert thumb teasing at the sensitive peak of her engorged flesh.
Attacked simultaneously by the extremities of shock, disbelief and a cringing sense of shame, Ashley froze. She was too devastated to cope with anything beyond her own reactions to what had just happened between them. The impossible… the unmentionable… the unforgivable. She wasn't a teenager with overactive hormones any more. How could she let him do this to her? In unwitting anguish, she looked up at him, seeking an answer to the inexplicable.
Vito's hands slowly stilled, virtually unnoticed by her. 'It hasn't changed, has it, cara? We have an insatiable hunger for each other. Something so powerful I didn't even believe it existed until I met you. That wasn't enough for me the last time,' he breathed in an unsteady undertone. 'But this time, it's going to be the icing on the cake.'
'Don't be disgusting!' Ashley made another feeble attempt to dislodge herself from his hold so that she could rearrange her disordered clothing. Little tremors of physical after-shock were still quaking through her, nor was she yet in any fit state to deal with the ramifications of her own failure to maintain control of the situation.
'And what a relief it is to be with a woman who believes she can treat sex as casually as a man, who expects none of the traditional touches of courtship and romance and who would certainly never dream of demanding that I do something as boringly conventional as wait until after the wedding,' Vito continued smoothly.
Something perilously close to naked panic assailed her in the wake of that most enlightening speech. 'Something wrong?' Lustrous dark eyes were tracking her every change of expression with the efficiency of a scanner tuning in to easily read airwaves.
An awful lot of somethings. So many that she couldn't put them all together at once. Without the smallest preparation she was being confronted with all the false images she had put up for Vito's benefit four years ago, when it had seemed so desperately important that he did not wring an admission of undying love from her. Being loved gave immense power to the loved one. Her father had wielded that power over her mother throughout their marriage. Ashley had been determined that Vito would never receive that weapon from her.
It's chemistry, it's my age, it's infatuation, she had told herself then. I do not love him, I do not need him, I will not look for him when he is not there. That had been her mantra of self-defence. And she had behaved accordingly, refusing verbally to grant him the exclusive commitment he demanded and loudly disclaiming the double standards which made sexual experimentation acceptable for a man but not for a woman.
Certainly she had not behaved that way without some justification. And from the outset Vito had had that exclusive commitment whether he had chosen to believe it or not. But Vito had acted as though he owned her. She had played her role with the nervous defiance of someone being beaten back into an increasingly tight corner by an overpoweringly masculine male, who thought liberation was something to do with occupied territories and absolutely nothing to do with the female sex. Looking at Vito now, so cool and so calm, it was hard to recall the furious violence of their arguments and the ferocious jealousy and possessiveness he had demonstrated when she dared to show him that he did not have the right to dictate her every move.
'Vito… I…' It occurred to her that all those proud pretences of hers had truly come home to roost with her now. Vito had an utterly mistaken impression of her true character. Vito had always had a most unendearing habit of misinterpreting what she said, especially when she flung things she didn't mean in a temper. And now, not unnaturally, Vito expected her to practise what she had once so loudly preached.
"'If you feel like it, go for i
t,''' Vito challenged in an accented drawl as smooth as black velvet. 'And you can't say that you don't feel like making love because I already know that you do.'
'I wish you'd stop throwing every s-stupid thing I ever said back at me!' she launched and subsided again as a blunt forefinger skimmed across her midriff and lingered just above her waistband.
'So you admit that some of it was stupid,' Vito probed mercilessly. 'Or is it just that you would admit to anything sooner than share this bed with me right now?'
In despair she turned her head away, wondering dully if sharing his bed now was Vito's callous method of sealing the bargain she had yet to agree to or merely the first in a long line of heartless humiliations, designed to reduce her pride to rubble. Dear God, if her brother's freedom was to hinge on this, what was she to do? If Vito made that demand now, she felt that she would walk out of this apartment and under the nearest bus, because she would never be able to look either him or herself in the face again.
'I've never been promiscuous,' she mumbled. Vito dealt her pinched profile a grimly amused smile. Had she seen it, rage would have revived her, but she did not see it. Nor did it occur to her that Vito was being astoundingly patient for a male bent on immediately slaking his lust.
And, without warning, what she was to do was taken care of in the most unwelcome fashion possible. Forty-eight hours of frantic worry, powered by insufficient sleep and food, abruptly took their toll. Ashley burst into floods of tears, shocking herself as much as she shocked him. Her most pressing need then was for privacy but Vito caught her back before she could reel off the bed.
'Let go!' she sobbed.
'How can I’. He tugged her into his arms.
'I can't take any more!' Blinded by the raining gush of tears, sobs wrenched at her throat. 'I'm… I'm not a c-call girl or something.'
'No, you have entirely the wrong attitude and far too much class,' Vito assured her instantly, encouraging her to weep all over his shirt-front while he smoothed her tousled hair back from her brow.
'I c-can't cope with you right now and you know it!' In a surge of mortified frustration, she struck weakly at his solidity with a loosely coiled fist. 'I n-never cry! I despise w-women who do this!'
He murmured incomprehensibly soothing things in Italian. She cried even harder because, God help her, she liked it. The scent of warm male flesh, so achingly familiar, enveloped her and was as strangely reassuring as the rock-steady beat of his heart. She couldn't remember when anyone had last put their arms round her… it had probably been him. Something akin to despair engulfed her, adding to her bitter burden of defeat.