The Italian's Secret Child Page 9

  She dragged her gaze away from all that tantalizing male skin. “I wanted to apologize.”

  “For what? Snooping?”

  “I wasn’t snooping. I thought you might be…entertaining, and I didn’t want to intrude.”

  “The only entertaining thing in these parts is you, Stephanie,” he said, rolling out of the hammock to land lithely on his feet. “Try again.”

  He wasn’t quite as naked as she’d first thought. He was simply shirtless. But his shorts, the same pair he’d worn at lunch, were unbuttoned at the waist, leaving them hanging so indecently low on his hips that it was a miracle they stayed up at all. The very idea that they might not, made her tingle in unmentionable places.

  “I wasn’t sure you were even home,” she said raggedly, averting her eyes.

  “So how did you plan to find out? By standing under the balcony and caroling, Matteo, Matteo, wherefore art thou, Matteo?”

  She didn’t need to look at him to know he found her highly amusing. “Don’t you dare laugh at me!” she fumed. “Not after all the grief you’ve caused me!”

  “I can’t help myself, cara. You just don’t seem able to open your mouth without putting both feet in it. As for causing grief, if anyone here’s the injured party, I am.” He came toward her, shaking his head dolefully and suddenly sounding anything but amused. “A gigolo shouldn’t be capable of feelings, though, should he? His only interest lies in taking advantage of—”

  “Matteo, please!” She felt thoroughly sick with shame and humiliation. “I don’t know what came over me, this afternoon. My only excuse is that, sometimes, under pressure, people say things they don’t really mean.”

  “True enough,” he replied. “This afternoon, I told you I wanted to make love with you. Now I freely admit, that’s no longer the case.”

  As if she wasn’t already chagrined enough, he had to add that! “I hardly expected it would be.”

  “Of course you did, Stephanie,” he drawled, stepping close enough to run an insolent finger down the side of her neck and along her shoulder to the braided silk straps holding up her dress. “That’s why you showed up here in the first place, all dressed to kill. You wanted to see if you could knock off the competition.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “And that’s the lamest and oldest lie of them all, cara. We both know exactly what—or, more accurately, who—I’m talking about. You’re jealous of Corinna.”

  For a moment, she glared at him, full of self-righteous indignation. And then the fight went out of her. “Yes, I am,” she admitted on a sigh, too weary to continue the charade. “I wish to heaven I weren’t—that I didn’t give a hoot who you’re sleeping with.”

  “Well, now we’re getting somewhere!” His voice softened, rolled over her like brandied honey. “Was it so very hard to confess your true feelings, for a change?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to care about you, Matteo. I don’t want to go through all that misery again, when I leave here—wondering if you’re kissing someone else, if you’re touching her the way you once touched me, and whispering in her ear the words I thought you only ever intended for mine.”

  He moved closer still. Framed her face with his hands. His mouth was achingly close, his gaze in the dim light disturbingly intent. “Then live for the moment, and let tomorrow take care of itself.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not like you. I can’t just wipe my memory clean.”

  “And you think I can?” He smoothed his forefinger over her lips, pried them gently apart, and briefly inserted the tip into her mouth. “Think again, Stephanie,” he purred.

  A bolt of heat streaked through her and left her weak and trembling. He couldn’t have invoked a more thrillingly erotic reaction if he’d kissed her deeply, or invaded her most secret and intimate flesh. “You did before,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “How do you know?”

  “You left without saying goodbye. You never called, never wrote.”

  “It was for the best. I wasn’t what you needed then.”

  “You’re not what I need now.”

  He let go of her and stepped back a pace. “Then don’t let me keep you. You’ve said what you came to say. Now go home.”

  How dearly she wished she could! But the message her brain tried transmitting to her legs went astray, and instead of turning and beating a fast retreat, she remained rooted to the spot.

  “Not until you tell me one thing. Are you and Corinna lovers?”

  “That’s hardly any of your business, is it?”

  “Are you?”

  Ever so deliberately, he reached inside his khaki shorts to rearrange his underwear—and heaven only knew what else—then hauled them up around his waist and slowly fastened the button. “I might not be a gentleman by your standards, Stephanie,” he drawled mockingly, fully aware that she watched his every move, dry-mouthed with fascination, “but I’m chivalrous enough not to kiss and tell.”

  “You’re not a gentleman by anyone’s standards!” she gasped, wrenching her gaze away.

  “And that’s why you were so attracted to me in the first place, isn’t it? You got some sort of sadistic thrill from doing it with a peasant.”

  Doing it? She could have wept. He’d been her first and, in many ways, her only lover. She had given him more than her body; she’d trusted him with her heart and soul. Yet he dismissed what they’d been to one another as merely doing it! “No more than you did from doing it with a lady!” she spat.

  “Really?” He circled her thoughtfully, his bare feet soundless on the paving stones, his skin gleaming coppery gold in the faint light. “Is that why you’re really here—to put the theory to the test? See if we can still connect on the old level?”

  “No!”

  “Then I guess we’ve said everything there is to say.” He held open the gate. “Buona notte.”

  Again, she tried to move her feet, and again they refused her. Her throat was thick was misery, her eyes burning with unshed tears. She was afraid to blink, for fear that they’d roll down her face and he’d see them.

  Emotions raw and dangerously close to the surface, she sank down on the stone edge of the fountain. She’d coped with family estrangement, divorce, death; successfully juggled single parenthood and a career. But Matteo showed up out of the blue, and she fell apart at the seams.

  He’d come back into her life less than a week ago. They’d spent only a few hours together. There were insurmountable obstacles lying between them. Yet she was on the brink of loving him again, and fighting her feelings left her so emotionally disjointed and fragile that she barely recognized herself.

  Why did it have to be him living next door? she asked herself bitterly. Why not some tall, dark, handsome stranger, instead of a man so familiar to her dreams that her heart could have identified him in a crowd of thousands?

  Oblivious to her distress, he pushed away from the gate. “Take your time,” he said, strolling past her toward the house.

  Almost immediately, the front door closed, the downstairs grew dark, and a light shone from an upstairs window. And still she sat there, knowing that what she wanted to do, and what she ought to do, weren’t one and the same, and fighting to make the right, the wiser choice.

  At length, the battle over even though the war was far from won, she stood up and started the long, difficult journey home. Not to the villa next door, but to where her heart belonged.

  He hadn’t locked the door. Nor had he gone to bed. He leaned against the wall at the top of the staircase, waiting.

  “I was beginning to think you’d never make up your mind,” he said, holding out his hand. “Avanti—come, innamorata! We’ve fought the inevitable long enough.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JUDGING by the way she clung to the banister and took each stair one at a time, dragging her feet as if some invisible anchor weighed her down, Matteo half expec
ted she’d change her mind.

  “Avanti,” he said again, this time gentling his tone to make the word less a command than a soothing invitation.

  Slowly she drew closer, until at last her fingertips brushed his. Grasping them, he pulled her the rest of the way and into his arms. She collapsed against him, as spent and shaken as if she’d climbed Mount Epomeo in her flimsy high heels.

  “Was that so very difficult?” he asked her.

  She lifted her head to meet his gaze, and to his dismay he saw panic in her eyes. “Yes,” she said tremulously. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

  “You do not trust me?”

  “I don’t trust myself.”

  He stroked her hair, loving the cool, silken feel of it slipping between his fingers. “Why not?”

  “Because I forget to be careful with you. You make me say things better kept to myself. You make me want things I can’t have.”

  “How do you know you can’t have them? Have you asked?”

  She pressed her lips together and didn’t answer.

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I already know the answer.”

  “Which is?”

  She hesitated just long enough for him to know she was about to lie—or, at the very least, tell only a partial truth. “That you don’t really want me. You told me so, not half an hour ago.”

  “And if I’ve changed my mind? If I spoke in haste, out of anger and hurt pride?”

  “You could change your mind again,” she said, her voice tight with anguish. “I could make you angry again.”

  “What do I have to do to reassure you, Stephanie?”

  “Convince me you care enough that nothing I’ve said or done in the past will change how you feel about me now.”

  Unconditional acceptance? He wasn’t prepared to go that far quite yet. But, “I have always cared, Stephanie,” he said gravely. “Enough to leave you before. Enough to ask you to stay with me tonight, in the sincere belief that we have a shot at a new beginning.”

  She shifted restlessly in his arms, a beautiful butterfly tempted by danger to ignore the safety of flight. Though unintentionally arousing, the whisper of silk against his skin, the movement of her breasts sliding against his chest, stirred his body to hunger. “You know that I can’t,” she sighed. “I have to think of Simon—”

  He brought his mouth to her ear, nibbled lightly on the diamond stud in her lobe. “For a few hours only,” he coaxed. “You’ll be home before sunrise. Simon will never know. No one will.”

  “I shouldn’t,” she faltered.

  But she did. She let him kiss the side of her neck, and her shoulder, and her throat. She trembled all over when he pushed down the straps of her dress. She whimpered his name when he dipped his tongue in the sweet, warm valley between her breasts. And when he dropped to his knees, taking her dress with him and leaving it puddled around her feet, then settled his mouth at her bare, narrow waist, she let out a gasp and pressed her hands to the back of his head, holding him captive against her.

  He inhaled the delicate, unforgettable scent of her. Ran his palms up the back of her thighs. Hooked his thumbs inside the front of her underpants. Parted the soft, full curves between her legs, and touched her.

  She stiffened. Knotted her hands in his hair. Let out a stifled gasp.

  He trailed his mouth down her flat, quivering belly and brought it to rest against the triangle of fabric covering her womanhood. Blew a long, damp breath against her. With his tongue drew a wet, lazy circle on the satin, then took it between his teeth and tugged it down her legs, one excruciating centimeter after another. By the time it reached her ankles, she was begging for him, her voice drowning in tears, and the aroused, honeyed taste of her was driving him mad.

  Lunging to his feet, he caught her up in his arms and strode the short length of the hall to his room. Her dress remained on the floor at the top of the stairs. Somewhere in transit, her satin underpants slipped off. When he finally laid her on the bed, she wore only her bra and one shoe. He made very short work of both.

  “There’s something you have to know,” she muttered, rising up one elbow. “I shouldn’t have waited until now to tell you, but I can’t let it go on—”

  He stepped out of his shorts and briefs. Pulled open the drawer in the nightstand. “Don’t worry, cara. You won’t get pregnant.”

  Sinking down on the mattress, she pressed a hand to her mouth, and stared at him, dazed and…something else…something along the lines of fearful. As if she thought he might harm her in some way. “Matteo,” she begged unevenly, “please listen! This is important.”

  He flattened his hand beneath her left breast, directly over her heart. It fluttered as wildly as a trapped bird. “The only thing important at this moment is whether or not you want me to make love to you. If I’ve misread the signals, tell me now, Stephanie, because I’m not made of marble. Much more of this….” He kissed her inner elbow, the hollow of her throat, the corner of her mouth. “Much more of this,” he finished, dragging the warning past the hunger ravaging him, “and I won’t be able to stop.”

  “I want you,” she wailed softly, covering his hand. “You know I do. But you might not want me if—”

  “I’m very clear about what I want,” he said, bending over her as she lay on the bed, her beautiful body dappled in lamplight. “I have been from the second you I saw you in the garden, last week.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” she protested, even as her hands strayed up to caress his shoulders. “There’s so much you don’t know.”

  “It’s exactly that simple. This…” He brushed his mouth over her nipples and past her navel to the top of her thighs. “…is about you and me, and no one else. Stop trying to turn us into something complicated.”

  “But we are complicated!”

  “Shut up, tesoro,” he murmured hoarsely, bringing his mouth back to hover over hers, and slipping his hand between her legs. However morally bound she felt to resist him, she was deliciously sleek and ready for him. “Let me love you, instead. Then we’ll talk until dawn, if you wish.”

  “Oh!” she moaned anxiously, clamping her thighs together and snaring his hand hard against her, as the first faint tremors of orgasm echoed through her body. “Oh!”

  He moved his finger, found the firm bud of flesh nestled at her core, and circled it expertly, remembering as if it were just yesterday that they’d last made love, how to bring her to release. Her body arched, a slim, flexible bow of sweet golden skin stretched taut over finely-fashioned bone and muscle. She cried out, and clung to him, her body convulsing in a series of spasms that shook the bed.

  “Now!” she pleaded, her hands racing down his torso to cradle him. “Oh, please, Matteo, come to me now!”

  “Sì, la mia innamorata,” he ground out, suddenly teetering on the edge of control, and grabbed the condom from the nightstand. She reached out to help him—a loving, generous act, at once exquisitely cruel and magnificently exciting.

  And then he was where he’d wanted to be, from the moment she’d walked back into his life. Buried inside her. Sheathed tightly in the hot, sleek confines of her body.

  Desire ran free, exploding within him so fiercely that he almost came before he’d had time to savor the moment. Shuddering, he partially withdrew, willing his flesh to subjugation. At twenty-five, premature ejaculation might have been excusable, but it was not the way a man of thirty-five pleased a woman.

  Because she was urging him on with feather-light touches to his groin, he took her hands and pinned them on the pillow above her head. “Tu rallentari!” he groaned. “Slow down, my Stephanie!”

  At once, she locked her legs around his waist and, as he delved deep within her a second time, brought her hips up to meet his thrust. More than his control slipped, then; the entire world fell away. Swearing, sweating, fighting a battle he hadn’t a prayer of winning, he cushioned her
small firm buttocks with his palms, welding her to him as they tumbled together down an abyss so deep and dark and thrilling that he didn’t care if they never hit bottom.

  Then, it was over, and in the span of that too-short, lavishly exquisite agony, the man he’d been, lived—and he died. With the last of his seed spilling free from his body, so, too, did all the constants by which, until that moment, he’d steered his destiny. Stripped of power and direction and purpose, unsure of what lay ahead, he collapsed on top of her.

  At length, with a mighty effort, he raised his head to look at her. Her eyes had turned violet with passion, and a delicate flush stained her throat and face. “You haven’t changed,” he told her huskily. “Say what you will, but in all the ways that count, you’re still the same girl who gave herself to me that long-ago summer. Still full of passion and fire. Still so desirable that I look back now and wonder what kind of fool I had to be, to leave you as I did.”

  She turned her head aside and wiped a hand over the dew of perspiration filming her upper lip. “My body’s not the same,” she panted. “Childbirth has taken its toll.”

  Rolling to lie beside her, he tracked his finger over a tiny silvery mark near her navel, a souvenir of her pregnancy, but one so faint as to be barely discernible. “It has made you more beautiful.”

  She managed a small, mirthless laugh. “Oh, I doubt it! But thank you for saying so.”

  “Listen to me, Stephanie.” He caught her chin, made her look him straight in the eye. “You are exactly as a woman should be, and I am glad I found you again. But you’re right when you say not everything remains the same as it once was.”

  Her gaze grew dark and wary. Haunted, almost. “I am?”

  “Sì. I am different. What we just shared was different.” He punched lightly at his chest. “I felt it here. We were more di forti sentimenti with each other. We shared more…promessa.” He tilted her face up to his. “Capisce?”

  “Yes. But it doesn’t change the past.”