At the Count's Bidding(22)
Seeing her had taken the brakes off whatever passed for his self-control and he was careening down the side of a too-steep mountain now, heedless and reckless, and he didn’t care what he destroyed on the way down. He didn’t care about anything but exploring the phrase a pound of flesh in every possible way he could.
She didn’t blink. He didn’t think either one of them breathed. He saw her clench her hands into fists, saw her stiffen her spine. He wanted to stop her from running. From not running. From whatever was about to happen next in this too-close, too-dark night, where the only thing that moved was that long dress of hers, rippling slightly against the faint breeze from the far-off sea.
Then she moved, in a simple slide of pure grace that was worse, somehow, than all the rest. It reminded him of so many things. The supple strength and flexibility of her body, her lean curves, and all the ways he’d worshipped her back before he’d known who she really was. With his hands. His mouth. His whole body. She was his memory in lovely action, a stark and pretty slap across his face, and when she was finished she was settled there on her knees before him.
Just as he’d asked. Demanded.
Giancarlo stared down at her, willing back all of his self-righteous fury and the armor it provided, but it was hard to remember much of anything when she was staring up at him, her eyes wide and mysterious and her lips slightly parted, making the carnal way she’d taken his thumb inside her mouth seem to explode through him all over again.
Making him realize he was kidding himself if he thought he was in control of this.
As long as she didn’t realize that, Giancarlo thought, he’d manage. So he waited, watching her as he did. The night seemed much darker than it was, heavy on all sides and far fewer stars above than in the skies over his home in Tuscany, and he felt the ragged breath she took. That same old destructive need for her poured through him, rocketing through his veins and into his sex, making him clench his jaw too tight to keep from acting on it.
He felt like granite—everywhere—when she tilted herself forward and propped herself against his thighs, her palms like fire, her mouth much too close to the part of him that burned the hottest for her.
“Your mother thinks you’re lonely,” she said.
It took him a moment to understand the words she spoke in that husky tone of voice, and when he did, something he didn’t care to identify coursed through him. He told himself it was yet more anger. He had an endless well where this woman was concerned, surely.
Giancarlo reached down and took her jaw in his hand, tugging her face up so he could look down into it, and it was the hardest thing he’d done in a long, long time to keep himself in check. In control. To crush the roaring thing that wanted only to take her, possess her and force himself to think, instead.
“That’s not going to work,” he told her softly. He was so hard it very nearly hurt, but he stood there as if he could do this all night, and he felt the faintest shiver move through her, making it all worthwhile.
“What do you mean? That’s what she said.”
“It doesn’t matter if she hauled out her photo albums and wept over pictures of me as a fat, drooling infant,” he said mildly, though his hand was hard against her jaw and he could feel how much she wanted to yank herself back, away from him. He could feel the flat press of her hands on his thighs, and the heat there that neither one of them had ever been any good at harnessing. “You’re not bringing it up now, on your knees in the dirt because I ordered it, because you have a sudden interest in my emotional well-being.”
“I could be interested in nothing but your emotional well-being and you’d tell me I was only running a con,” Nicola—Paige said, with more bravado than he might have displayed were he the one kneeling there in the dark. “I don’t know why I bother to speak.”