Ruthlessly Bedded Forcibly Wedded(20)

She was fast bewitching him all over again.



He bent his head and kissed her deeply as he finally thrust all the way, burying himself inside her. Her teeth nipped at his lower lip, her arms tightened around his neck, and as he started to move in and out the world was reduced to this room, this moment, this woman and the explosion that was approaching more swiftly with every driving movement of his hips into hers.



They teetered on the brink together, and then with a helpless cry Cara finally fell, deep, deep into a vortex of pleasure so all-consuming that if she hadn’t been clinging onto Vicenzo she feared that she’d have been swept away for ever.



When Cara finally came back to earth, and the stark reality of what had just happened, she extricated herself from Vicenzo’s embrace. His deep breathing only faltered for a second. Jerkily, she pulled on her clothes, but as she turned at the door to look back at the man sprawled on the bed she found herself gravitating to a chair in the corner of the darkening room. She sat there, just watching him, as if that could help her make sense of it all.



She still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. One minute she’d dropped the jar, and he’d been taking the splinter out of her foot with surprisingly gentle hands, and the next he’d been kissing her, and then…

She only had to look at the gracefully sprawled limbs, the sheets tangled around his legs, feel the tenderness at the apex of her thighs. Was it because he had kissed her? Had he breached her defenses so completely by doing that small thing?



Self-disgust ran through her. Her pathetic attempt to not let him kiss her had lasted for about ten seconds. She tried desperately to justify her actions. He’d caught her in an emotional moment and she hadn’t had the defenses in place to resist him. But Cara knew she was lying hopelessly to herself.



She’d declared that she’d never sleep with him, but she’d just given him his wedding night of consummation practically gift-wrapped. She’d put up no fight. The memory of that incendiary kiss came back. Surely a kiss couldn’t represent so much?



She touched a finger to her lips. They felt bruised and plump. Sensitive.

And she remembered just how good it had felt to kiss him, to be kissed by him so thoroughly. Her insides cramped with sudden panic at the surge of emotion and Cara got up and left the room silently. She went into the kitchen and cleaned up the mess on the floor. She saw the drops of blood from her foot and her hands shook as she cleaned that too. Self-recrimination burned through her; had she acquiesced because she’d been seeking that elusive connection again? The connection that had never existed?



A cough came from the door and she looked up, tensing all over. Vicenzo stood there in nothing but his trousers, top button open, his arms folded across that formidable chest. Cara’s face flamed, and her belly quivered all over again with renewed desire—much to her abject disgust.



He arched a brow. ‘We wouldn’t want a repeat of what happened, would we?’



She bristled. She felt so exposed and vulnerable, her body still throbbing slightly. ‘No,’ she bit out, avoiding his eye as she wiped down the floor.

‘We certainly wouldn’t.’



He was beside her in an instant, and he pulled her up with a hand on her arm. ‘I was talking about the jar-dropping, not what happened afterwards.’



She glared up at him with every atom of strength she could muster. ‘And you know perfectly well what I’m talking about.’



He jerked his head towards where they’d both just been, irritation still prickling under his skin at finding her gone from his bed. ‘That was an exercise in proving just how easily you’ll fall into my bed. So, yes, Cara—with that kind of chemistry there will be plenty of repeats until this desire runs its course.’



The fact that he’d set out to coldly prove how easy she would be lanced her like a knife. She tried to jerk her arm out of his grip, but it tightened when he spotted something over her head behind her and reached for it. It was her wedding ring.



He took her hand and placed the ring on her finger. He tipped up her chin, but mutinously she avoided his eyes. She felt raw.



‘I don’t want to see that ring off your finger again, Cara.’



She bit her lip and refrained from telling him that she’d taken it off to cook as much as anything else. So she just said, ‘Yes, sir.’



Vicenzo tugged her hand closer. She still avoided his penetrating gaze.

His knee-jerk response to needing to see that ring back on her finger had him reacting from a deeply visceral and private place. A rejection of that need.



‘By all means, Cara, play with me. It’ll help to spice things up. And when I’m good and ready to let you go, when you’ve delivered my heir, then you can take this ring off and throw it in the sea for all I care.’



‘That won’t happen. Because I’m not going to leave my baby,’ she said shakily, finally looking at him. His eyes were so cold she felt a shiver run through her.



He arched a disbelieving brow. ‘No? I’ve seen first-hand just how easy it is for a woman to walk away from her family, so I don’t believe in the illusion of the maternal bond. You’ll walk away with enough of an enticement in your pocket.’



His brutal words reached down inside her, stunning her with their stark confirmation of his monumental lack of trust, with the questions they raised. Who was he talking about? His mother? Her heart skittered away from wanting to know anything…anything that might make her feel something.



‘Believe what you will, Vicenzo. You’ll see when the time comes.’





She finally jerked her hand out of his and forced herself to walk and not run to the door, throwing the cloth she still held into the sink as she passed. She turned as if she could somehow warn him off, and backed away from his all too triumphantly mocking expression.



She managed to get out, ‘I’m going to go to bed. On my own.’



She heard his softly spoken words, saw the look in his eye. ‘You know where I am when you wake aching in the middle of the night, Cara.’ They resonated deep within her, and then the stark realization of something rendered her dumb, especially when her wedding ring lay on her finger like a brand: despite his cruel words, and what had just happened, she still yearned not just for the intimacy of his kisses but also for the right to know what had made him so mistrustful.



With a strangled cry that she couldn’t hold in any more, as the true extent of her own weakness hit home, she turned and fled to her room, any previous appetite for dinner long gone.



Vicenzo braced his hands on the counter where only a short time before he’d been extracting glass from Cara’s foot. Where they’d gone up in flames because of a kiss. He cursed himself for letting her goad him into saying what he had. He’d given away too much. But, he comforted himself, she would be under no illusion now about the future he envisaged.



Vicenzo looked up but saw nothing. His taunt to her about waking up aching in the night was laughable—because he was already aching to have her beneath him again.





CHAPTER EIGHT


CARA had watched the shadow of the small plane dancing over the sparkling Mediterranean below them as they’d approached and then landed on the island of Sardinia, in the north-west airport of Alghero.



Vicenzo’s words the previous evening, the stark reality of his cold ambivalence to this baby and her own vulnerability to him, had made her close in on herself in protection. He had given her the bare details, telling her that his family villa was located near the ancient ruins of Tharros, on the western coast.





A Jeep and driver was waiting for them at the airport, and the afternoon sun beat down on Cara’s head.



After driving for about forty minutes, the driver, who had been introduced as Tommaso, turned onto a narrow road with tall trees swaying on either side, making it shady and mysterious. They turned right, towards the coast. A huge set of iron gates appeared and opened smoothly as if by magic, almost hidden by the dense foliage and colorful bougainvillea. They emerged through low-hanging branches into a massive forecourt complete with a fountain, its clear water jumping high and falling burbling into a low pool. Lotus flowers drifted on calmer water.



The house appeared then, surprising Cara with its discreet elegance. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Her experience of millionaires was confined to those who competed to live as flashily as possible. They stopped, and she got out before Vicenzo could stride around and open her door. She’d been skittish around him all day, jumping if he came too near. Her belly seemed to be in a constant knot of anxiety now, and she’d ignored his dark looks.



It was a classic Mediterranean terracotta flat-roofed villa. But, with a tantalizing hint of another style, it had huge floor-to-ceiling windows, with white curtains billowing gently in the warm breeze. A delicate latticed veranda hugged the exterior and snaked around both sides of the villa, and Cara caught a glimpse of lush lawns falling away and down either side, to where she imagined the sea lay. She could hear waves breaking gently nearby, and a well of emotion rose up at the sound.



It was one of the things she’d missed most about living in London. Their family home in Dublin had been to the south of the city, on the coast, but Cormac had lost no time in selling it off as soon as their parents had died.