She shook her head in an urgent negative, her shining silver-blonde hair flying round her flushed cheekbones, her violet eyes welded to his.
‘That was why I felt so guilty when you lost the baby,’ Alessio confessed harshly. ‘I thought that all those passionate encounters might have contributed to that—’
‘No!’ Daisy protested in a pained whisper, her gaze soft with distress as she drew instinctively closer to him and smoothed her fingers down his arm in a comforting motion. ‘That was just something that happened. The doctor had assured me that there was no reason why we shouldn’t be making love—’
‘How the hell could you have believed that I didn’t want you any more?’ Alessio broke in with a blatant lack of understanding.
‘That’s how it seemed. You never touched me again,’ she muttered uncomfortably.
‘Daisy, I couldn’t trust myself to touch you! I didn’t have any self-control around you and I was very frustrated,’ he breathed feelingly. ‘Celibacy felt like another punishment. I was a selfish little jerk.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ Daisy said shakily, devastated by what he had told her but undeniably touched too. Her heart skipped a beat as her eyes connected with his vibrant golden gaze. A tiny muscle somewhere deep down inside her pulled tight and her lower limbs turned weak as insidious heat curled in the pit of her stomach. ‘But you didn’t have to be so extreme...’ She swallowed and the tip of her tongue stole out to moisten her full lower lip. ‘We could have done—’
‘Other things to ease my raging libido?’ Alessio slotted in huskily as he reached out and folded both arms round her to ease her up against him, his burnished gaze nailed with magnetic attention to the voluptuous curve of her pink mouth. ‘Having made my magnificent gesture of self-sacrifice, I was in full martyr mode, and I was far too proud to come back and ask for favours.’
‘It...it wouldn’t have been a favour...’
‘No?’ Alessio prompted thickly.
‘I always liked making you lose control...it was almost as exciting as losing it myself,’ Daisy confided abstractedly, in severe shock and unable as yet to emerge from it. In one bitter bout of confidence, Alessio had yanked the ground from beneath her feet. All those years ago, he had not turned away from her in deliberate rejection. No, indeed. Incredible as it seemed to her, Alessio had still been seething with unabated lust for her dumpy little barrel of a body, and that thought knocked Daisy sideways and over.
‘Please...don’t say things like that,’ Alessio groaned, and with lean, strong hands he gradually drew her up the poised length of his taut, muscular body, letting her find out for herself why he was trembling as she came into head-spinning contact with the bold, hard jut of his aroused masculinity.
Held level with the scorching blaze of his eyes, Daisy hadn’t a single thought in her entire head. Every wanton skin cell in her body was busy limbering up at the starting line and Alessio did not disappoint her. He took her mouth with a wild, hot hunger. Excitement hit her in a violent shock wave of response. In an instant, she closed her arms round him, sent her fingers delving blissfully into his luxuriant hair and only uttered an encouraging moan when he sent his hands travelling down over her hips and clamped them to her slim thighs to hold her in place.
That single kiss blazed into fiery heat. Her head spun. Her heart raced. The passion she had damped down and suppressed for too long exploded in a shower of multicoloured fireworks and blew her away. With a muffled growl of raw satisfaction, Alessio hungrily probed her mouth with a wickedly erotic precision that imitated a far more primal possession.
He set her down and flipped her round, his seeking mouth delving in marauding exploration of the soft, sensitive skin between her neck and her shoulder, discovering pulse points she had forgotten existed. Daisy extended her throat in an ecstasy of shivering pleasure and automatically snaked her hips back into the hard, thrusting heat of him, feeling him shudder in urgent sexual response to that helpless provocation.
He brought his hands slowly, caressingly up over the straining thrust of her breasts, their swollen fullness pushing against the smooth cotton of the shirt. As his thumbs brushed and circled over the aching prominence of her nipples, all Daisy’s breath escaped at once. Damp heat surged between her trembling thighs and her legs buckled. Twisting her round, Alessio lifted her against him to bring her down on the bed, locking her mouth urgently beneath his again.
‘You said I was incredible in bed,’ Alessio breathed raggedly, blazing golden eyes holding her entrapped as he sat up and peeled off his shirt. ‘It wasn’t true. We were incredible together...’
As a muscular golden brown expanse of chest highlighted by a triangle of curling black hair filled her vision, Daisy started melting from outside in, languorous weakness enclosing every limb. Alessio leant over her, releasing the buttons on the shirt then spreading the edges apart with deft fingers, to gaze down at the pouting swell of her pale breasts with explicit appreciation.
As their eyes collided again and meshed, Daisy quivered in sensual shock. He lowered his dark head and his mouth engulfed an achingly tender pink nipple, making her jerk and moan in unconscious supplication as her fingers tangled with his hair and then clutched blindly at his shoulders. The sensuous glide of his teeth was followed by the soothing sweep of his tongue. Her breath escaped in torturous bursts, her whole body burning up.
Somewhere irritatingly close a telephone shrilled and she frowned. Alessio cursed with what breath remained to him. Two more rings and a vicious burst of Italian was dragged from him. With the abruptness of violent frustration, he lifted himself away from her and lunged a seeking hand down to retrieve a mobile phone.
Then, unexpectedly, Alessio froze, dark blood highlighting the hard slant of his cheekbones while Daisy watched him in growing fascination.
‘His,’ he murmured with surprising warmth. ‘Sì...Sì...wonderful...terrific...great ... Would you like to speak to your mother?’
‘Tara?’ Daisy mouthed, her embarrassment as instinctive as it would have been had their daughter walked in and surprised them in bed together.
Alessio extended the phone without a word.
‘How are you guys getting on?’ Tara chattered. ‘I knew you’d be worried sick about me because this is the first time I’ve been away.’
‘Yes—’
‘Isn’t Dad romantic taking you back to where you first met?’ Tara gushed. ‘I bet you were really knocked flat by that.’
‘Yes—’
‘Well, I’m fine and I’m having a whale of a time, so I hope you won’t mind me not ringing again...’ Her daughter’s voice dropped very low before she continued, ‘Sorry, but it looks really naff having to phone home.’
Seconds later, Daisy returned the phone to Alessio. He tossed it aside. A gulf of silence stretched and Daisy’s brow furrowed when Alessio made no move to pull her back into his arms. Her still heated body tautened and flushed with guilty acknowledgement of her own lingering and intense arousal.
‘I thought my memories might have been coloured by adolescent fantasy but they weren’t.’ His dark, deep voice flat with a curious lack of expression, Alessio cast her a sudden chillingly cold glance from below spiky black lashes, his brilliant dark gaze bleak and hard. Springing lithely off the bed, he reached for his shirt. ‘You really are dynamite in bed...but I think I’ll take a rain check.’
Daisy’s face flamed with shock and humiliation. That rejection slashed like a winter wind across her exposed flesh. She tugged the sheet over herself, her fingers bone-white as she clenched them beneath its cover. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she heard herself whisper strickenly.
Alessio swung back to her, his dramatically handsome features taut. His wide, sensual mouth twisted. ‘I’m still very angry with you. Every time I remember that you took my daughter away from me, it makes me want to smash things. But I’ll get over that. It’s irrational to expect more from you than you are capable of giving and it’s impossible to turn the clock back.’
Ill-prepared for that level of frankness, Daisy flinched. He had hidden that anger so well from her that she had been fooled. Now, when her every defence was down he condemned her with that reminder, throwing her into guilty confusion. ‘You’re not being fair.’
Alessio’s screened gaze closed in on her and lingered in cool appraisal, his detachment somehow making her even more painfully aware of her nudity beneath the sheet. ‘On the contrary, I am being very fair. You’re a remarkably good mother. You’re gorgeous and sexy and great in bed.’
Daisy bent her head, burning pink invading her cheeks afresh. But not so sexy and not so great that he couldn’t still walk away, she thought, in an agony of mortification and self-loathing.
‘That you should also be a little greedy and emotionally shallow is no big deal,’ Alessio added grimly.
Her head flew up. ‘I am not greedy...and I am not shallow!’
‘Daisy, you have the staying power of a butterfly.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘It’s not important.’ In the thundering silence, Alessio shrugged with an air of arrogant finality. ‘If it wasn’t for Tara, we wouldn’t be here now.’