The #1 Bestsellers Collection 2011(40)

‘So beautiful,’ she repeated. He watched her as her gaze scanned from one spectacular end of the valley to the other, her free hand held up to shield her eyes from the setting sun while the silken fabric of her skirt shifted and rippled around her legs in the barely there breeze.

‘Without a doubt.’

And she turned towards him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes questioning.

‘You could be happy,’ he said, ‘living here.’

And the lights in her eyes dimmed a little then. ‘Rafe,’ she said softly, so softly he felt his name on her breath even as he read it on her lips. Lips that beckoned him and drew him closer. Lips that made him ache with wanting her.

She shook her head, the barest, almost imperceptible movement from side to side, which he refused to accept as meaning she didn’t want his kiss. Not when her eyes gave him a different message and her lips were already parted and ready for him.

And so he cupped her warm cheek with his hand, and on a tiny track, below the Castello Montvellate and above the magnificent sweep of valley below, his world shrank to just one woman, and one moment in time.

And that moment held its breath and hovered between them, shimmering with intensity as he lowered his mouth to hers. She shuddered into the kiss, and he slid his hand around the back of her neck to steady her, weaving his fingers into her hair, the taste of her flooding his senses and firing his blood.

She tasted of sunshine and vanilla, of warmth and woman, and the way her lips moved under his told him he was not the only one involved in this kiss. She was there, every part of her. She was his. He gathered her to him with his free arm, finding that sweet spot in the curve of her spine that brought her fully against his aching length.

She gasped into his mouth but she didn’t fight, didn’t move away. Instead she settled even closer, the subtle squirm of her hips a sweet agony that he poured into his kiss, to her lips, to her cheeks, to her eyes. And everywhere he kissed just fuelled the need that had been building ever since she’d stepped out of that helicopter, a need that refused to be compartmentalized and set aside.

I want you, he wanted to whisper, while his teeth nuzzled at her lobe. She trembled as if he’d said the words and threw her head back, forcing her breasts harder against his chest, so that he ached to free them and reacquaint himself with their satin perfection, longed to draw their pebbled peaks deep into his mouth.

Instead, he dragged in a lungful of air, fighting the urge to take her, right here, right now, on this lonely path high above the city, knowing it was madness when the paparazzi made an art form of lying in wait and holding out for the perfect shot, and yet still having to fight the beast for supremacy.

She’d already made him wait so long—too long—but soon, he told himself, encouraged by her participation, there was no doubt in his mind that very soon he would have her again.

Hesitatingly, reluctantly, he slowed the kiss, drawing back as he loosened his arms around her. She opened her eyes, and he saw her bewilderment, sensed her disappointment and very nearly changed his mind.

‘We should get back,’ he said, wishing she would argue, wishing she would demand that he stay and kiss her again, needing a damned good reason to let her go. ‘I have a meeting I’m already late for,’ he said, trying to convince himself. ‘Besides which, we don’t want you catching a chill.’

And before his eyes her back seemed to stiffen, her expression cooling so quickly that he ached to turn back the clock and take back his words.

‘Of course,’ she said, tucking the hair that had so recently coiled thick and silkily around his fingers behind her ears as she turned away. ‘I’d hate to catch a chill.’





CHAPTER NINE


SHE was a fool. Forty-eight hours later, that was the only explanation Sienna could come up with as she paced to and fro under the dappled shade of the vine-covered terrace, her various text books lying open and abandoned on the table nearby.

Two nights ago she’d gone to sleep—eventually—with the memories of that cliff-path walk playing through her mind. They’d walked together along a cliff top path breathing fresh sea air scented with a myriad different wild flowers and herbs, and then he’d wrapped her hand in his as they’d gazed out over a view that was to die for. And then he’d kissed her, and the defensive walls she’d built around herself, and that he’d been unsettling ever since he’d found her poolside and asked her to walk with him, had been rocked apart.

He hadn’t pushed, hadn’t demanded a thing from her, and yet one simple kiss and all her defenses had been ready to crumble, like some impressionable teenager on her first date.