‘Sergio…’
‘Say please,’ he urged breathlessly.
She gritted her teeth. ‘No!’
‘Some day I’ll make you say please,’ he swore.
But Kathy wasn’t listening. Trembling with desire, she was already pulling him closer. Hot and impatient, Sergio required little encouragement. Golden eyes ablaze, he slid between her thighs and entered her with energising heat and strength. She cried out in startled acknowledgement of his invasion. He had made her burn with an irresistible hunger and now the dark, delirious pleasure began. It was glorious and her capacity for enjoyment knew no limits. His passionate intensity drove her wild with excitement. Sensation gradually became a raw, sweet agony until he sent her careening to a tumultuous peak of explosive release.
There was a timeless moment of pure ecstasy and joy. In the sensual ripples of delight that followed, she felt wonderfully close to him, transformed and at peace. And then her brain kicked back into action and blew all those fine feelings away again. She remembered how things really were between them and felt angry, mortified and earth-shatteringly bitter. As a deep sense of hurt threatened to surface she squashed it flat and wrenched herself free of his arms in a fierce gesture of rejection.
‘Can I leave now?’ Kathy asked, snaking over to the far side of the bed and sliding her legs off the edge with an eagerness to depart that spoke more clearly than any words. ‘Or are you really going to insist I stay the whole night?’
Sergio was accustomed to women who voiced compliments and witty remarks in the aftermath of intimacy. He thought her attitude offensive.
Kathy didn’t wait for an answer from him. She rose upright in a hurry and was quite unprepared for the wave of dizziness that engulfed her. The room tilted in front of her bemused eyes and the floor threatened to rise and greet her. Her face damp with perspiration, she swayed and staggered before she sank hurriedly back down on the bed again.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
Kathy was fighting an attack of nausea while taking slow, deep breaths in a desperate effort to clear her swimming head. ‘Maybe I stood up too fast.’
‘Lie down.’ Sergio pressed her back against the pillows. ‘I thought you were going to faint.’
‘I haven’t eaten in hours. That’s all that’s wrong,’ she muttered, feeling foolish at having her big exit halted in its tracks. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’
‘I’ll order food.’ Sergio used the phone by the bed and began getting dressed.
Kathy refused to look at him. ‘I just want to go home.’
‘As soon as you’ve eaten something and you’re feeling better.’ Lean, dark face sombre, Sergio spoke with scrupulous politeness.
Gripped by an overwhelming weariness that was as unfamiliar to her as the dizziness, Kathy swallowed hard and said nothing. She knew that there was no way she was going to feel better in the near future. He had destroyed her peace of mind and devastated her pride. What if her worst fear came true and she was pregnant? Pregnant by a guy whom she hated like poison?
CHAPTER FIVE
THE next morning, Kathy woke up feeling sick again.
Although she was afraid of using the pregnancy test she had bought too soon and wasting it, her nerves would no longer stand the prospect of a longer wait. It shook her that it took so little time to perform a test that was of earth-shattering importance to her life. A few minutes later and she had the result that she had dreaded: she was going to have a baby. Her tummy flipped with panic and nausea and she had to make a dash for the bathroom. In the aftermath, even a morsel of toast was more than her tender digestive system could contemplate.
Had she but known it, Sergio was not having a very satisfactory start to his day, either. He had only just arrived at the Torrente building when his senior executive PA, Paola, and his security chief, Renzo Catallone, requested an urgent meeting with him.
Paola laid the watch that Sergio had never expected to see again down on his desk. ‘I’m really sorry, sir. I’m very upset about this. I came into the office very early on the morning I went on holiday because I wanted to check that I’d taken care of everything before I left. I saw your watch lying on the floor of your office and I locked it in a drawer in my desk for safe keeping—’
‘You found my watch?’ Sergio interrupted with incredulity. ‘And said nothing?’
‘I was in a hurry to leave. There was nobody else around. I did email another staff member to say where your watch was, but evidently the message was overlooked,’ the troubled brunette explained unhappily. ‘When I came back to work this morning, someone mentioned that your watch had gone missing and that everyone thought it had been stolen. It was only then that I realised that nobody knew what I’d done.’