The Italian's Future Bride(14)

Now she knew what it felt like to be just one of a large crowd.  Self-contempt engulfed her, followed quickly by hot suffocating shame.



Maybe she moved or maybe she even groaned. She didn't think she'd done  anything but he suddenly shifted, levering up his torso so he could  withdraw that all-powerful proof of his prowess from inside her, and the  worst shame of all came when she was unable to still her damning  quivering response.



At least the way he shuddered told her that he was experiencing the same thing.



Pushing up on to his forearms, he lifted his dark head off the pillow  and looked at her. One of those thick silences seized the next few  seconds while Rachel tried hard not to burst into tears. Her heart was  still pounding, the desire to duck and hide away almost impossible to  fight. It didn't help that his expression was so sensuously slumberous,  like a man who was feeling very-very satisfied.



'I … '



It was the only word Rachel managed to drag free from the tension in her throat.



'You-what?' he prompted huskily, reaching up with a long, warm, gentle  finger to run it along the trembling fullness of her pulsing lower lip.



'I th-think we got carried away … ' She breathed the words out over his finger because he had not lifted it out of the way.



'Well, you carried me away,' he said with an odd half smile that did not  seem to know whether to be cynical or just rueful about the whole  thing. 'You were-special.'



'Th-thank you,' she mumbled unhappily.



'Quite an unexpected … gift to come out of this mess tonight, which makes  me so glad I did not turn away from it when I had the chance … '



A gift-he saw her as agift ?



Cynical, Rachel named his half smile, and tensed as the warmth still sandwiched between their two bodies began to chill.



'Well, turn away now, Mr Villani,' she responded frozenly. 'Because it's the lastgift you are going to get from me!'



She gave a push at his wide shoulders and obligingly he rolled away to  lie on his side, watching as she scrambled off the bed, then began  hunting the littered floor for something to wear to cover up her  nakedness. Catching sight of her dress lying there on the floor in a  brazen swirl, she shuddered, hating the sight of it, and made a wild  grab for his shirt instead.



'You sound very certain about that.'



'I am.' Rachel had to fight with the shirt sleeves, which had become tangled inside out.



'We were really great together … '



'Well, you're such a great lover,' she flicked back. 'Better than most, if that gives your ego a boost.'



'Grazie.'



Get lost!she wanted to scream at him. A gift-agift !



The shirt slithered over her now shivering body and she dragged the two  sides together with fingers clutching at the fine cloth like tense  claws.



Flushed, angry, and aware that any second now she was going to explode  on a flood of wild, uncontrollable I-hate-myself! tears, 'Is there  another bedroom I can use?' she asked, chin up, blue eyes refusing to do  anything other than look directly at his smooth, sardonic, lazily  curious face because she was determined to get away with at least some  small part of pride intact.



'You don't need one. This bed is easily big enough for the two of us.' He was supremely content in his languid pose.



Refusing to get into an argument with him, Rachel turned to walk towards the bedroom door.



'I don't do one-night stands,' he fed gently after her.



She stopped, narrow shoulders tautening inside his oversized shirt. 'Neither do I … ' she felt constrained to reply.



'Good. So we understand each other.'



'No.' Rachel swung round. 'Idon't understand!'



He was already off the bed and reaching for his trousers, so casual  about his nakedness that she had to fight not to blush. He was  incredible to look at: all golden and glossed by hard muscle tone, made  all the more blatantly masculine by the triangle of black curls that  swirled between his burgeoning pectorals and then drew a line down his  torso to the other thick cluster curling around the potent force of his  sex.



The stupid blush broke free when she recalled what that part of him had  felt like erect and inside her. She tried to damp it all back down again  but it was already too late because, as he was about to thrust a  shockingly muscled brown leg into his trousers, he glanced at her and  went as still as the dead.                       
       
           



       



Her breathing went haywire, her old friend panic rising up from places  she did not know it could rise up from-her tender breasts, her taut  nipples stinging against the cloth of his shirt and that terrible hot  spot still pulsing between her legs, which made her draw in her muscles  in an effort to switch it off.



He dropped the trousers. And she knew why he had. Seeing the way she was  looking at him had turned him on like the floodgates opening on a  mighty dam. What she'd thought potent before was suddenly downright  unbelievable. He started walking towards her and she actually whimpered  as she put out a trembling hand in the useless hope of holding him back,  while her other hand maintained a death grip on the shirt to keep it  shut across her front.



'No, please don't.' Her little plea came out all husky. Already her legs  were threatening to collapse. 'We-we've made this situation messy  enough as it is without adding intimacy to it-please!' she cried out  when he just did not stop.



'I have just come inside you with the most amazing pleasure I have ever  experienced,' his dark voice rasped over her. 'Intimacyis here,mia bella  . It is too late to switch it off.'



But it wasn't-it wasn't! 'I don't want-'



'Oh, you want,' he refuted. 'It has been vibrating out of you from the  first moment we met. And I would be a liar if I did not admit to feeling  the same way about you-so quit the denial.'



'Sex for the hell of it?' Rachel sliced back wildly.



'Why not?' Capturing her warding hand, he used it to draw her in close.  'We are stuck with each other for the next few months while this thing  plays itself out, so why not enjoy what we do have going here which is  not part of the lie?'



'If I walk out of here dressed like this and tell anyone waiting out  there that I changed my mind because you just were not good enough-that  should finish it,' she suggested wildly.



'Are you telling me that my finesse is in need of practice?' He threw  back his head and laughed. 'Since we both know that you seem to be  pretty much a natural sensualist, Miss Carmichael, I give you leave to  teach me all you know.'



'What is that supposed to imply?' Rachel stared up at him.



He grimaced and she didn't like the cynical gleam that arrived back on  his face. 'Either someone taught you how to give a man unbelievable  pleasure or it just comes naturally to you,' he enlightened. 'I was  attempting to give you the more honourable benefit of the doubt.'



He was daring to suggest that she'd been trained like a concubine to pleasure men-?



First a gift, now a trained whore. Rachel stiffened like a board. 'How dare you?' she breathed furiously.



'Very indignant,' he commended. 'But I have just had the life essence  squeezed out of me by the kind of muscles I did not know a woman could  possess and you kiss like a delightful, greedy, well-seasoned  Circe,amore -dangerous, but I'm hooked.'



'I think this has gone far enough.' She went to twist away from him.



He spun her back, broke her grip on the shirt front and ran his two  hands inside it in a sensual act of possession that claimed her slender  waist. Two long thumbs stroked the flatness of her lower stomach and her  flesh turned into a simmering sensory mass. When she released an  agonised breath he watched the way her pale hips swayed towards him as  if they could not stop from hunting out closer contact with the  burgeoning jut of his sex.



'Look at you,' he murmured. 'You cannot help yourself. That deliciously  damp cluster of curls I can see crowning your thighs is crying out to  feel me there again.'



'No,' she denied, knowing it was horribly, shamefully true.



'If I do this … ' he eased her in closer and gently speared a path between  her thighs ' … your slender thighs cling to me as if your life depends  upon it … '



And she was clinging. Weak and helpless. He rocked his hips and her arms  just lifted, then fell heavily around his neck as she gave herself up  to the pure pleasure of it. Her head tilted back, her blue eyes dark and  her soft mouth parting and begging for his kiss.



He did not hold it back. He ravished her mouth while other parts of him  ravished the soft folds of warm damp flesh between her legs. It did not  occur to her that he was as much a slave to what they were generating  between them. To Rachel he was just displaying his contempt for her.  Toying with her because the humiliation of being made such an easy  victim of her half-sister's messy marriage still stung his ego and he  wanted her to pay for making him feel like that.