When he moved to take her arm, she flowed toward him. Closer in, he smelled as marvelous as she recalled—better. She went up on her toes, slid a hand up to cup the nape of his neck, and kissed him.
Notthe way she’d kissed him outside today, chaste and infuriating.
Leontina kissed him the way she’d wanted to kiss him for three months.
Deep and hot and filled with all the wildness and wonder he’d taught her himself.
Chapter Four
It was likea great dam broke inside Pau, and once it did, there was no reclaiming higher ground. It was swept away in an instant and he knew immediately that there was no hope of getting it back.
He might as well surrender to the flood. It was that or be lost in it himself.
And he had done his best at the wedding ceremony. He had kissed her as the ceremony required, but he’d made sure that it was barely a kiss at all. A dry peck, nothing more, even though every part of him had been seized with the urge to get his hands on her for real. And taste her again, at last.
The way he’d dreamed all these months.
Now she’d undone all his good work. His sacrifice. His self-control.
Because now that her mouth was on his, he was done for—no matter what he tried to tell himself.
He hadn’t expected that the tool of his revenge would taste like this, was the thing. All that heat and glory. That punch deep in his gut. Nothing in his life had readied himself for something like Leontina. He hadn’t thought to prepare himself for such an onslaught of passion that it had nearly knocked him over in Italy.
It was the same here, in his family’s ancestral home.
It was—and he could no longer pretend otherwise—simply Leontina. This was what she did to him. This was who she made him.
Pau had never been much like Giaco, with his big appetite for all forms of intimacies—made even more voracious in service to their plans for Umberto, to build the perfect picture they’d known the old man would use to dismiss his son entirely. Pau had applauded Giaco’s efforts—and energy—but Pau himself had always preferred intensity to volume.
Leontina’s kiss proved, yet again, that he’d never really experienced intensity at all.
Not before her.
But it also proved that he hadn’t been making things up to suit his narrative three months ago. This woman simply set him on fire, and the part of that he found the most maddening was that he didn’t think she was trying.
It was simplyher. It was Leontina herself. It was this impossible chemistry that raged between them no matter what he told himself.
And Pau had never been the kind of man who interrupted an afternoon’s work for the pleasures of the flesh, or any pleasures whatever—
But he couldn’t seem to keep his arms from wrapping themselves around her body. He couldn’t seem to prevent himself from lifting her up off the floor and holding her high against his chest as he devoured her in turn.
And then, somehow, he was sliding his hands down the soft curve of her spine so that he could grip her fine, surprisingly lush bottom.
He held her tight, pressed there against his cock, so hard and ready for her it bordered on pain.
Pau kissed her and kissed her, unable to tell where he ended and she began because it was all the same impossible sensation. And he remembered it too well from before.
It had blown up just like this. He’d been similarly knocked flat by the sheerheatof it. Of her mouth on his. Of the slightest touch of her hand.
They had talked at the reception, and she had been the one to touch him first. She had been the one to angle herself closer to him. When he had suggested they take a stroll, she had smiled with too much light in her eyes and he had wondered—for the first time in his life—if he had what it took to keep his hands off her until they were alone.
The answer to that was no, he didn’t have anything remotely resembling his usual fierce sense of honor and comportment, because she’d looked up at him with a ferocity that had made him shiver and his cock rock hard, and had kissed him like her life depended on it.
Pau had found himself wondering if, in fact, his did.
He’d kissed her back wildly, heedlessly. Recklessly.
And it had all gotten worse from there.
