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He pulled her to him with strong hands and instantaneously attempted to sink into her with one powerful thrust. There was a flash of momentary pain that made her bite down on her tongue and taste blood. Cesare muttered something in Italian, settled his hands on her hips and drove into her again, making her tender flesh yield more fully, and the sensation was so unbearably pleasurable that she moaned in shock and delight, for she had worked so hard at forgetting, had made herself forget, that most intimate moment.
But Cesare was inside her again in the place that was his alone, and she wrapped her arms tightly round him in acceptance and welcome, letting him teach her that primitive rhythm again as he moved with a raw power that dominated and drove, allowing her no surcease from the crazed spiral of excitement controlling her. She hit that promised peak of glory in an astounded sunburst of pleasure that tore her apart as she jerked mindlessly beneath the waves of climactic release, crying out his name with tears of ecstasy in her eyes.
Cesare came down on her, nearly crushing what life remained from her, and then swiftly slid on to his side in the confined space, with one arm clamping her back to his hot, damp body. Her cheek rested against a smooth brown shoulder and her nostrils flared on the warm, aromatic maleness of him. She was in a state not a hair’s breadth from heavenly bliss and there still wasn’t a single atom of activity in her brain.
His hand splayed across her lower stomach and then stilled, explored the fine seam of the scar he had come upon. ‘What caused that?’ he asked with sudden tension.
Mina’s brain switched back on, all systems on red alert. Cesare was already flipping her over, evidently intent on examining the imperfection visually. But before she could attempt to snatch up something with which to cover a nudity that without warning now struck her as appalling he had achieved his objective.
Cesare had turned pale at one glimpse of her Caesarean scar. ‘You’ve had surgery,’ he breathed as she sat bolt upright, grabbed clumsily at her discarded dress and concealed herself behind it as best she could. ‘Major surgery——’
‘No, only a little female thing,’ Mina lied in desperation, evading his shocked gaze. ‘It looks much worse than it is.’
‘What was the matter with you?’ he demanded tautly.
‘I told you, something female and private—minor.’
‘It doesn’t look minor——’
‘But it is and I’m sorry you find it so offensive,’ she said wildly, ready to say or do anything to throw him off the subject.
‘Of course I don’t find it offensive but naturally I was disturbed,’ Cesare asserted stiffly, ‘and if that is the result of some minor female problem you must have had a third-rate surgeon!’
As he sprang off the bed, entirely unconcerned by his lack of clothing, Mina made no response. She was remembering the day of Susie’s birth. The long labour that had eventually led to the necessity of a Caesarean section. What she remembered most clearly was the terrible sense of aloneness that day and the days which had followed before she was released from hospital. All the other women in the ward had had husbands or boyfriends, but she had only had Roger and Winona during all those endless open visiting hours and she had been so mortified by the sympathy of some of those women that she had chosen to kill Cesare off sooner than admit that her baby was the result of a one-night stand with a man who hadn’t even wanted to lay eyes on her after it.
Yet even after that experience here she was again in a bed which Cesare had put her in. It was a devastating return to reality, plunging her down into a well of stark shame. Abruptly, seeking only to hide herself, she wrenched back the quilt and slid under it, turning on her stomach, burying her burning face in the pillow. She had betrayed herself. And she had no excuses to make in her own defence.
Four years ago she had loved Cesare and had mistakenly assumed that when he’d reached for her that night he’d wanted something more than sex. But she had found out the hard way that passion could give a dangerous illusion of intimacy. In her ignorance, she had read more into his behaviour than was there. This time, her savaged pride could fall back on no such misinterpretation.
A fiery desire drew them together, but in the aftermath they were separate again. Cesare despised her. Cesare had so low an opinion of her morals that he had swallowed whole all that nonsense she had spouted about having a weekend lover. It didn’t really matter to him. All his ego had required was the humiliating surrender he could drag from her at will. He had told her that he would use her as once he believed she had dared to use him…and she had actually allowed him to do it!
How could she respond so wildly to a man she hated? What madness was in her that she could be guilty of such self-destructive behaviour? Four years ago, it had taken her months to rise above the conviction that she had been stupid and cheap and shameless. How long would it take this time? How could she live with the knowledge that in Cesare’s radius she was every one of those three things? How could she live with the knowledge that when Cesare chose to reach out an arrogant hand to her she was his for the taking? Pain stabbed into her, sharp as a knife.
‘I’ve changed my mind about you living with me,’ Cesare imparted with flat emphasis into the thundering silence.
Hardly surprising, she reflected with a cringing shudder. He had already taken what he wanted and it had cost him the bare minimum of effort. Only an idiot would now go to the unnecessary inconvenience of moving her below the same roof! Seduction,
soft lights and music or whatever had not been required. Just like the last time, Cesare had slaked his sexual hunger without any of the frills which other women probably took for granted. She took a masochistic satisfaction from lashing those unpleasant truths home to herself.
‘Being waited on hand and foot by servants in luxurious surroundings would merely teach you all over again that you can get what you want out of life by using sex as a currency,’ Cesare delivered, as if he were handing down a judgement from on high to the condemned scarlet woman about to be dragged out and whipped for the sin of being sexually available.
‘I want you to leave,’ a muffled voice said from the pillow. She wanted him to go before she started tearing her hair out and sobbing uncontrollably. It was her lowest hour.
‘When you can establish to my satisfaction that every penny of that money is now gone, I will be prepared to assist you to move somewhere a little less like a hovel,’ Cesare drawled coldly. ‘But I am not going to keep you. You’ll have to find work, some form of respectable employment where you will not be tempted by the opportunity to make money by deception.’
Stunned as all that sank in, Mina emerged from the pillow and encountered winter-dark eyes sharp as lasers. ‘Doing what?’ she probed in a wobbly voice of disbelief. ‘Scrubbing floors?’
Cesare studied her with glittering cool. ‘I don’t care what you do as long as it’s honest.’
‘The reform package.’ Hysteria clogged up her working throat. She struggled to keep it in but the mindless giggles tearing at her couldn’t be restrained and spilt out, shattering the heavy silence.
With a vicious curse in his own language, Cesare came down on the edge of the bed and closed hard hands over her shoulders. ‘Stop it!’ he hissed.
‘C-can’t help it!’ she gasped, but her overtaxed emotions somehow screamed to a frozen halt when she collided with the blaze of anger in his golden eyes.
‘Try!’ he raked down at her with lethal emphasis.
To her horror she felt the sting of tears and tore her gaze defensively from his. He had branded her a criminal, hounded her out of her job, deprived her of wellearned promotion, and she had rewarded that list of offences not with fury but with the gift of her body. Dear God, what was wrong with her? What was happening to her?
