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Jesus, she was going to kill him! Nick leaned his forehead against hers and gave a soft, ragged laugh.
“I know, sweetheart. Me, too.”
She looked up at him, her cheeks flaming. “Truly?”
“Yeah.” Another ragged laugh. “And wouldn’t your old man’s fancy friends have loved that?”
“Because—because all I could think of was what would happen if—if you touched me more. If you moved your hand, only a little—”
“Enough,” Nick growled, and drew her hard against his side, silencing her with a kiss as he hurried her down the wide marble steps to a gleaming red Ferrari.
“Mine,” he said, in answer to her unspoken question. “Delivered here an hour ago.” He opened the passenger door, one arm curved around her as he did, with such blatant masculine possessiveness that she felt her knees go weak.
“Your seat belt,” he said, once he was behind the wheel, the words an imperious command.
Alessia complied, though her hands trembled. The car gave a throaty roar as he turned the key.
“Where are we going?”
“To a place where we can be alone without the ghosts of your father or mine looking on.”
Then he leaned toward her, gave her one last, deep kiss before he stepped hard on the gas and the Ferrari leaped into the night.
CHAPTER NINE
NICK drove fast, his hands light and sure on the steering wheel.
He let the Ferrari take the winding roads into the dark hills like the thoroughbred it was.
They weren’t going very far. Twenty miles. Fifteen minutes, the Realtor had said, twenty at the most.
The road ahead climbed higher. Nick downshifted and thought fifteen minutes would be about all he could manage.
He’d wanted women before. Why not? He was a man in the prime of life. But he’d never wanted a woman like this, with a need so strong, so powerful, that having her was all he could think about.
It had taken him most of the afternoon, making calls on his cell phone to make arrangements for tonight. He rarely thought about the fact that he had, to put it bluntly, an almost unfathomable amount of money and the connections that went with it, but there were times having money and those connections could change everything.
First, he’d phoned a Ferrari dealer in New York, who had phoned a Ferrari dealer in Florence. Then he’d called a banker pal in London who’d called a Realtor in Siena who’d called a Realtor in Florence…
It had all been time-consuming, but he’d finished with an hour to kill before a dinner party he wanted to attend about as much as a vampire would want to have a vegetarian lunch.
Taillights winked just ahead. Nick checked his mirror, swung out and passed the vehicle as the speedometer neared ninety.
That final hour had been an eternity.
A voice inside had kept saying, What are you waiting for? Find her. Push her against the wall. Ruck up her skirt, unzip your fly, hold her wrists high over her head and drive into her while she sobs your name and comes and comes and comes….
Crazy, he’d told himself, even to have thought that way.
Life was all about self-control.
He’d learned that growing up, when being a son of Cesare Orsini had made him fair game for every TV newshound in New York. He’d perfected it in combat, especially in clandestine ops where self-discipline could be the difference between life and death. It was the single most important factor that had made him the kind of gambler who won far more often than he lost, at cards and then as a financial decision-maker at Orsini Investments.
And, of course, relationships with women, in bed and out, were all about a man exercising self-control.
And why he’d been thinking about relationships when a minute earlier he’d been thinking about Sex, Sex with a capital S, had been beyond him to comprehend.
So he’d taken an endless shower, let the cold water beat down until he could think straight. Then he’d dressed in the tux he’d thought to bring with him, looked in the mirror at the image of a civilized man about to deal with a woman in a civilized way…
