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‘Don’t look at me like that, Edie,’ he murmured, using my Christian name—and the only real name I’d given him—for the first time. ‘Unless you want to share my bed once the game is over.’
It was supposed to be a warning, but to my dazed mind and the pheromones hurtling through my body it sounded more like a promise.
A promise I didn’t want to refuse.
I lifted shaking palms to his stubble-roughened cheeks. He clenched his jaw and tried to pull back, but I refused to let go.
Just this once, I wanted to go with my instincts and to hell with the consequences.
‘Damn it,’ he swore softly, but then he dragged me into his arms.
Joy burst through me—so inappropriate and yet so intoxicating—at the realisation I had snapped his cast-iron control.
He captured my lips with his. The kiss was firm and forceful, and demanding. Heat swooped into my sex and swelled in my breasts, shimmering through my body like the lights in the fiery night sky. My nipples tightened into hard aching points against the unyielding wall of his chest. My thighs trembled as his hands grasped my buttocks and drew me tight against him so I could feel the full measure of what I’d done to him. The thick outline of his erection ground against my belly.
The size and hardness shocked me, but it thrilled me more.
He wanted me as much as I wanted him. This seduction was real. We were equals.
His tongue thrust deep into my mouth in a relentless rhythm, devouring me. I opened my mouth wider, met his tongue thrust for thrust, the hunger consuming me.
But as the kiss continued, the sensations bombarding me became too strong, too overwhelming. What was happening to me? He was destroying my resistance and every ounce of my will. Why did I yearn to surrender to him?
I stopped massaging his scalp and gripped the silky waves of his hair in shaking fingers to tug his head back.
He grunted but let me go so abruptly I stumbled.
My survival instinct finally kicked in—several minutes too late—and I scrambled back, scared that I would throw myself back into that maelstrom of needs and desires if he made any attempt to kiss me again.
But he made no move towards me, his ragged breathing as tortured as my own. He swore, a guttural murmur of Italian street slang that I didn’t understand, then swung away and stalked towards the window. The horizon was dark again, the dance of iridescent colours gone.
He thrust his fingers through his hair, then shoved his hands into his pockets. His broad shoulders rose and fell as he heaved out a breath, his big body silhouetted by the sprinkle of lights from the bay.
At last he turned back to me but, with his hair mussed and his movements far from smooth, he was nothing like the man who had faced me across the poker table and then the dinner table. No longer confident and controlled, and indomitable—instead he seemed wild, or barely tame, like a trapped tiger prowling the bars of its cage.
I touched trembling fingers to my lips, the soreness both devastating and invigorating. This new side to him should have scared me more but as he walked back towards me, still struggling to get a grip on the desire which continued to reverberate through my own body, I felt a giddy sense of kinship.
Was he as disturbed by the ferocity of that kiss, and how quickly it had raged out of control, as I was?
‘Forgive me,’ he growled when he reached me. ‘That got out of hand a lot faster than I intended.’
The apology sounded gruff but sincere. And gave me an answer I didn’t know how to handle. Dante Allegri, the ruthless unprincipled womaniser, was a lot easier to hate than the man before me, who seemed almost as troubled by that kiss as I was.
‘Can we... Can we get back to the game?’ I managed at last, surprised by my ability to string a coherent sentence together.
One eyebrow rose a fraction, but then he nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Lifting one hand out of his pocket, he directed me to precede him into the poker salon. He made a point of not touching me again but, once we were seated at the table and he began to deal the cards, I could see he had regained his composure, and that cast-iron control.
I lifted my hole cards and examined them, but the probabilities I should be calculating a
s he dealt the first of the community cards and the blind betting began refused to come. My mind and every one of my senses had turned to mush.
My heart shrank in my chest as the play continued and he won the hand.
I tried to get my mind into gear during the next hand, but my judgement was off and my concentration shot. My mind and body were still reeling from the driving needs and inexplicable emotions he had ignited with a simple kiss. A kiss I had encouraged. No, a kiss I had initiated.
