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‘You didn’t want to share a bed with me last night... I assume,’ Raffaele continued lazily. ‘Yet I believed you were attracted to me.’
Maya could feel her face starting to blossom in a dreadful slow-burning blush. ‘I was...er... I am,’ she admitted tightly, feeling that he deserved that much truth from her.
‘So, what was the problem?’ Raffaele enquired levelly as he set the tea down that she had handed him untouched.
Maya sipped her tea and stared down into it as if it might provide her with a miraculous rescue from the dialogue. ‘I’m not very experienced.’
‘Not a problem for me.’
‘Actually, not experienced at all,’ Maya confided thinly, resenting the need to invade her own privacy, but still feeling that she owed him an explanation for her less than adult behaviour.
Without warning, Raffaele vaulted upright again and moved out of view, utterly astonished by her admission but trying to hide the fact from her. ‘Again,’ he breathed a little gruffly, ‘not a problem... I assume.’
‘You...assume?’ Maya prompted in surprise, glancing across the cabin at him, studying his long, straight, shirt-clad back as he gazed out through the sliding doors onto the terrace.
Raffaele swung fluidly around, dark deep-set eyes settling on her with sudden intensity. ‘I’d be a liar if I told you I’d been a woman’s first before. I think that the more honest we are with each other, the easier this marriage will be for both of us.’
‘I agree with that,’ Maya framed round an enormous yawn, her virtually sleepless night catching up with her even as much of her earlier awkwardness with him drained away and somehow without her noticing. ‘But, you know, I’m not a child. I wasn’t freaking out about the sex as much as...as...what are you doing?’ she gasped.
Seeing that yawn, Raffaele had begun moving towards her even while she was speaking and, removing the cup from her hand, he set it down and bent to lift her off the side of the bed and then immediately lower her back down with her head on the pillows. ‘You need more sleep,’ he told her. ‘I’m shattered too.’
Maya watched him toe off his canvas shoes and throw himself down on the other side of the bed with wide anxious eyes.
‘I didn’t get much sleep last night either,’ Raffaele pointed out. ‘I’ll keep my clothes on though, since I suppose anything else would freak you out.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Maya mumbled, her face reddening. ‘I don’t mind if you get undressed.’
He unbuttoned his shirt and sighed, stretching out his long, lean, powerful frame. ‘I don’t think I can be bothered.’
Maya lifted her head and looked down at him, the curling black lashes resting on his high cheekbones in a flawless masculine face. The shirt lay open now, revealing a long bronzed slice of muscular torso. ‘Take the shirt and the jeans off or you’ll be uncomfortable,’ she instructed drily.
Raffaele’s eyes flew open again and a sudden grin slashed his wide perfect mouth and stole away the darkness that often edged his strong features. ‘Only if you have the guts to match me.’
Impatience gripping her, Maya peeled off her tee and wriggled free of her shorts, pushing them off the bed. She had forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a bra and, flustered by the knowledge that she had bared her breasts for his benefit, she wrenched the sheet back on the bed and scrambled beneath it to close her eyes, acknowledging that she truly felt as if she could sleep for a week.
For a split second as he took in that view of her pale pert breasts, Raffaele had frozen halfway out of his shirt but, gritting his teeth, he shed the shirt in a heap and embarked on his jeans.
‘I’m afraid I’m going commando,’ he warned her.
‘I’m not looking...couldn’t care less.’
‘Maybe I want you towantto look—maybe my male ego is squashed by this amount of disinterest,’ Raffaele murmured with sibilant bite.
‘A twenty-ton weight couldn’t squash your ego,’ Maya mumbled soothingly, sliding a hand below a pillow and tucking her cheek gratefully into its soft support because he was correct: she had never felt so tired in her life. It was as if all the stresses, all the fears and worries that had dogged her over the past weeks had all homed in on her at once and she was exhausted, mentally and physically.
‘You’re doing a very good job all on your own.’ Raffaele listened to the soft sound of her breathing ease into a regular rhythm while tension kept his own tiredness at bay.
When had he last been with a woman who didn’twantanything from him? He couldn’t remember. It had started so far back in his life with his mother’s incomprehensible demands. If it wasn’t attention a woman wanted from him, it was sex or money or the desire to show him off like a trophy in public. That knowledge had forged an iron barrier inside Raffaele and for the first time Maya was making him realise that it wasn’t that he was unfeeling, it wasn’t that he didn’t have emotions, it was that he had walled them up behind that barrier. Every time he had seen someone reveal humanity’s worst traits of cruelty and greed, he had felt justified in his outlook, and it had never occurred to him until that moment that he would one day be cruel and greedy too and visit those ugly qualities on the woman he had trapped into marrying him.
No, hehadn’tblackmailed her, hehadn’tforced her in any way, he rationalised with confidence. Facts were facts: Maya had made her own choice when she decided to save her parents from their mistakes and had paid with her freedom. But it was also fact that he didn’tneedthe Parisi technology company to survive and that he had pushed her into their current predicament simply because he was bored and in search of a fresh business challenge. He wasn’t, he decided, a good enough person to decide that he regretted what he had done:he didn’t. But he was also burning to possess Maya with a hunger that was deeply unfamiliar to him, in spite of his rich, varied past experience of women.
Because she was a challenge? Because she didn’t seem to want him as much as he wanted her to want him? Was he really that shallow, that arrogant?
Or was it because she had some strange unidentifiable quality that revved his libido? Was sex really that important to him? He would’ve claimed it wasn’t. After all, it had been weeks since he had last had sex, because sex had become as lacklustre as everything else in his life. At least, he could be grateful to Maya for returning him to the sexual land of the living, he conceded grimly, amused by the tent in the sheet over his hips. His handsome mouth quirked as she burrowed her hips into his thigh with a sleepy murmur. With care, he gently pushed her back from him because he didn’t need the temptation and he didn’t do affection. Loving or even highly valuing anyone or anything in his life was too risky, too dangerous, as he had learned at a very early age.
Maya wakened slowly to a room that had been plunged into the warm peach and golden shadows of the afternoon. Checking her watch, she saw that she had slept several hours away and she was about to sit up when the bathroom door opened and Raffaele stalked out stark naked, a towel still in one hand as he dried his wet black hair, leaving it tousled and damp and spiky.
Clothed, Raffaele was intimidating, naked he was even more magnificently overwhelming. He had the physique of a Greek God, carved in vibrant warm bronzed flesh rather than cold marble. From his broad shoulders to his powerful torso, narrow hips and long, strong legs, he was a vision of sleek masculine virility such as she had never seen in real life. Her bemused attention roamed down over the hard contours of his muscular chest to the corrugated lean flatness of his stomach, lingering on the silky line of dark hair that furrowed down over his belly...and there her gaze froze, wide with dismay.
