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‘Well, keep telling yourself that if that works for you, but the anger, the suspicion and the interrogation suggest another story. You don’t have the right to question me about who I have in my life,’ Leah informed him with spirit. ‘We are not a couple—’
‘We could have been—’
‘No...this...would have happened.’ Leah moved her hand across her abdomen, indicating her pregnancy. ‘And it’s obvious to me that we would have ended up at each other’s throats regardless—’
‘I don’t think so,’ Gio argued, stalking towards her, tall, dark and resolute, his spectacular eyes fierce, making her back up against the wall behind her. ‘The passion would have cancelled out our differences—’
‘What p-passion?’ she dared shakily, her throat tightening, her mouth running dry as he studied her with the incredible intensity that she associated only with him. He looked as though every brain cell in his handsome head were fully concentrated on her and for some reason that sheer intensity of his lit her up inside like a torch. No male had ever looked at her that way until him and it had a power over her that she couldn’t comprehend.
She was running out of breath. An intoxicating tension held her still, her breasts stirring inside her bra as she sucked in oxygen, her nipples tightening into straining peaks while a hot liquidity welled at her feminine core.
‘Tell me not to touch you,’ Gio urged her in a driven undertone.
Why did he have to say that? Nobody had touched her since him. Those words only reminded her of how he had made her body sing and how much she longed to feel that way again. ‘I can’t do that,’ she whispered.
‘Why not?’ he framed in a sexy purr, leaning over her, resting his hands against the wall on either side of her head, caging her in with his big muscular body. Dimly she could feel his body heat warming her.
‘Because...because...’ And Leah leant forward and let her hands slide between the parted edges of his jacket and smooth up over his hard muscled chest, the heat pulsing through her metamorphosing into an outright unbearable ache that made her lower limbs tremble. He was so warm and the familiar scent of him that close made her head swim as though she were intoxicated.
Long fingers tilted up her chin; metallic silver eyes inspected hers. ‘Your pupils are huge—’
‘Are they?’ she muttered helplessly as she finally yanked her hands back from him, guilt infusing her at that weakness she couldn’t suppress, that wicked and terrible need totouchhim.
‘You want me too,’ he husked with a raw edge of confidence.
She stretched up on her tiptoes, small hands reaching up to cup his face. ‘We can’t do this,’ she told him firmly.
With a rough sound low in his throat, he turned his mouth into her palm and slid it down to press against the pulse point on her narrow wrist. As she shivered in reaction, she felt the hard, urgent thrust of his erection against her midriff.
‘I’ve had a lot of cold showers since you went out of my life,’ he told her roughly.
‘I was barelyinyour life—’
‘But you left your mark on me all the same,’ he breathed rawly, reaching down to clasp her hips and lift her up against him. ‘And nobody else will do.’
Leah stopped breathing altogether. That physical contact was everything she craved and yet everything she shouldn’t allow herself to have. Frustration currenting through her, she let her knees clamp to his waist, and she kissed him, teasing along the edge of his full lower lip, nipping across the upper just as he had taught her that one unforgettable night. He had the most beautiful, perfect mouth she had ever tasted, and she wanted to feel it on hers with every breath in her body.
‘Put me down before this gets out of hand,’ she muttered tightly.
‘I’m already out of hand...feeling reckless.’ Gio growled that admission soft and low, bending his head to kiss a teasing, enervating line down over the sensitive slope between her neck and shoulder, awakening a tidal wave of response in her sensation-starved body. ‘I want to take you into my bedroom and ravish you.Madre di Dio, is that even allowed in your condition?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ she heard herself say.
With a suppressed groan, Gio slowly, carefully lifted her more fully into his arms and carried her out of the hall and down the corridor to his bedroom. She weighed so little and yet he was insanely conscious of the swell of her stomach and of a quite inappropriate desire to shape it with his hands. She was pregnant, definitely pregnant, not lying on that score anyway. And it waspossiblethat the baby was his, he reasoned, entirely possible. But it truly didn’t matter whether the child was his or not at that moment because it was her whom he was burning up to possess.
‘I wasn’t jealous,’ he breathed against her reddened lips as he laid her down on a big wide bed and flipped off her shoes.
‘If you say so,’ Leah mumbled, wondering how they had travelled at such insane speed from discord to passion and why that passion had overpowered her every misgiving and why now she felt crazily relaxed as if she was finally safe. Safe from what? From being alone? She wasn’t alone any more. She had Ari and Cleo and her niece now, the family she had always craved. Only for some reason, that wasn’t enough for her any more, she grasped dimly.
‘It was just anger. You were racing off to be with him when I was there right infrontof you,’ Gio specified without hesitation.
‘He offered me dinner—’
‘I would’ve offered you dinner.’
His mercurial silver eyes held hers and heat washed through her as he shed his jacket, wrenched at his tie, all that very formal expensive tailoring of his discarded with disrespectful haste as he stripped. ‘I felt challenged, not jealous. I don’t share. I don’t cheat.’
Leah veiled her gaze and tried not to smile. He was territorial, possessive even, though she had not given him that right. His bronzed chest bare, the rippling muscles of his abdomen taut and evident as he came down to her, he bent his dark head and kissed her with a hunger that raced through her in an incendiary wave of heat. Her fingers speared into his luxuriant black hair as he lifted her up to him and peeled off her top. Her bra fell away. He caught her breasts in his hands, savouring their swollen fullness with an appreciation in his intent gaze that she felt to her very toes, as though her body was his alone to worship and admire.
