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She was dressed in a stunning off-the-shoulder red satin gown, which hugged her subtle curves like a second skin and pushed up her breasts, making her cleavage a work of art.
My ribs tightened, making my thundering heartbeat almost deafening.
I still wasn’t sure what had possessed me to describe the dress I wanted Jessie to wear to Lavigne in detail when I had hired her. But I could not deny the staggering effect it was having on me now.
This gown was more expensive, the material bolder and more luxurious, than the one Jessie had worn all those years ago. But the effect on me was exactly the same. I was mesmerised, enchanted, spellbound with lust and something else, something I had struggled to control for days now—weeks even—damn it.
As always, I attempted to concentrate on the lust—and discard that desperate emotion which had begun to haunt me, tormenting me each night as the nightmares returned when I was in my self-imposed exile, and I had to force myself not to return to her bed, to wake her and plunge into her again.
But somehow my desire—like my nightmares—and the inexplicable decision to make her wearthatdress for me again were all equally problematic.
Why had the connection we had shared since that night only become more intense, more desperate, more insatiable in the past three weeks, no matter how many times I took her?
Perhaps it was simply that each time I touched her, tempted her, each time I tortured us both—drawing out her pleasure simply to prove that I could—her artless response to me had only become braver, bolder and more honest, and all the more intoxicating for it.
Making me greedy for every second of her company.
I didn’t want to take her to the event upstairs which had already begun in the Inferno’s palatial roof garden. The thought of having to socialise with anyone, when I only had one more night with her, tortured me now, as it had been torturing me for days.
How can I let her go? When I’m not ready to lose her. And why should I?
My palms started to sweat, my breathing becoming ragged.
I licked my lips, the elaborate chignon the stylist had spent hours constructing revealing the graceful line of her neck, the soft skin of her nape to my hungry gaze. Desire surged in my groin because I knew now exactly how much she loved to be kissed there.
I sunk my fists into my trouser pockets and forced myself to clear my throat rather than charge across the room.
Jessie’s gaze connected with mine in the mirror. For a moment I could see a flicker of panic—followed by awareness—in the pale silvery blue. And I was reminded painfully of the girl who had once informed me with such artless candour I was to be her first lover.
‘Bonsoir, Principessa,’I murmured as I crossed the silk carpet, my tone so husky the words scraped my throat. ‘Madame Lavigne is worth her exorbitant price I see,’ I added, trying to sound sophisticated when all my baser instincts were already in free fall.
Her gaze remained riveted to mine. Did she feel it too? This urgency? This desperation? Surely, she must? How could she be ready to let me go either? Three weeks hadn’t been long enough, that had to be obvious to her too.
I had waited, I realised, for days now, weeks even, as I brought her to staggering pleasure each night for her to ask for more. But she hadn’t, and now our time was nearly over...
Her cheeks flushed the dark vermilion I had come to adore as I reached her.
‘Renzo, this dress...’ she said, chewing her bottom lip in a way which had the need surging again in my gut. But the fierce emotion in her face made my heart throb into my throat. What was it I could see in her eyes? Surprise and confusion I could understand—I was not even sure myself why I had been so determined to see her again as she had been that night, fresh and forthright and only mine—but there was something else there that made no sense, because it looked strangely like guilt.
‘It’s just like the one I wore that night,’ she added, as if she believed the similarity had been an accident.
‘I know, I asked Madame Lavigne to recreate it. I wanted to see you in it again,’ I managed, realising that a part of me had always wanted desperately to be able to go back to that night and be a better man than I had been then.
Stupid to realise that now, I thought. After I had been insisting to myself for so long that all I had ever really wanted out of our liaison was to become that man again.
‘But...why?’ she asked, looking more confused, more wary, even as the emotion deepened the pale blue of her irises. The searching light in her eyes though—as if she were looking for something—terrified me.
‘Because I want you now, even more than I did then,’ I murmured, grasping her wrist and dragging her into my arms, still desperate to convince myself my need was all about sex. ‘Undress. Or I will rip it,’ I said, my voice harsh with the demand I didn’t want to control anymore, because it was a good way to hide all the other emotions churning inside me.
Not just need but longing, and the fear of losing her a second time. The fear of the intimacy which had snuck up on me in the past weeks and months and was making it impossible now for me to even contemplate letting her go.
Jessie’s eyes widened, but I could see the flare of arousal, behind the flicker of shock. I was behaving like a caveman, the skill and sophistication I had tried so hard to show her over the last three weeks burning to ash in my mouth. But what concerned me more was the way the searching light in her eyes had died.
What had she been looking for? And why did it hurt now to think that I might be incapable of giving it to her?
I swallowed heavily, as she stepped back, and found the tab underneath her arm, to draw the zip down.
Suddenly I was thrown back to that night so long ago, when I had made her strip for me. But that man—the one who could be patient, provocative, who could deny the emotional hold she now had over me—no longer existed.
