Читать книгу Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals - Caitlin Crews - Страница 16

CHAPTER SEVEN

HALFWAY THROUGH THE formal dinner laid out with luxurious attention to detail in one of the Napa winery’s private rooms up high on a hillside, every plate and glass and carefully arranged bit of food as choreographed as some refined ballet, Luca was so darkly furious he had no idea how he kept to his seat.

He told himself it wasn’t fury. Or it shouldn’t have been. That Kathryn was simply doing what she did, what she had always done and always would, and there was no point reacting to it at all—

But that didn’t help. Every time her musical little laugh floated across the table, he tensed. Every time that silver-haired jackass to her left with the wandering hands touched her, he thought smoke might pour from his ears.

It was one thing to know that this was what she did. That she was no doubt lining up potential selections for her future wherever she went. He’d never expected anything less. Yet it turned out it was something else to witness her in action.

Particularly when he could still feel her. Still hear those cries in his ears. Still taste her, the hard nub of her nipple and that creamy heat below.

Damn her.

He had no memory of the conversations he must have engaged in with the people sitting on either side of him. When the eternal dinner ground to an end at last and he could finally get the hell away, he escorted Kathryn to their waiting car with a hand that was, he could admit, perhaps a little too insistent against the small of her back.

“Is this an attempt at chivalry or are you herding me?” she asked under her breath, that damned smile of hers still welded into place even outside, in the dark, where there was no one to see her but him.

He wanted to mess her up, Luca acknowledged. He wanted to dig his fingers beneath that facade of hers and see what she hid away underneath. He wanted far too much, and all of it wrong. And dangerous, besides.

He was not a man who had ever been interested in entanglements. But tangled was the very least of the things he felt around this woman.

Luca held the passenger door of the sleek limousine open as she climbed inside, nodding brusquely at their driver. Then he swung into the limo’s hushed interior himself, making no particular attempt to keep to his own side of the wide backseat as he slammed the door shut behind him.

Kathryn was digging in her evening bag. She glanced at him as he came close, then froze.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. The faintest frown etched itself between her eyes, where that fringe of hers nearly touched her eyes and drove him utterly crazy with that same sharp longing he was finding it harder and harder—impossible—to control. Just as he could no longer seem to control himself. “What happened?”

“You tell me.”

He felt outsized and more than a little maddened. He sprawled there next to her, too close but not quite touching her. Not quite. His blood was pumping through him much too fast. His heart was trying to kick its way out of his chest. He was holding himself back by the smallest thread.

He wasn’t sure how he was holding himself back at all.

Her frown deepened, which was at least better than that damned smile.

“I don’t know, Luca. I thought that went well enough. I’m not sure what you wanted out of it, but it seems as if every vintner in two valleys is deeply impressed with your varietals. What more can you ask?”

For the first time in his life, Luca did not care the slightest bit about wine or the wine business or anything having to do with his damned vines or vintages or barrels or whatever else.

“I could ask that when we are conducting business, you manage to keep your mind on that,” he seethed at her. He didn’t even try to contain that tone of his or the simmering outrage in it. “And not on laying your trap for your next victim.”

Her gray eyes chilled. “What are you talking about?”

“You weren’t particularly subtle,” he gritted at her as the car began to move, sweeping them out toward the main road and the mountains to the west. “Everyone at the table got to watch you hang all over that poor man and play your little games with him.”

“And by little games, I assume you mean the work you and I were there to do? That I was doing while you sulked?”

“You spent a long time off in the bathroom before dessert,” he continued, not caring that he could see the effect of his harsh tone in the way she shivered slightly. “What were you doing, I wonder? Your target also disappeared for a similar span of time. And God only knows what you were doing beneath the table where no one could see.”

He’d thought of little else. He knew the meal he’d been served had been the finest Californian cuisine, a fusion of the state’s rich bounty presented to perfection, and yet it had all been tasteless and pointless to him.

Kathryn shook her head, her lips pressing together. “This is ridiculous. Not to mention offensive in the extreme.” Her gray eyes flashed. “Of course, that’s your thing, isn’t it? The more horrible, the better.”

“And here’s what I wonder.” He shifted so he was closer to her, looming over her, his whole body humming with that darkness, that tension, that driving need he could neither understand nor control. This was what she did to him. She made him lose the tight control he’d always maintained over himself, his world, his life. Always. He found that the most unforgivable. Maybe that was what made him move his face that much closer to hers—so she could feel his fury in every word he spoke. “How does a noted whore for hire seal the deal? On your knees or on your back? Does it vary with each mark or do you stick to a set routine?”

He didn’t see her move, and that told him more about the blind single-mindedness of that darkness in him than anything else. He felt her palm against his jaw, heard the crack of it fill the car’s interior with the bright burst of the slap she delivered and he saw the fire and the fury in her dark gray eyes.

The pain came a moment later, sharp and swift.

“You’re a vile little man,” she threw at him, and he didn’t disagree with her. But that was neither here nor there. “The only thing more disgusting than your imagination is the fact you think you can dump it out on me whenever you feel like it, like a toxic spill.”

Luca laughed, a darker sound than the night outside the car or the way her breath came out in angry pants, and tested his jaw with his hand.

“That actually hurt.” He shifted his gaze to hers, and eyed the way she sat there, clearly trembling with rage. “Is this where you play the outraged and offended virgin? I must tell you, Kathryn. You’re not that accomplished an actress.”

She paled. He thought she might keel over, or explode, but she pressed her lips together again instead. She lifted a hand, and he thought she might try to hit him once more—and the operative word was try—but she only put her palm to her neck. As if she wanted to control her own pulse. Or her own breath.

Or herself.

And he didn’t know what to do with that notion that swept over him like heat, that she might find herself as out of control in the middle of this mess as he clearly was.

“If you hit me again,” he told her softly, “I’ll return the favor.”

“You’ll hit me?” Her eyes were grim in the dark. “I’m glad your father is dead, Luca. He would have been horrified by you.”

He ignored the little flare of something a good deal like shame deep inside him then, even as it knotted itself in his gut.

“Let’s be very clear about this,” he said, and he was aware on a distant level that the fury that had been riding him all through dinner had eased. Not disappeared, but loosened its hold. He didn’t ask himself why. “It will be a very cold day in hell before I worry myself over what my father, of all people, might have thought about anything I do. Much less what you think. That’s the moral equivalent of taking lectures on good behavior from the devil himself.” He eyed her in the close confines of the car’s backseat, where he was still too much in her space, and it still wasn’t enough. Not close enough. Not enough. “But I don’t hit women. Not even when they’ve hit me first.”

She had the grace to look faintly abashed at that, and her gaze dropped to her hand. She flexed her fingers out in front of her, and he wondered if her palm stung as much as his jaw did. The idea didn’t make that heavy knot inside him loosen any.

He reached over and took her hand in his, and held on when she tried to jerk it out of his grasp. He ignored the little huff of air that escaped her lips, and smoothed his fingers over her palm as if he was tracing it. As if he wanted to rub the sting out.

As if he didn’t know what the hell he wanted.

“Hit me again, Kathryn,” he said in a low voice, looking at her hand instead of her face, “and I’ll take that as an invitation to finish what we started last night. No matter how many old men you make dance to your tune at a dinner table. No matter who you’re pretending to be tonight.”

Her fingers curled as if she wanted to clench them into a fist.

“I’m not pretending to be anyone,” she snapped at him. “The only person playing a game here is you. And there will never be an invitation to finish anything. That was an aberration. A terrible, horrifying mistake. I have no idea why it happened and—”

“Don’t you?”

He hadn’t meant to ask that question, but once out, it seemed to hover there between them, threatening everything. Pounding in him so hard it became indistinguishable from his own heartbeat.

“No,” she whispered, but her gray eyes were too large and too dark. Her pretty mouth trembled with the lie of it. And he could feel the tremor she fought to repress in that hand he held between his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never do.”

And Luca smiled. Hard. “Let me give you some clarity.”

He let go of her hand and reached for her, wrapping his hands around her waist and lifting her out of her seat and over his lap. He heard her breath desert her as he settled her against him, her legs to one side. Then he simply bent his head and took her mouth with his.

Once again, that maddening fire. Once again, that swift shock, lust and need, greed and hunger, burning him alive.

As hot and as wild as if they were still in her bed. As if they’d never left, never stopped.

And she didn’t fight him. She didn’t pretend. He felt her give in to this thing that pounded between them, felt the heady rush of her surrender.

She hooked her arms around his neck as if she couldn’t control herself any more than he could, then she opened her mouth to him and kissed him back.

And Luca lost track of everything.

That he was trying to make a point. That they were in the back of a moving car. That she was the last woman on earth he should be touching at all, much less like this. That he absolutely should not be doing this.

He simply lost himself in the perfection of her mouth. The sweet heat of the way she kissed him and tangled her fingers in his hair. The weight of her slender body against his and the sheer desperation in the way they came together.

Again and again.

But it wasn’t enough.

He groaned against her mouth, and she shifted against him as if he’d lit her on fire, the curve of her hip coming up hard against his aching sex.

And Luca stopped pretending he had any control where this woman was concerned. Or at all.

He shifted her on top of him, swinging her around to straddle him. He shoved the dress she wore up and out of his way, settling her down astride his lap, and he almost lost it when she gasped into his mouth as the softest part of her came up flush against his hardness.

He could feel her shudder all around him, or maybe that was him, as lost in this insanity as she was.

There was no control. There was no hint of it. And the truly scary part of that was how little Luca cared that it was gone.

There was nothing but his hands buried in her hair again and his mouth against hers, feasting on her. Ravishing her. He could feel her wet heat against him and rolled himself into it, aware that only the fabric of his trousers and the insubstantial panties she wore separated them. He let the slick, hot glory of it build.

There was nothing but her taste, an addictive wildness against his tongue. She surrounded him, more beautiful with her dress at her waist and her hair half– falling down from its elegant little knot than any other woman he’d ever seen.

Than anything at all.

And Luca found himself muttering things he knew better than to say out loud, even if he was speaking in Italian.

“Tu sei mia,” he told her. You are mine. He didn’t know where that had come from, what the hell he was doing. Why he meant such things down deep in his bones, when he shouldn’t. When he couldn’t.

But he found he didn’t much care then. He filled his hands with the taut curves of her bottom and guided her against him in an unapologetically carnal rhythm, until she tilted her head back and moaned.

So he did it even harder, watching her face go slack as she rocked against him, driving him crazy, making him so hard and ready for her it bordered on pain. He moved his hand from her gorgeous bottom, sliding it around to find the heat of her with his fingers through the barrier of those soft panties.

“Look at me, Kathryn,” he ordered her, his voice little more than a growl.

She obeyed. And her eyes were wide and gray. Slicked hot with desire. Her lips were parted, and her cheeks were flushed. Luca felt something shift inside him, a sharp and uncompromising tilt. He couldn’t name it, though there was no pretending he didn’t feel it. He only knew that he was no longer the same man he’d been even five minutes before.

There was only Kathryn, arched above him, straining against him, her beautiful eyes locked on to his.

And there is this, he thought, sliding his hands into her panties and slicking his way through the molten wildfire of her sweet core to find the neediest part of her. Then he pressed down, hard and sure, and watched her hurtle over the side of the world.

She bucked against him as her pleasure tumbled through her, making greedy little noises that were almost his undoing, her fingers digging hard into his shoulders, her head thrown back and her lovely back arched like a bow.

And everything shifted again, but this time, all the hunger and greed and sense in his body surged straight to his sex.

Luca needed to be inside her. Right now.

She was still shaking, still astride him. She was still panting as she tipped forward until she could rest her forehead against his shoulder. And now he could feel her harsh little breaths as well as hear them, and somehow, that made everything hotter.

Closer. Crazier. Better.

He reached between them, amazed to find his hand was unsteady as he pulled himself from his trousers at last, so aching and so hard. Kathryn was limp now, still shuddering and gasping, and he simply pulled her panties to one side and lined himself up with her entrance, the scalding heat of her nearly enough to make him lose it right there.

He thought he swore in Italian, or perhaps it was a prayer. She was slick and hot, and he didn’t care where else she’d been or with whom. He didn’t care why. He didn’t care about anything but the way she fit in his arms, his lap.

He didn’t care about anything but this.

It had been two years of sheer torment with this woman; he could admit that now, when the truth seemed so obvious at last. He’d wanted her from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. Perhaps he would always want her. But that wasn’t something Luca wanted to think about. Not now when she was everything he’d ever wanted, poised there above him, hot and wet and nearly his.

Nearly.

He moved his hands to her hips to hold her right where he wanted her. He tucked his mouth against her neck, where he could taste her, salt and need.

And then finally, finally, he thrust his way home.

* * *

It hurt.

God, did it hurt.

Kathryn felt something tear, felt a shriek of agony sear through her like a burn, and then there was nothing but the hugeness of him. Deep, deep inside her. So deep she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but freeze there over him, that harsh thrust of his possession like a throbbing brand within her.

Luca swore.

Then again, in both Italian and English, and she scrunched up her face so she wouldn’t cry and kept it buried in the crook of his shoulder as if she could hide from this. As if that might make the shuddering, aching heaviness go away.

But it didn’t work.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Kathryn. Sit up.”

“I don’t want to.”

He was still buried deep inside her, though he didn’t move. Then the car bumped over a dip in the road and thrust him deeper into her, and she felt the way he braced himself. Heard the small exhalation he made, as if this was no easier for him than it was for her. And that heavy sharpness radiated out from where the length of him was still inside her, making even her breasts feel stung with it.

As if the whole of her body was one giant ache.

“Sit up, cucciola mia,” he said, in a voice she’d never heard him use before, something far warmer and indulgent than any she associated with him. He nudged her with his jaw. “Now, please.”

And it seemed the hardest thing she’d ever done, to ease herself back, knowing he could see the panic and the pain and the leftover heat all over her face. To feel him lodged inside her as she carefully shifted position. To look into his dark eyes, so close to hers, aware that he knew things about her now she hadn’t wanted to share.

Too many things.

It had all happened too fast. She’d been lost in another bone-deep, impossible shattering, torn apart into a million little pieces and unable to breathe, and then it had been too late.

Too late, she thought again.

She wasn’t sure what that thing was that crept over her, deep in her chest and her gut, a raw sort of hollow. She was terribly afraid it might be a sob.

Luca reached up and smoothed her hair back from her still-flushed face. She squirmed against that thick, hard intrusion that connected them so intimately, and he only watched her do it. He didn’t move—though she thought that steel line of his jaw hardened.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice the quietest she’d ever heard it, and she didn’t know what to make of that. She didn’t know how to feel.

She moved her hips and didn’t understand how people did this, or why, when there was no comfortable position and too much of that heavy, aching heat. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“Kathryn,” he said, that low voice at odds, somehow, with the very nearly tender way his thumbs brushed over her temples, and her name in his mouth a kind of poetry that made that hollow thing inside her seem to hum. “You went from pleasure to pain in an instant. How could I not notice that?”

She shifted again, still trying to find a way to sit on his lap when he was inside her, and this time his eyes darkened. She caught her breath.

The car bumped again and this time, the sensations that spun out from that involuntary thrust were more of a deep spark than anything sharp or painful. The ache inside her...changed. The spark seemed to light it up, infusing it with something else besides the pain. She shifted experimentally, then tugged her bottom lip between her teeth when that something else bloomed into something better, and watched that slow hunger burn in his dark eyes.

She felt an answering echo of it in her, as if the heaviness and the stretched ache were connected to all that delicious heat she thought of as his, that she could feel easing back into her the longer they sat like this.

“I wasn’t aware that it would matter to you whether or not you hurt me,” she said, without meaning to speak.

Luca’s hands moved to cup her cheeks, and his dark eyes met hers, nearly grim in the shadows of this car slipping through the California night.

“It matters,” he said gruffly. “You should have told me.”

And that hollow thing inside her swelled, crashing over her like a terrible tide. She didn’t know what it was. She only felt the sting of tears in her eyes and the throb of something far heavier in her chest.

And Luca deep inside her, hot and still.

“Tell you?” she whispered, because her voice had deserted her. “How could I tell you? You don’t just think I’m a whore, Luca. You know it. You’ve never had the slightest doubt.”

“Kathryn.”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.” She only realized that her tears had spilled out when he wiped them away with his thumbs, more gentle with her than made any sense. “You would have laughed in my face.”

He didn’t deny that, though his gaze darkened even further.

He pulled her face to his and kissed her, and it was almost too much. The thrust of him deep inside her body and the impossible sweetness of his lips on hers. It made her brain short out. It made that great rawness inside her glow.

“Ah, cucciola mia,” he murmured, pulling back from her mouth, still holding her face in his hands—almost as if he found her somehow precious. “I’m not laughing now.”

And then he began to move.