Читать книгу The Delicious De Campos: The Divorce Party - Jennifer Hayward - Страница 16

CHAPTER NINE

LILLY WOKE UP with such a supreme feeling of well-being she thought she might have been accidentally transported to a land of paradise, where everything was silk sheets, hard male and a bone-meltingly familiar sense of satisfaction she never wanted to end.

Turning her head from its face-down planting in the pillow, she slid her palm across the sheet in search of more warm, hard male. Nothing but silk. Her eyes flickered open. She was alone in the huge king-sized bed.

She flipped over, settled back against the mountain of pillows and stared out at the brilliant blue sky. She might almost think it had been a dream, the ridiculously hot sex she’d had with her husband. But the ache between her legs begged to differ. And in the blinding light of morning everything seemed magnified by ten.

She’d let the man she was still madly in love with, who didn’t love her anymore, strip her of the defenses she’d spent a decade building. Then she’d slept with him in a moment of madness without using protection, which demonstrated exactly what a moment of madness it had been.

Damn.

She squeezed her eyes shut. It had been a monumentally stupid thing to do. The one thing she’d never been able to deny was the connection they’d had in bed. And once that took over all bets were off.

It was the reason she’d refused to see him for so long. Because she didn’t trust herself around Riccardo.

Her stomach churned. Both she and Riccardo had extremely fertile families. But hadn’t it taken her girlfriend, Darya, forever to conceive? Surely it wouldn’t happen in one night?

Finding the whole thing entirely too disconcerting, she threw back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. Riccardo would have been up hours ago. He’d probably swum fifty lengths of that Olympic-sized pool and gone through every set of weights in the exercise room by now.

She padded restlessly over to the patio doors and threw open the curtains. The humid heat hit her immediately, and the perfume-soaked, salty, heavy air was filled with the scent of dozens of exotic flowers. It begged complete lethargy—a sunchair, a book and a drink, followed by a cool swim.

She blinked and shaded her eyes against the brilliant sunlight. And found her guess had been right. But rather than laps her husband was slicing through the ocean with a powerful front crawl that ate up the distance between the raft that bobbed about a mile out and the beach.

She watched as he hit the shore and walked up the beach, water sluicing down over his washboard abs. The drool that formed in her mouth was swift and uncontrollable. As if having him so completely last night had done nothing to stem the urge she had for him.

He lifted a hand to swipe the water from his face. And saw her standing there.

A heart-meltingly sexy smile curved his mouth. He walked up the beach and came to stand below the balcony, a fully relaxed, content-looking Riccardo who turned her insides to mush.

“You coming down?”

A smile twisted her lips. “If you’ll come swimming with me. I’m sweating already.”

“We have fifteen minutes before breakfast is ready. Get your suit on and get down here.”

She slipped off her négligée and pulled on the fuchsia bikini she’d bought with Alex. She might have made the huge mistake of sleeping with Riccardo last night, but that didn’t mean she had to continue her foolish behavior today. She needed to focus on keeping her head. She bit her lip as she pulled on a short cotton dress over her bathing suit. So what was she doing, running down to swim with him? And what had he meant when he’d said, “This is not over. We are only getting started”?

It didn’t matter what he’d said! She swiped some sunscreen across her cheeks and nose. Riccardo was a lethal banned substance for her. Best to accept that last night had been inevitable between them, like a storm reaching its conclusion, and find a way to make it through the next six months without killing each other.

Hot sex wasn’t going to accomplish that.

A rational brain would.

Tell that to her hormones, she thought as she joined Riccardo on the tiny private beach in front of the villa, the sand as smooth as silk between her toes. Because the intensity of her husband’s dark gaze on her was making her overheating problem a virtual crisis.

“You’d better lose the dress,” he advised. “Nowhere down here to leave it.”

She darted a self-conscious glance around her. The bikini wasn’t French Riviera material but it was revealing enough. She would rather have just gotten in the water, but since there really wasn’t anywhere to leave her cover-up on the beach she walked up to the terrace, draped it over a chair and headed back down to him, self-conscious in her halter top bikini.

The smell of bacon wafted through the air. “Mrs. Adams is cooking?”

He nodded. “We thought we’d let you sleep in. You needed it.”

She walked toward him, ultra self-conscious in her halter top bikini.

Her husband took her in from beneath veiled lashes. “And here I thought we had declared a truce.”

She frowned. Looked down at herself. Pink. Her swimsuit was pink.

Heat filled her cheeks. “It was the only suit that didn’t make me look like an adult movie star.”

He reached for her, his fingers closing over her forearm. “Why go for modest when you look that good, cara?”

She sucked in a breath as he pulled her against his hard, dripping wet body. “Did you listen to a word I said last night?”

“Si. I am intent on desensitizing you.”

She pressed a hand against his chest to balance herself. “You can’t just wave your fairy wand and cure me, Riccardo. Anorexia is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, even if I have it under control.”

“I know,” he said, bringing his lips down on hers as he swung her up in his arms. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

She smiled at his arrogance. His lips were warm from the heat of the sun, his kiss as leisurely as the mood he seemed to be in, and she found she just didn’t have the willpower to fight him.

He walked into the sea, and the water was so warm it barely registered on her heated skin. Then he wrapped her legs around him so they floated on the buoyant sea.

“Riccardo...”

“What?”

“I—I don’t think this is appropriate.”

He gave her an amused look. “We’re married. What’s inappropriate about it?”

She focused her gaze on his Adam’s apple. “Last night was...amazing...but I think anymore of that is just going to complicate things between us.”

He lifted her chin with his fingers. “If you mean sex, Lilly, then I’m going to have to disagree. Sex breaks down the barriers between us, and if you think, now that we’re finally talking, I’m going to let you put them up again, you’re mistaken. By the end of this weekend there isn’t going to be anything I don’t know about you.”

She went rigid. “There isn’t anymore to say.”

He pressed his lips together. “How did you keep it from me? I never saw the signs.”

“My anorexia?”

He nodded.

She pressed her hands against his chest to put some distance between them, but he kept his arms firmly banded around her. “I was better when I met you. I’d gotten control over it. I’d spent my career practicing physiotherapy, learning how incredible the human body is—how strong it is—and how much more important it was to honor your body than do what I’d been doing to it.”

She swallowed hard. His gaze on her face was making her feel as if she was under a microscope.

“It started to get bad for me again after that first year, when our honeymoon with the media wore off and they made a game out of criticizing how I looked or what I wore.”

“Which they do with anyone who’s in the limelight like that,” he interjected.

“Yes. But for me it was harder. Anorexia isn’t something with a lot of outward signs. It’s insidious. I withdraw. I stop eating. It becomes impossible for me to look at my body objectively. Everything gets distorted.”

He frowned. “I thought it was a vanity thing. The need to look perfect.”

A rueful smile curved her mouth. “The need to not hate myself would be more accurate.”

His jaw hardened. “Was I really that impossible to talk to? Did I really demand that much perfection from you?”

“It comes with your life, Riccardo. It’s expected from those around you.”

His jaw hardened. “We could have made adjustments to our life to make things easier for you.”

She shook her head. “You’re going to be the head of a ten-billion-dollar conglomerate when you take over from your father. You couldn’t make those changes even if you wanted to.”

His dark eyes glittered. “We could have. We could have done what was necessary and let the rest go.”

“You’re a dreamer,” she bit out. “You needed a new wife. And you refused to admit it.”

His lip curled. “I did not need a new wife. I needed a wife with the guts to tell me what was wrong. I needed a wife who was there for me at one of the lowest points of my life and instead you were gone.”

She recoiled. “I had lost myself, Riccardo. I had lost the ability to keep myself in balance. If I hadn’t left I would have reverted back to my old bad habits and destroyed myself.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You couldn’t have waited until I’d gotten back? Been there for me?”

She pushed hard against his chest and this time he let her go. Finding the sandy bottom with her feet, she stood facing him. “What happened in Italy? All I knew was that you’d been summoned there on Antonio’s orders.”

He scraped his wet hair out of his face. “It doesn’t matter now. We’re talking about why you left.”