His Cinderella's One-Night Heir, page 9
‘Belle...?’ he breathed silkily before she could rush up the stone steps ahead of him, a newly released Charlie dancing at her heels.
And she turned back to him, wide violet eyes bright below the tangle of red-gold curls on her pale brow. Dark eyes dazzlingly gilded by sunlight, he stared down at her and the hunger she incited surged up inside him with volcanic force. He pulled her into his arms, one hand locking to the back of her head, his fingers meshing into her curls, and he devoured her soft, smiling mouth with his own. Taken by complete surprise, Belle stiffened and then leant into the solid heat of him, the wild, ferociously sweet taste of his hunger melting her deep down inside to create a blossoming ache of need.
Distinctly dazed by that embrace, she stumbled when he set her free and it was all the encouragement he needed to sweep her up into his arms and carry her up the steps with Charlie racing in their wake and barking to indicate his enthusiasm. Belle started to laugh. To say that they made an entrance to the palazzo would have been to understate the case, for a group of goggle-eyed staff awaited them there.
Belle slid down out of Dante’s arms, flushed and embarrassed by his hot-headed behaviour but immediately soothed by the huge smiles that greeted their arrival. Their luggage was being brought in and she accompanied Dante upstairs. Only belatedly did it dawn on her that that seemingly spontaneous kiss had most probably been driven by Dante’s desire to make them seem more like a loving couple. It had been a public statement, nothing more. At that acknowledgement, the bounce dropped straight out of her step again and she scolded herself for believing for one minute that he had simply succumbed to an overwhelming passion.
The first-floor landing was open-plan to the piano nobile, the main reception room according to the usual Palladian floor plan. It was certainly a very grand and richly furnished space. Indeed, her brain was already whirling with images of colourful frescoes, classic statues and more architectural detail than she could comfortably absorb in a short space of time. ‘Do you use this as the main reception area?’ she enquired.
‘Only if I throw a party but that isn’t very often. I converted rooms on the ground floor for normal life. It’s a challenge because Jacopo left me a treasure house and I don’t like making changes but, at the same time, I have to actually live here, so it has to be made fit for purpose,’ he pointed out, following the luggage through a classical double doorway into a simply vast bedroom.
It was only then that Belle realised that naturally they would be sharing a room and that her nights of solo privacy were at an end, but when she laid eyes on the huge canopied bed with its incredibly opulent crimson-and-gold brocaded drapes, she burst out laughing. As if it were not imposing enough, the bed sat on a dais. ‘Please tell me I don’t have to sleep in that monstrosity...’
‘I’ll have you know that that is a genuine Louis XIV bed,’ Dante informed her with amusement lighting up his lean dark features. ‘And it is very comfortable... Look, even Charlie thinks so.’
Belle exclaimed in dismay, ‘Charlie! No!’
The terrier had searched out the most comfortable place in the room and had had no problem leaping up onto the bed and making himself at home there. She scooped him up and set him down on the floor again.
‘So, you live inside a history book. I would never have guessed that about you,’ she admitted truthfully.
‘My parents’ home is only a few miles away and I’ve been visiting this house since I was a little boy. I was grateful for my uncle’s interest in me because I got very little attention at home,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘I was brought up by nannies, some better than others, and few of them lasted long because my mother is a demanding employer. Cristiano and I went to boarding school and Jacopo used to come and take us out for the day. He was a very kind man and I think he felt sorry for us.’
‘Was he close to your parents?’
‘No, and when he left me all his worldly goods, they were outraged because they had always assumed they would inherit his estate and to leave it to me, the younger, more rebellious son, was even worse in their eyes.’
‘What age were you when he died?’
‘Twenty-one.’
Belle shook her head, unable to even imagine inheriting the splendour of such a residence and all that went with it at such a young age. ‘You have already lived a most extraordinary life, Dante, and you’re not even thirty yet. You may not have been blessed in the parent department, but you were blessed in other ways,’ she told him quietly.
‘Do you want the official tour now or later?’ Dante enquired.
‘Later would be fine,’ she said. ‘I’m a little tired. I’d like a shower and a nap.’
‘Dinner’s at eight,’ he told her casually.
In truth, Belle was thinking that she needed to pull back and wise up fast. She was at the Palazzo Rosario purely to play a role: that of official girlfriend. Dante had reminded her of that harsh fact when he’d kissed her and carried her in like a bride, for goodness’ sake! Such a public and exaggerated display of affection would not have occurred to Dante if he hadn’t been faking it to make them seem more like a real couple. Real couples kissed and laughed and fooled around like that, but she had to remember that they were not a real couple.
She opened a connecting door and found a bathroom, a gorgeous creation in Carrera marble with a copper bath catching the fading sunlight by the window. Dreamy, she thought, but she was too tired for a bath and would savour its delights some other time.
All her troubled thoughts were concentrated on Dante. The act of sex had plunged their arrangement into a no man’s land of confusion, she acknowledged ruefully in the shower. All of a sudden she didn’t know how to behave, what was acceptable, what was not. Was he expecting her to be all over him like a rash when anyone else was around? Or did the staff not really matter? Probably not, she decided, not after he had staged that big entrance for them. Now he was probably just expecting her to blend into the woodwork while he got on with his normal life. Her true moment of importance wouldn’t arrive for ten days when his guests would arrive...at about the same time as she would be finding out whether or not she was pregnant.
But what were the odds? She winced. She told herself it wasn’t likely but she had already calculated that that accident had happened during her most fertile phase, which wasn’t good.
The door opened and she froze, telling herself off for not locking the door and ready to curl up in a heap on the shower floor. But it was Dante and he gave her a slow smile over the wall that separated the shower from the rest of the room.
‘I decided that I needed a nap as well,’ he husked, reaching down to pull up his T-shirt and haul it over his head, a truly spectacular network of muscles flexing to make that movement possible. Her mouth went dry and she knew that he had only been joking about the nap, her colour heightening.
She had assumed he wouldn’t come near her again until they were in that big bed later that evening. She was learning that it didn’t pay to make assumptions with Dante. He had told her that he was a passionate guy. He liked sex. He liked sex a lot...and he wanted her, had wanted her from the first moment he saw her, and nobody had ever wanted Belle with such immediacy or such passionate intensity. She could live in the moment, couldn’t she? She watched the jeans drop, the classic V shape above his hip bones tightening as he got naked in record time. Sensation clenched low and tight in her pelvis and she was literally holding her breath, seeing Dante naked and aroused for the first time. And yes, he definitely had more than a nap in mind.
He stepped in with her, crowding her back against the tiled wall, hunger smouldering in his dark golden eyes, his body taut against her stomach, and she literally stopped breathing. A wild heat gripped her feminine core but that out-of-her-depth feeling was claiming her again. Only the night before she had still been a virgin, still shy, still ignorant of all sorts of things and, while she was no longer that naïve and unprepared, six feet two inches of Dante, naked and bronzed and wet and ready in the shower, was almost too much to handle.
Long fingers pushed up her chin so that he could see her eyes. ‘Are you too tired?’
Belle trembled. ‘Er...no,’ she told him truthfully, barely able to catch her breath.
‘Too sore?’ he husked.
One of her tomato blushes gripped her from head to toe and she shook her head in urgent negative but even as she did so, she knew she was telling a partial lie. She was still tender, still very aware of what they had done only hours earlier. Yet inexplicably her body now craved him like a dangerous drug, as if that one act of intimacy had smashed all her defences, her inhibitions and her misgivings.
And yet, on another level, she was painfully aware that she wanted more from him than he would ever give her, and her insecurities lingered underneath. All he wanted was sex, but he wasn’t feeling the magnetic mental pull, the attachment that was tugging at her, no matter how hard she tried to resist it. She was convenient, available, here only to play a role that he was paying her for. A role that had somehow become real, only it wasn’t real because she was not his girlfriend and he hadn’t really invited her to share his house with him. In just ten days it would all be over, and she would be gone.
What did that make of her? Did it mean she was like her mother? A woman content to be a man’s plaything for a little while and gratefully scoop up the expensive treats and gifts he was prepared to provide in reward? Horror gripped her.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dante breathed rawly, linking her arms round his neck as if she were a puppet and lifting her up against him, feeling the tension in her slender body, the little tremors running through her.
‘Nothing,’ she protested shakily, fighting that attack of guilty discomfiture, knowing it wasn’t the same thing. Nothing that had happened between her and Dante had been planned by either of them. It had all been happenstance from start to finish.
‘That kiss...outside...it set me on fire,’ Dante muttered thickly, nuzzling his unshaven cheek against her throat, his stubble abrading her softer skin. ‘And the thought of you up here, getting naked in my shower was too tempting.’
‘So I need to stay fully clothed at all times from now on?’ she teased with a little gurgle of laughter.
‘No, I’d probably turn caveman and rip them off you!’ Dante growled, sucking at the skin between her neck and her shoulder to send an arrow of fiery heat darting down to between her legs.
And as he lifted his wet head, golden eyes molten with desire and framed with spiky black lashes, her arms tightened round his neck and she kissed him. There was no yesterday, today or tomorrow in that hungry kiss, no thought of any of that, no uncertainty. She simply couldn’t go another moment without tasting that wide sensual mouth of his and she decided she wasn’t going to beat herself up any more about what she couldn’t resist. And what she couldn’t resist was Dante.
With a stifled groan he braced her against the wall and then he bumped his brow against hers and sighed. ‘Need a condom...rain check. Just because we had one glitch doesn’t mean I should risk you again.’
‘No,’ she agreed as he slowly lowered her down the wall again, her body feeling hollow, plunged from the edge of anticipation to what felt like abandonment.
Dante stepped out of the shower and she heard him rifling through drawers as she finished rinsing the conditioner out of her hair, marvelling that the goop in her hair hadn’t put him off. She was surprised when a pair of arms closed round her from behind and smoothed up slowly over her full breasts, fingertips lingering to pinch her nipples, reviving that hot liquid burn sensation at the heart of her.
‘Had to find my wallet. I don’t bring women here. You’re the first,’ Dante admitted.
‘Where do you take them?’ she heard herself ask uneasily, hurt at the thought of him with other women, telling herself off for that sensitivity, because of course he had had other women in his life.
‘I go to their place...always,’ he stressed. ‘You’re unique.’
But only because he hadn’t had a choice where she was concerned, she reminded herself. She could hardly play the live-in girlfriend from a distance.
‘Unique in every way,’ Dante confided, his hands running all over her slippery body, finding the most sensitive spot, dallying there until she bucked and gasped out loud.
He spun her round and lifted her again, stunning eyes glittering like golden stars with intent as he braced her back against the wall again and sank into her with a guttural groan of satisfaction. She was caught up in the excitement, utterly abandoned to the surging sensation gripping her lower body. She needed more and then more, and he gave it to her in spades, all that she wanted until the terrible tension broke and she reached a breathtaking climax of pleasure that wrung her out.
‘You see, unique,’ Dante told her gruffly in the unbroken silence that followed. ‘You don’t scream. You don’t shout my name. You don’t even tell me how fantastic that was. The irony is that I want you to do all those things for me.’
And she thought about that confession over dinner, all modest in a neat little dress at the beautifully set candlelit table, and the food, absolutely exquisite. She knew she would never scream for him, never shout his name, never, ever tell him how fantastic he was because the minute he got those responses from her she would be the same as her predecessors and, ten to one, he would no longer want her.
Yet the instant she caught herself having such thoughts, she panicked. Her skin turned clammy. She was thinking like a mistress, withholding on the enthusiasm front in the forlorn hope that such an attitude would help her to hang onto his interest. Her mother had been almost a professional mistress, always hooking up with well-off men, making herself indispensable until they moved her into their homes. Pleasing men had been an art form for Tracy. And Belle was determined not to follow in her footsteps, so there would be no scheming, no withholding, no lies. She would be straight down the middle all the way and when he ultimately rejected her, at least she would know that it was her true self he had rejected and not some false image she had put up.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DANTE STUDIED BELLE at breakfast and almost smiled.
She was half-asleep because he had kept her awake half the night. A tinge of guilt infiltrated him as he noticed the shadows below her eyes, the faint slump of her small shoulders. He was a demanding bastard and he knew it but every time he looked at her, he got hungry again. It had never been like that for Dante before. Usually after several encounters he was cooling off and on the way to the exit, but inexplicably Belle kept him coming back for more. He wasn’t going to worry about it though, because in another couple of weeks even her originality would have worn off. He liked his own space, hugged his privacy and would, undoubtedly, be glad to reclaim it, which put him in mind of the room he had had prepared for her.
He brushed aside the newspapers he had yet to open. ‘Belle?’ he murmured. ‘I want to show you something.’
Belle blinked and set down her tea, rising slowly by dint of bracing her hands on the arms of her chair. He was probably about to give her that tour of the palazzo he had promised, which they hadn’t got around to the night before. She ached all over as if she had overdone it at the gym and she had a love bite on her neck. She had toyed with the idea of covering it up with a silky scarf and then had wondered if that uncool bruise was yet another deliberate part of his act to make them look like a more convincing couple.
Dante threw wide a door, and she stepped in and understood then. This was to be her room, furnished with the antiques he had bought and still a little bare, but the seat and the books and the promise of privacy were inviting. A wall of glass doors overlooked the internal courtyard, which was an ordered but highly attractive Italianate garden with box-hedged beds. Most of the plants were evergreen and the only colour of flower was white.
‘This was once my uncle’s office. He liked to be able to walk round the garden when he was working,’ Dante told her.
And it was a beautiful room and an even more beautiful garden but it daunted her that she was only to be in his life for a couple of weeks and yet he still apparently felt the need to give her a room of her own. Strikingly, not her own bedroom but a room to which she could retreat when...when what? Maybe it was just a room she was to use as part of their couple pretence, she told herself urgently. Even so, it was hard to ignore the message he was giving her. He had to be a man who set a high value on his own privacy, had possibly even worried that she would be under his feet all the time when he was around. She would use the room as much as she could, she promised herself, flinching at the idea of being seen as an intruder, a nuisance, possibly even a clingy nuisance.
‘This is lovely,’ she said a shade uncomfortably after the thoughts she had had, and she wandered over to the armchair, smoothing an admiring hand over its soft rich upholstery. ‘You never did tell me why you and the dealer were laughing about this chair...’
A slashing smile curved his wide sensual mouth, lighting up his whole darkly handsome face. ‘Reputedly the chair is from a maison close...’
‘A...what?’
‘A brothel,’ Dante translated gently. ‘And the chair was specially designed for ladies to get into more interesting positions for their clients...’
‘Oh...’ Belle said, dumbfounded by the explanation, studying those swivelling arms, trying to imagine and then reddening fiercely.
‘Yes...oh!’ Dante laughed, teasing her. ‘But don’t worry, I’m not about to ask you to pose for me. I get quite excited enough simply seeing you in my bed...in my shower. You don’t need to pose or do anything special to turn me on.’
