surroundings combined with her nudity and his white-hot sexual temperament. The vibrations in the atmosphere were shooting round her like invisible lightning bolts, making it incredibly hard for her to breathe. 'Because I said no? Because I had the incredible bad taste to find another man?' she threw at him in provocative intent, hoping to douse the dark flames of arousal in his intent stare.
Vito didn't even flinch. True, a momentary gravity tightened his facial muscles, but the idea that she had so swiftly sought consolation was evidently so ingrained that she could not shock him. 'Because I loved you,' he grated, and she was the one most inconveniently shocked by that confession. 'You look surprised, but why should you? Do you really believe that lust rejected would still incite me to such violence?' He ran the fingertips of his other hand up along the line of her extended throat in a caressing gesture that was curiously chilling. 'Love? I believed it couldn't happen to me. I had given up all hope of it ever happening. I was twenty-eight years old and, in many ways, older than my years. And then one night I saw you on a dance floor and I wanted you more than anything I had ever wanted in my life…'
Ashley was trembling, curiously unwilling to accept the truth of what she had once believed. 'Infatuation,' she said fiercely. 'And it burnt out for both of us.'
'But this didn't…' One forceful hand welding to her taut spine, Vito lowered his dark head. His breath fanned her cheek and then he let his teeth nip playfully at the soft fullness of her lower lip, soothing the tiny assault with the teasing tip of his tongue until involuntarily her mouth opened, inviting a deeper invasion.
The hard heat of his body against hers was a powerful enticement. Tiny little quivers of sexual tension were awakening at every pressure-point where his lean muscles were in contact with her softer curves. Ashley began to shake, struggling to deny and to fight the insidious weakness stealing through her limbs. She could stop this, she would stop this, the little voice in her head screamed. He could not force her into intimacy. But a curious weighted stasis was holding her still in his embrace as though she was waiting for a hurricane warning before she could actually act in her own defence.
'No… no, not this!' Her voice was hoarse with the effort it took to break the spell. He clenched both her hands in his and held her back from him before she could take a single evasive movement. His intent gaze smouldered over her. As she glanced down at herself, she saw the revealing thrust of her nipples against the fine percale sheet still draped across her breasts, and her translucent skin burned with the heat of her own betrayal.
A dark flush accentuated the harsh set of his features. 'If you can't live without a man, that man might as well be me,' he grated roughly.
Fury speared through that all-pervasive physical frailty. Between clenched teeth, she spat, 'If rape turns you on, go ahead!'
A glimmer of black humour softened the hard set of his sensual mouth. 'How you do love to dramatise yourself. Why can't you be honest about this at least? You saw me for the first time in four and a half years last week and within minutes you were hot all over, eating me with your eyes.' Outraged, Ashley shrieked, 'That's a filthy lie!'
Vito dealt her a flashing smile of all-male satisfaction. 'Console yourself with the thought that if you hadn't looked at me like that, you wouldn't be here now. You dug your own grave, cara.'
With a superhuman effort Ashley took advantage of his loosened hold and, dragging her hands free, leapt off the bed. Snatching up the dress she had earlier discarded, she fled the room. The rest of the apartment was unhelpfully in darkness and she skidded in the direction of the hall, uncertain of her bearings.
Vito caught her hand and in her determination to escape she tore her fingers free so violently that she fell back against the wall. 'You're out of control!' she gasped strickenly as he trapped her there, one hand squarely planted on either side of her head in the depths of her hair.
'And so are you,' he breathed unsteadily. 'Exactly the way I like you.'
Scarcely able to believe that this was happening to her, Ashley attempted to raise her knee, but a hard thigh pinned the recalcitrant limb in place and simultaneously Vito brought his mouth crashing down on hers.
It was like a naked flame thrown on tinder-dry straw; a complete and uncontrollable conflagration. As his tongue hungrily probed the moist recesses of her mouth, a hoarse moan of pleasure was forced from her. Her taut body went into meltdown; between one moment and the next all rational thought ceased as though he had thrown a switch. She braced her hands on his shoulders and answered that kiss with complete abandon.
Time had no meaning. All that existed was a fierce world of almost unbearable sensation which wiped out everything else. He was lifting her up to his level, burying his face in the ripe swell of her aching breasts until he found a taut nipple to tease with his mouth and feelings, physical feelings that had been held in too tight for too long suddenly exploded in a fiery gush of response. Her fingers dug into the springy depths of his black hair and she wanted to scream with the power of what she was experiencing. Vito choked out a curse as he cannoned off a door and then he found her mouth again, feeding her desire with the overwhelming force of his own. He didn't break that contact for a second as he brought her down heavily on a bed somewhere in the darkness.
He was struggling out of his shirt and the assistance he got was negligible as her hands wandered in a helpless need for reacquaintance over the broad expanse of his chest, fingertips skating through the dark whorls of hair and down to the smoother skin at his lean waist. He felt hot, as if he was burning up, but the same flames were in her and she was lost, irretrievably lost in the scent and the feel and the touch of him.
Abruptly he wrenched back from her and ripped off the remainder of his clothes. He muttered something in Italian and then he groaned, 'How the hell do you do this to me? It wasn't supposed to be like this.'
Cooler air briefly washed her damp skin and for a split-second a shard of reason almost returned, but, before the nebulous thought could form, Vito was back in her arms with a vengeance. She gasped as long fingers slid between her thighs and found the moist centre of her desire, cried out and arched her back beneath the hot onslaught of his mouth on her taut breasts.
'Tell me how you feel,' he demanded between clenched teeth as he moved over her, his hands rough on her thighs, his body a heavy but blessed weight on hers.
'Vito, please… oh, God, please… don't stop.' She was at fever pitch, her entire being concentrated on a razor edge of unbearable need. She could feel him, hot and hard and ready, and she couldn't wait, was terrified he might make her wait, because if he didn't drive her over that edge she thought she might die from frustration.
He took her like an invading army, ruthless in conquest. The sheer power of his first thrust forced a cry of pain from her dry lips but pain became intolerable pleasure within seconds. Her hips writhed beneath his as he drove into her in long shuddering strokes, his skin slippery with perspiration against hers. She moved to the heated rhythm he set, abandoned and driven by the most intense excitement of all, and then suddenly every muscle clenched and she was moaning with the ecstasy of fulfilment, rawly erotic shock waves spreading out from the very centre of her body to drain her momentarily of all thought and all movement. With a groan of raw satisfaction Vito subsided on her, spent and satiated. Instinctively she wrapped her arms round him and almost instantly drifted off to sleep.
When she surfaced, it was like waking up to a living hell. Lights were on, harsh and glaring, and the first things she saw when she opened her eyes were the photographs on the cabinet by the bed. Carina, smiling from a silver frame. And Carina in Vito's arms, punch-drunk with happiness in one of those informal but intimate studies that just might have been taken on a honeymoon. Ashley's stomach twisted and turned over sickly as if she had gone down too fast in a lift. She turned away and met Vito's shuttered dark gaze. Almost fully dressed, he was shrugging a broad shoulder into the jacket of a navy pinstripe suit. He looked heartbreakingly handsome and soul-destroyingly remote. If he was feeling anything, he wasn't showing it, and that ability of his to shut everything out tortured her at a moment when she felt sick with self-hatred and humiliation. Trembling all over, she shut her eyes, struggling fiercely against her mind's determination to replay the last few hours. It would happen soon enough: the self- examination, the questions that had no welcome answers. But not now, the little voice in her head pleaded, not now… in front of him.
'I think I should leave.' There was no emotion whatsoever in the announcement, except that some sixth sense told her that Vito couldn't wait to get away. She pressed her cheek into the pillow. 'Can I leave too?' she whispered, and it sounded as if she was begging, and for the first time in her life she really didn't care.
'It was inevitable that this would happen.' 'You made it happen,' she condemned. 'We made it happen,' he countered harshly. 'I didn't plan it. I intended to wait until after the wedding.'
A near-hysterical laugh escaped her and she bit down so hard on her tongue that it bled. She never had been able to cope with Vito when he froze, and he wasn't about to let her go. Vito's ancestors had been loan sharks since the Middle Ages. Something for nothing was not a concept that had figured largely in his upbringing. Vito would take what he wanted from her regardless of the cost. He would pick her apart as he had done over dinner and then fall
