Sicilian Nights Omnibus (12 page)

Leonora exhaled on an unsteady breath of intense longing. She didn’t know how she had got to this point, but now that she was here she knew that she didn’t want to turn back.

‘I’m not very good at this kind of thing,’ she warned him.

Alessandro looked at her.

‘Liar,’ he told her softly as he went to her. ‘My body says that you are very good at it indeed.’

He was lifting her bodily out of the chair in which he had placed her when he had rescued her from the shower, only this time without the towel. He had pushed it aside, his hands warm and firm on her bare skin, his confidence putting to flight her own untutored hesitancy, compelling her body to recognise in his touch his right of possession.

As he carried her over to the bed she put one arm around his neck, her hand resting against his nape whilst the other instinctively slid inside his open shirt. His chest felt warm and hard, the sensation of muscle packed tight beneath male flesh causing the anticipation already curling through her belly to intensify into a low-lying persistent ache of need. She could feel that need burning, spreading through her, swelling her breasts and tightening her nipples. The fingers of the hand resting against his nape slid into the thick darkness of Alessandro’s hair as she looked up at his mouth, her lips parting breathlessly. All her senses seemed to be intensified, her sensual awareness heightened, the mere smell of his skin an aphrodisiac so powerful that it made her weak with longing.

Just the way Leonora was looking at him was having a similar effect to raw spirit taken on a battle-hardened empty stomach, Alessandro recognised, filling him with a surge of primitive testosterone-fuelled male energy far too powerful and all-consuming to be contained by any barriers. Like Mount Etna at its most dangerous, it defied and mocked the frailty of a mere man’s attempt to suppress it.

He had reached the bed, but instead of placing Leonora on it he continued to hold her, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her in his arms whilst he accepted the offering of her parted lips, his tongue thrusting deeply and fiercely into the hot, wild intimacy of her kiss, his free hand going to her breast to savour the erotic pleasure of the contrast between the globe’s full softness and the tight, hard demand of her swollen nipple.

A wild shudder ripped through Leonora’s body, arching her upwards in a mute appeal that begged for more, and she was answered by a thick groan of male enjoyment from Alessandro as he responded to her need, continuing to kiss her whilst he brought her flesh to helpless surrender with the skilled touch of his fingers against her eager nipple.

Just when his hand had left her breast to cover her sex with an immediacy that matched perfectly her own desire she had no idea. All she did know was that—blissfully—its weight against the mound of flesh within which an increasingly frantic longing pulsed brought her a momentary relief that was quickly replaced by an even more intense desire.

Breaking their kiss to look down at Leonora’s naked body, Alessandro felt his being gripped with urgency. Her nipples demanded the servitude of his lips. The sensual relaxation of her thighs into her own desire invited the probe of his thumb against the top of the sweetly closed outer lips to her sex, into the liquid heat they enclosed.

Leonora moaned—a long, slow, sweet sound of female pleasure rising from deep within her, mirroring the crescendo of pleasure to which she was being brought by the skilled movement of Alessandro’s touch against her clitoris. She wanted both to move with it and hold that pleasure to her, and at the same time she wanted to escape its dominance, fearing that it would overwhelm her. Her body had become an alien, sweetly tormented instrument that responded only to Alessandro’s command.

Deep down inside herself she could feel an ache of yearning that could only be satisfied by the shared possession of their flesh, by the feel of him deep within her, the feel of her flesh enclosing him and holding him. A surge of
dizzying joy burst through her. At last it was over. Soon she would be the woman she had secretly longed to be for so long—complete, fulfilled, with ownership of the knowledge of her own sexuality and all its secrets given to her by Alessandro in exchange for her unwanted, soon-to-be cast off burden of virginity.

Leonora tensed in the midst of her lyrical pre-celebration, cold truth shadowing her joy. She couldn’t let Alessandro find out that she was still a virgin. It would be the ultimate humiliation. And he would find out if she didn’t stop him soon.

Leonora was pushing him away, retreating from him, struggling to sit up—rejecting him, Alessandro recognised. Swiftly he released her, his pride immediately reacting to her recoil from his touch.

‘You said that...that this wouldn’t happen,’ Leonora reminded him. The ache of her body deprived of his touch was so strong that she could hardly bear it. It set all her nerve-endings jangling against the low dragging weight of her unsatisfied desire.

Alessandro got up and strode over to the chair, picking up the towel they had left there, tossing it over to her, keeping his back towards her whilst Leonora wrapped it clumsily around herself. Leonora’s accusation stung. He
had
said he wouldn’t touch her—but that had been before. Before what? Before he had seen Falcon looking at her? Before he had walked into the bathroom and felt that surge of arousal that had obliterated everything else?

‘I’m a man,’ he told Leonora with a dismissive shrug, once he had got his emotions and the fierce urgency of his still-aching need for her under control and was able to turn round and look at her. ‘You offered yourself to me, so I responded.’

‘I was frightened because of the spider,’ Leonora defended herself.

The look Alessandro was giving her burned though her fragile defences.

‘It was not in fear that you arched beneath my touch, offering yourself to me in all the ways that a sexually aroused woman offers herself to a man, begging for his touch and his possession. If I wished to do so I could show you all over again just how you responded to me.
If
I wished to do so. But I do not.’

His words shamed and scorched her. Leonora wanted to deny them, but how could she? She
had
responded to him. But that had only been because in Alessandro’s arms and beneath his touch her secret fantasy of how her imaginary perfect lover would be had come physically and overpoweringly to life.
That
was the reason she had responded to Alessandro as passionately as she had, not because she had wanted Alessandro himself. She could not and must not do that. It was far too risky to let herself want the real man, because then she might— She might what? Fall in love with him and want him for life? Fall in love with Alessandro? How ridiculous—and how very, very fatally dangerous.

He was being ungallant, Alessandro knew, saying things he would normally never have dreamed of saying to a woman, no matter how sexually frustrated he might have felt. But there was something about Leonora that drove him beyond the boundaries of his own rules—something that brought out an emotional passion that infuriated him every bit as much as she did. Neither of those things could be brought within his control, and both of them challenged and taunted him, driving him to want to stamp his possession and his superiority on them, even whilst they remained outside his grasp. Together, Leonora and his passion for her took him to a place he had thought he had conquered a long time ago, a place in which the supposedly cold ashes of his youthful need to prove himself were suddenly glowing dangerously hot.

Was he really so little in control of himself? So little of a man that a woman’s rejection could unleash such a compulsive need to show her that he could make her want him above and beyond all other men? And why
this
woman?

* * *

Alessandro was in the bathroom, giving Leonora an opportunity to slip on the silky nightdress that had been part of the new wardrobe she had been supplied with, before getting into the enormous bed and lying as close as she could to its edge.

Alessandro had been right to accuse her of wanting him. She had. She still did. But, as shaming as that accusation had been, it was nothing to the shame she would have experienced had she not stopped him and he had discovered the truth. She had heard her brothers joking about ‘ancient’ virgins and the horror of accidentally finding one in one’s bed. Modern men wanted sexual partners who were accomplished lovers—polished, sophisticated women who were informed and entertaining in bed as well as out of it. She, on the other hand, had felt like a raw novice in Alessandro’s arms, giddy with excitement at the thought of the pleasures in store and yet at the same time too overwhelmed by her own excitement to know how to harness it properly.

She had felt like pulling off his shirt and exploring every bit of his torso with her hands as well as smothering it with kisses, when a more knowing woman would probably have aroused him with just one single touch. Alessandro would be a connoisseur of sensuality and all its many pleasures, she suspected, and likely to have nothing but disdain for her inexperienced attempts to show her desire for him.

As he stood under the lash of the shower, waiting for his desire to subside, Alessandro cursed himself. Why had he allowed himself to touch Leonora in the first place? And, having done so, why was he now unable to subdue and dismiss the physical ache for her that was gripping him? She was just a woman, and he never,
ever
allowed any woman to matter so much to him that he could not stop wanting her—much less have that wanting bringing him to the point he was at now.

It was because she had rejected him, that was all. Because she had rejected him here in his childhood home, where the memories of so many other rejections whipped his spirit and his emotions raw of their usual protection.

Why had she changed her mind? She had wanted him. What was she hoping to gain? Did she imagine that by withholding herself from him she could make him want her more—to the point where she was the one controlling him through his desire for her?

Everything that life had taught him to be in order to protect himself burned into life, fiercely repudiating the thought.
He
was the only who controlled his own desires. There never had been and there never would be a woman—any woman—who had the power to make him want her against his will, either physically or emotionally. If Leonora wanted to enter into a competition to see which of them had the most control over their sexuality then he was more than prepared to do so—and to win. And he
would
win. He had to do so. His pride demanded that he did.

Because a small part of him feared that he was not as well defended against her ability to arouse him as he would have liked? Defensive pride held his muscles rigid. He would not and could not tolerate allowing himself to admit that he might want her more than she wanted him. He didn’t. And he would prove that to himself before the weekend was over.

Alessandro reached for the tap and turned it to cold, his body tensing as much under the pressure of his thoughts as against the icy blast that shocked it.

CHAPTER NINE

L
EONORA
WOKE
UP
abruptly in the darkness. A dull, heavy ache was pressing down on her womb, a sense of emptiness and unsatisfied need. Somehow or other she must have rolled over in her sleep—and not once but at least a couple of times, given the width of the bed, because now, instead of lying on its edge, she was much further over, towards Alessandro’s side. She knew that because she was lying facing him, and could see the curve of his naked shoulder where the bedclothes had slipped away. If she were to roll over again she could almost lie curled up against his back...

Resolutely she made herself turn away from him and inch her way back to her own side of the bed. Once there she looked at the luminous face of her watch, which she’d left on the beside table. Just gone half past two. The room was still and silent, the only movement coming from the curtain. Leonora’s heart jumped. Was the window open? If it was then the spider would be able to get back in.

Instantly she was imagining it clambering through the window, dropping down onto the floor, and then making its way towards the bed. Beneath the bedclothes her toes twitched, and apprehension slithered down her spine. She wanted to get up and check the window, to put her mind at rest, but she was too afraid to do so. She tried to think of something else, but the only ‘something else’ she could think about was how much she wished that things could have been different earlier on in the evening.

What she meant, of course, was how much she wished that
she
could have been different. That she could have been the kind of woman who had the confidence to enjoy the sensual pleasure of being in Alessandro’s arms instead of having to remind herself of the reason why she could not allow things to reach their natural conclusion. If she had been then right now she would probably be sleeping safely in his arms, her body replete with the satisfaction of their lovemaking, instead of lying here alone, still aching for him, terrified that the spider might return and miserably aware of how angry she had made him.

She should have brought things to a halt before they had got as far as they had, she admitted, but she had been caught off guard by the intensity of her own response to him. Because she had never allowed herself to be in such a situation before. And because he was, after all, a very, very attractive and sensually powerful man—no woman worthy of the name could fail to be aroused by a man like Alessandro. And she
was
a woman—very much a woman as far as her newly discovered sensual needs went. Even if she hadn’t realised that before.

How much she wished now that she had lived her life differently and gained the experience that would have made it easy and natural for her to respond fully to Alessandro in the way she had wanted to. How wonderful it would have been in the future to look back on this time and know that she had lived it to the fullest extent. She had started out resenting Alessandro and everything she believed he stood for, her resentment springing originally from his refusal even to consider employing her. But, having learned what she had about him and his childhood, now knowing that they were both middle children, she felt as though there was a special private bond between them—even though Alessandro himself wasn’t aware of it.

A rustle from the curtain jolted her back to her original fear, making her cry out in panic.

Alessandro woke up immediately, automatically sitting up to switch on his bedside light. Its warm glow illuminated the bed, and Leonora’s fear-tensed face.

‘Is the window open, do you think?’ she asked. ‘Only if it is the spider might get back in.’

She had bruised his pride earlier, and would certainly have to be punished for that—but not by his making use of her very real fear, Alessandro decided grimly. He would never allow himself to descend to that level, no matter what other people might choose to do. He might feel angrily sure that a combination of her competitive nature and the fact that he had refused to employ her had led to her seizing the opportunity he had accidentally given her to prove that she could best him, but that did not mean he could now allow himself to use her fear against her.

Alessandro had witnessed his father using those kind of underhand tactics too often to want to use them himself. Besides, a victory based on another person’s weakness rather than his own strength was no victory at all to Alessandro. No, when she admitted in his arms that she wanted him so much that nothing else mattered it would be because she
did
want to be in his arms, not because fear had driven here there for protection. His father would have called him a fool, no doubt, deriding him as he had done so often when he had been growing up, but his father’s opinion of him no longer mattered. He had grown beyond that, and it was now his own moral estimation of himself that was the yardstick by which he measured himself as a man.

Which was why he was putting aside his earlier anger to offer calmly, ‘Would you like me to check the window?’

‘Would you?’ Hope and disbelief mingled in her voice in equal measure. It was an unfamiliar and very fragile feeling to know that a man—especially a man like Alessandro—was willing to do something brave on her behalf. But then during the short time they had spent together she had already experienced more than one unfamiliar feeling with regard to Alessandro.

He was being very generous, given what had happened earlier, and through her fear Leonora felt a renewed stab of guilt for the way she had behaved. She felt so confused and unsure of herself, all too conscious that somehow she had allowed herself to stray into territory she didn’t know and where she felt very vulnerable.

It had simply never occurred to her that she would be so attracted to Alessandro, or so helplessly unable to resist the tug of that attraction. The Alessandro Leopardi she had built up inside her head from what Leo had told her about him and, more importantly, from what she had decided he must be like after he had repeatedly rejected her job applications, refusing to acknowledge how well qualified she was to work for him, bore no resemblance to the man who had held her in his arms earlier or the man she was with now.

She tried and failed to imagine either her father or her brothers making the kind of offer that Alessandro had made just now with regard to her arachnophobia. They loved her—of course they did. But their father’s robust, competition-focused parenting had affected them all—as Leonora had come to recognise once she had gone out into the wider world to earn her own living. Watching the fathers of her pupils, it had become obvious to her that many of them treated their young daughters very differently from the way they dealt with their young sons.

It was, of course, to her father’s credit that he had insisted on treating all of them absolutely equally—he had done his best for them, and it couldn’t have been easy losing their mother when they had been so young. They had all suffered. How could they not have? But Leonora suspected that her loss had been the greater. Without a female role model to guide her and teach her how to grow into her femininity she had felt so sad, and even a little envious of the way other fathers parented their little girls. Leonora had come to recognise, as she had watched small girls flirting outrageously with their fathers, that they were being gently taught the appropriate ways of using their feminine gifts in a way that she never had.

It was true that she had learned to moderate the straightforward and outspoken directness her father had taught them all, and it was true that doing so had made her feel more comfortable within herself. But when it came to flirting she felt as clumsy as a would-be juggler, trying to put on an act and having everything come crashing down all around her instead of keeping everything spinning effortlessly in the air. And that sent her straight back to the defensive habit of playing the brash tomboy, and watching men recoil from her.

Watching her, and seeing the shadows chasing one another through her eyes, Alessandro discovered that he wanted to know what was causing them. Uniquely, in his experience with her sex, she said very little about herself. He knew the basics, of course—he should, given the number of times she had submitted job applications to him—but even in the section allowed for personal comments about aspirations and hopes her words had been blunt, sometimes to the point of aggression, and had focused only on her fierce professional desire. And yet earlier tonight in his arms her response to him had been intense; her passion had meshed with his own desire instead of competing with it.

She had not, as he might have expected her to do, tried to control their intimacy. Instead—surprisingly, given what he knew about her—she had waited for him to take the lead. Why? Because she’d believed she would have a better chance of getting her own way later if she did? She was going to be disappointed if she thought he would change his mind and give her a job. Yes, she was well qualified—far better than many of his pilots—but her presence amongst them would cause trouble.

Had she been plainer in looks or less plain in opinion he might have been tempted to break his own rule, simply because of her qualifications, but it was obvious to him that she would create chaos amongst his existing pilots. There would be those who would champion her because of her looks and those who would oppose her because of the competitive streak in her nature which came across so clearly in her applications. Either way it would have led to the kind of fall-out that wasn’t just divisive but was also, in his opinion, potentially dangerous. When he hired a pilot he needed him to be totally focused on his work. Not focused on a woman like Leonora.

If she could get under
his
skin, when he prided himself on being immune to any kind of female manipulation, then what chance did his pilots have?

But what he wanted to know even more was why she was so intent on securing a job with his airline, and if he was right to suspect that, having failed to do so via her professional pilot’s skills, she was now attempting to do it via a very different set of skills. What would happen if he
did
try to dig a bit deeper?

There was only one way to find out, Alessandro told himself as he thrust back the bedclothes and stood up. Normally he slept completely naked, but tonight after his shower he’d put on fresh underwear—not that he had imagined for one minute that he would be called upon to take on anti-spider-invasion duties, he thought humorously.

He started to make his way towards the window, stopping at Leonora’s side of the bed to say, in a deliberately light voice, ‘You never mentioned your arachnophobia on your many CVs, as far as I can remember.’

‘My brothers have teased me so much all my life about it that I’ve developed a second phobia about admitting it to anyone.’ Leonora tried to joke back as she sat up in the bed, drawing up her knees protectively, just in case the spider was about, but it was hard to concentrate on exchanging light-hearted banter when Alessandro was standing so close to her wearing so little.

His body was superbly muscled, tapering downwards from his shoulders in an athletic male V shape. His chest was lightly covered with the dark hair she had already seen, which she could now see also arrowed downwards across his flat belly to disappear beneath the top of his underwear. Underwear which, though perfectly respectable, nevertheless revealed just how very much of a man he was. Her eyes rounded slightly and she tried to drag her gaze away. He was
magnificently
male, she thought, gulping back a treacherous sigh of longing. What would it be like to be the kind of woman who felt confident enough to touch him there intimately—to hold him and know him? Her face burned hot at the danger of her own out-of-control thoughts. She prayed that he hadn’t noticed she hadn’t been able to help looking at him.

Alessandro had noticed, but he was more concerned about controlling his body’s reaction to her look than he was about the look itself. How could one look from a woman he had every reason to suspect was trying to manipulate him arouse him so immediately when he normally had no difficulty whatsoever in resisting women coming on to him far more strongly?

As he turned away from her towards the window, he reminded himself of what he was supposed to be doing and said, ‘I know that most boys go through a stage when it affords them a huge amount of pleasure to tease girls, but I should have thought that your parents—especially your mother—would have intervened once they realised you had a very real phobia.’

‘Our mother died when I was eight. She was killed by a speeding car when she was on her way to collect us all from school. Dad thought the best way for me to get over my fear was to be embarrassed into not being afraid. He always encouraged us to be competitive with one another, and I think he thought that if the boys teased me—especially Piers, because he’s the eldest—then I’d do anything to prove that I wasn’t afraid. I did try.’ She gave a small defeated shrug of her shoulders. ‘I hated conceding defeat and being called a cry-baby. But I just could not stop being afraid.’

Alessandro was glad that he had his back to her—and not just because her earlier visual focus on his sex had aroused him. Now he had something else he didn’t want her to see for his own protection. Pity and anger filled him in a fierce surge of unexpected and unwanted emotion. He had to bite back on an instinctive criticism of her father for not handling things better. Even if she herself was not aware of how much she was giving away, he had heard in her voice a defensive awareness that she knew she had been let down, but equally he knew that she would defend her father and her brothers against anyone’s criticism.

‘It must have been hard for you, growing up without your mother,’ he commented, when he had control of himself.

‘No harder than it was for my brothers, or than it must have been for you and your brothers,’ Leonora responded instantly.

They looked at one another. How well he understood what she was feeling, Alessandro recognised. For reasons he didn’t want to analyse too closely, he couldn’t bring himself to push her any harder. Not because she aroused any kind of tender feelings within him, he assured himself. No, it was because he believed he owed it to himself not to take an unfair advantage of her when she was so obviously vulnerable. He had a far too clear mental image of her as a girl, all sharp-angled pre-pubescent limbs, and with the defensive competitiveness that would have come from the parenting she had described—a girl growing up in a male environment without her mother.