The Sicilian's Mistress (11 page)

‘I…I did
what
?' Milly gasped, thunderstruck. ‘Honestly?'

‘Honestly, and only two more questions to go,' Gianni reminded her.

‘Why…why did I leave you?' she asked awkwardly.

Silence thundered on the line.

‘That one's on the forbidden list,' Gianni responded flatly.

‘That's not fair,' Milly protested. ‘I mean, obviously I want to know that!'

‘I'm not telling you. When you've come up with a replacement question, call me back,' Gianni suggested drily.

The line went dead.

Had Gianni done something dreadful to make her walk out? Had she done something dreadful? Or had they had a foolish argument in which one of them or both of them had said too much? An argument which struck Gianni as so stupid in retrospect that it really galled him to even think of it now?

She waited ten minutes and then she punched out the number that had arrived with the phone.

‘It's me,' she announced.

‘I know it's you,' Gianni breathed wryly.

‘Second question,' she began rather tautly after his last response. ‘Was I happy with you?'

‘I thought you were deliriously happy, but that's not really a question I can answer for you.'

In the last three years, Milly had known not one minute of what she could have termed
delirious
happiness. The concept of such an extreme couldn't help but impress her to death.

‘Gianni…what was I like then?'

‘Stubborn, quick-tempered, full of life, unconventional…hell, this isn't a safe subject!'

Milly snatched in a ragged breath, still reeling in astonishment from that disturbing flood of adjectives.

‘Are you OK?'

A choked sob was lodged in her throat. ‘Fine,' she managed. ‘I think I'll go to bed now.'

Milly Henner, it seemed, had been another woman entirely. A definite individual. Lively, strong…
unconventional
? A humourless laugh escaped Milly as she
climbed into bed. Gianni's description had knocked her for six.

She had judged their past relationship on the basis of the narrow outlook she had developed over the past three years. His mistress. She had been shocked, ashamed. She had immediately seen herself as a victim. But Gianni hadn't described a woman who was a victim; Gianni had described an equal. Where had that stronger and more confident woman gone? And was she ever going to find her again?

Exhaustion sent Milly to sleep quickly, but dreams full of disturbing and increasingly frightening images kept her tossing and turning. Terror began to rise notch by notch until finally she came awake in a complete panic, shaking like a leaf and sobbing out loud, so confused she didn't even know where she was.

‘
Dio mio, cara
…calm down!'

The instant she heard Gianni's voice she froze, and then just crumpled into the shelter of his arms, sick with relief that he was there.

A
SOB
catching in her throat, Milly pressed her damp face into Gianni's shoulder. The faint tang of expensive cologne underlying his own distinctive male scent made her nostrils flare. She breathed him in deep, like a drug.

‘That must have been some nightmare,
cara
.' Gianni held her back from him.

Her eyes were huge and shadowed in the stark white triangle of her face. ‘I was struggling with someone in the dark…it felt so
real
!'

‘But it couldn't have been. Nothing like that ever happened to you, at least not when I knew you.' Gianni spread long fingers across her taut cheekbones, dark, deep flashing eyes scanning her still frightened face.

Some of her tension drained away at that comforting assurance, but not all of it. She had never had a dream like that before, could not help suspecting that something she had once experienced had summoned it up.

‘Before you woke up, you called my name at the top of your voice,' Gianni imparted softly, mesmeric dark eyes glinting.

‘Did I?' Milly didn't want to talk about the dream any more. It had scared her too much. Her brows drew together. ‘How did you hear me…I mean, where on earth did you come from?' she belatedly thought to ask.

‘About thirty feet away,' Gianni told her. ‘I'd moved to work in the room next door. I didn't think you should be alone tonight, so I came up about an hour ago. If you hadn't wakened, you'd never have known I was there.'

In the dim light, Milly studied him properly for the first time. Shorn of his jacket and tie, his white silk shirt open at
his strong brown throat and his black hair slightly tousled, he looked infinitely more approachable than he usually did. A faint blue-black shadow had already darkened his aggressive jawline. Even stubble, she thought guiltily, added to his appeal. Hurriedly she turned her head away and made herself rest back against the pillows.

‘I'll get back to work.' Gianni began to stand up.

Milly tensed in dismay. ‘Do you have to?'

‘You want me to stay?'

Milly nodded agreement. ‘And talk about something cheerful. You could tell me about my parents, if you like.'

Gianni folded down on the bed, stretched his long, lean frame out with intrinsic grace and sent her a winging glance from beneath heavily lidded eyes. ‘You know what's going to happen, don't you?' he murmured, like an indolent tiger.

‘Nothing's going to happen.' Milly reddened. ‘Think of the bed as a sofa.'

Gianni loosed a low-pitched laugh and tilted his arrogant dark head back against the white pillows. ‘Your parents…you told me they were crazy about each other. Your father was called Leo and he was a Londoner. Your mother, Suzanne, was French—'

‘French?'
Milly rolled over in surprise to stare at him.

‘You're practically bilingual. Didn't you find that out yet? You spent the first eight years of your life in Paris.'

‘You're supposed to start at the beginning. Do you know when my parents got married?'

‘They didn't…they weren't into matrimony.'

Milly was stunned. ‘You mean, I'm…?'

‘Yes.'

She slowly shook her head. Her throat tickled, and then the laughter just bubbled out of her.

Gianni leant down, curved his hands to her shaking shoulders and tugged her up to his level. ‘What's so funny?'

Struggling to get a grip on herself again, Milly released a rueful groan. ‘It's just so ironic. In the world I've been living in for the past three years illegitimacy is a very serious issue,
and now I find out that
I
was born out of wedlock too! Tell me about Leo and Suzanne,' she urged.

‘They were pavement artists.'

‘Pavement artists,' Milly repeated weakly, and then she smiled. ‘I like that.'

‘Suzanne was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver in Paris. Your father never really got over it, and that was the end of your settled home life. He took you roving all over Europe with him. You didn't see the inside of too many schools, but you adored your father and you always talked as if you'd had a wonderful childhood.'

Milly gazed up into Gianni's lean bronzed face like a child listening to an enthralling bedtime story. ‘I'm glad.'

‘But then you always were a sunny optimist.' Gianni skimmed a lazy forefinger lightly through the glossy strands of blonde hair tumbling across his forearm and stared down at her with glittering dark golden eyes.

Her heart skipped a beat and then began to thud heavily. Her stomach clenched. The silence lingered and Gianni's eloquent mouth tipped into an indolent smile that welded her attention to him.

‘I'm a real pessimist about most things,' Gianni shared softly. ‘But in one field I'm rarely disappointed…'

A curious languor had crept over Milly. Her body felt weighted, yet incredibly alive, every sense feeling somehow keener, sharper. What a wonderful voice he had, she thought absently, as a little tremor ran down her taut spinal cord. Like sinfully rich chocolate.
Sin…
Her abstracted brain began to play with the word.
Sin
fully stunning,
sin
fully sexy…

Hot pink staining her cheekbones, she attempted to concentrate on what he was saying—which was a little difficult, she discovered, when he wasn't actually saying anything!

Slumbrous golden eyes framed with lush ebony lashes rested on her. And, like a tidal wave, Milly felt an enormous rush of yearning well up inside her. She remembered that sensational kiss. The cymbals…the fireworks. Unwittingly, she began to lift her head, push up on one elbow, soft lips
tremulously parted, her slim length beginning to curve towards him as if he was a magnet and she was a nail.

‘And you have never once disappointed me in that field,' Gianni informed her huskily.

Milly hadn't a clue what he was talking about, and couldn't have strung two rational thoughts together. ‘Didn't I?' she managed breathlessly.

‘In that one corner of our relationship I had total and absolute control.' Gianni's wide, sensual mouth curved into a wickedly charismatic smile that squeezed her heart in a sneak attack.

The dim light accentuated the smooth dark planes and hollows of his chiselled features. His bronzed skin was vibrant against the pristine whiteness of his shirt. With one long, lean and powerful thigh raised in a very masculine attitude of relaxation, Gianni was so physically arresting he just took her breath away.

In fact, she was so tense her muscles hurt. Yet she couldn't make herself move, couldn't drag her eyes from him, couldn't suppress the increasingly desperate craving holding her so still. Gianni bent his dark head slowly. His breath fanned her cheek. He let his tongue dart between her parted lips and she jerked and moaned and reached up for him, her hands spearing fiercely into his silky black hair.

He did it again, and her whole body leapt, electrified. Just one kiss, just one kiss, she promised herself, like an alcoholic craving what she knew she shouldn't have.

‘Oh Gi-anni…' she gasped on the back of an aching sigh.

He pressed his mouth to her cheek, her brow, her lowered eyelids, teasing her with feather-light kisses until she strained up to him even more. ‘Any time, any place, any way I want,' Gianni murmured thickly. ‘I don't have to say anything, I don't have to do anything. I just start thinking about sex and you are so tuned in to me you just
melt
…'

He kissed her, and it was like being shot to heaven on a rocket. She melted to boiling point in seconds. He made love to her mouth with an intimacy that shook her. He delved
and tasted and skimmed until she was burning up, clutching at him, living from one second to the next on the single terrifying thought that he might stop.

Peeling her hands from him, Gianni lowered her back to the bed. He sat up and ripped off his shirt in one impatient movement. Struggling to get air back into her constricted lungs, Milly was totally transfixed. He had a torso like a Greek god. Wide brown shoulders, rippling pectoral muscles roughened by a triangle of black curling hair and a stomach as flat as a washboard.

A tiny pinching sensation attacked low in her pelvis. She felt light-headed, but her body was so tense it screamed at her, every sense recognising Gianni as her lover. The scent of him, the touch of him, the very taste of him. She couldn't believe what was happening to her. She shivered in shock laced with a kind of death-defying excitement.

‘Gianni…' she whispered jaggedly, struggling to reinstate some form of control, some sense of reality to her own mounting disorientation. ‘I…
we
—'

Gianni came back down to her, dark eyes now bright as flames, his feverish tension as marked as her own. She saw a hunger in him that twisted something painfully inside her, and with a muffled little sound of surrender she reached up instinctively and opened her lips to him again.

With a dark, driven groan of satisfaction, Gianni lifted her up to him with two powerful hands and ravaged the tender interior of her mouth with a raw, demanding passion that overwhelmed her.

‘We both need this,' he said thickly. ‘You want me; you
always
want me…'

She looked at him, her heart pounding like crazy. She raised a trembling hand and touched his beautiful mouth with tender caressing fingertips, controlled by instincts that filled her with almost unbearably powerful feelings. ‘Like I need air to breathe,' she whispered shakily.

Gianni raised her up and divested her of her nightdress
with an easy expertise that somehow shocked her. And suddenly that wholly inborn feeling of security abandoned Milly. She stared in dismay down at the ripe swell of her bare breasts, her face hot with colour. She felt wanton, and then very, very shy as Gianni's gaze burned over her exposed flesh like the kiss of fire.

‘Dio…'
he growled, raising an unsteady hand to cup a pale, pouting breast adorned by a straining pink nipple, lingering to rub a thumb and forefinger over that stiffened peak.

The violence of her own response tore a startled moan from Milly. Her mind closed in on itself again, stripping away that brief awareness of anything beyond the physical. She shut her eyes tight, letting her head fall back. As he toyed with the achingly sensitive bud her own heartbeat thrummed in her eardrums.

‘I always adored your breasts. You're exquisite,' Gianni groaned, knotting one possessive hand into her cascading mane of golden hair and letting his mouth swoop down to replace his fingers.

Excitement took hold of her like a bushfire, blazing out of her control. The erotic mastery he unleashed with the tug of his teeth and the wet rasp of his tongue dragged her down so fast into a world of pure sensation that she was lost. She moaned and twisted, suddenly hotter than she could bear. She was wildly aware now of the maddening burn at the very core of her body, the pulse of damp warmth beginning to beat and ache between her thighs.

Gianni wrenched back from her to dispose of the remainder of his clothing. Milly opened passion-glazed eyes. She was trembling, her whole body just one gigantic pleading ache. ‘Gianni…
please
…' She didn't even know where the words came from.

‘It hurts to want this much, doesn't it?' Gianni leant over her, his long, lean body golden and tight with leashed power in the lamplight. His brilliant eyes savoured her quivering tension, watched her look at him with wonder.

‘Yes…' It hurt like a knot tightening and tightening inside
her. Her spellbound gaze roamed down over his powerful frame, lingering in sensual shock on the aggressive masculine thrust of his virility. Her mouth ran dry and it was like something unlocked inside her, loosing a hot flood of honey to pool heavily at the very heart of her.

All conquering male, Gianni pulled her close. Then he stared down into her hectically flushed face, his spectacular bone structure ferociously taut, his bright eyes curiously chilling, his beautiful shaped mouth hardening. ‘We always connected best at this level,
cara mia.
'

Something in that dark sardonic drawl spooked her, but before she could try to identify that apprehensive dart of unease Gianni eased her slender thighs apart and began to explore her wildly sensitive flesh. Her body jack-knifed under that surge of almost intolerable pleasure. It was mindless, all-encompassing, and she craved its continuance with every tortured and sobbing breath she drew.

But it was still a surprise when Gianni came over her, sinking rough, impatient hands beneath her squirming hips. And suddenly he was there, where the ache was worst, entering her in one powerful thrust that made her cry out.

Excited beyond belief by him, Milly clashed with the charged darkness of his eyes. ‘Gianni…?' she gasped.

‘
Madre di Dio
…I have to black out
my
memory to do this!' Gianni gritted savagely, driving into her again, making her tender flesh yield more fully to enclose him.

And even as she struggled to comprehend what was wrong, what he meant, the primitive rhythm of his possession engulfed a body too long starved of such sensation. Her confusion was not equal to the overpowering hunger he had awakened. With every driving invasion Gianni sent excitement hurtling through her at storm-force potency. Hot, aching pleasure took her over. Release came in a shattering ecstatic surge that jolted and freed what felt like every fibre of her being.

Within seconds, Gianni hit that same peak with a shuddering groan. Her arms came round him, tears flooding her
eyes. That didn't surprise her. It always happened. Sometimes she loved Gianni so much she wanted to scream it from the rooftops, she thought helplessly. She pressed her lips adoringly to a satin-smooth shoulder damp with sweat and whispered it instead.

With startling abruptness he pulled back from her. With a bitten-off Italian curse, he shoved himself away from her. Then he surveyed her with blazing anger and condemnation. ‘Bye-bye, Edward, hello, Gianni—all in the space of one day?' he ground out raggedly, strikingly pale beneath his naturally dark skin. ‘What sort of a fool do you take me for?'