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She could never give her heart to anyone who wasn’t prepared to look after it, and Alessio wasn’t the kind of guy who signed up for looking after a woman’s heart.
‘Sometimes,’ he drawled, now, snapping her out of her thoughts, ‘I look at you and you’re a thousand miles away. Where are you? Different place? Different country?’ He delivered a wicked smile. ‘Just as long as the man you’re with there is me, then I don’t care...’
He unzipped the trousers and Sophie hitched herself up onto her elbows and watched his smile broaden.
He knew she liked watching him.
She’d told him that it turned her on. Just as it turned him on for her to be naked when she watched, so that he could see her body, waiting in readiness for him to pleasure it.
She was naked now, lying on the king-sized bed in his enormous bedroom, which was a marvel of pale colours, dark wood and lots of hidden cupboards that slid open at the push of a button.
Like in every other room in his magnificent villa, the minimalist paleness of everything made Sophie think that this was a place no one under the age of eighteen should ever be brought—just in case sticky fingers or spillages ruined the pristine perfection. This was an adults-only escape, from the hard beauty of the marble to the bold abstracts hanging on the walls and, outside, the exquisite infinity pool which was surrounded by pruned trees and would doubtless come into its own during the warmer months.
In a playground for the rich and famous, Alessio’s villa was right up there with the most dazzling.
The evening before, after Leonard had retired for the night, he had taken her out into the garden, with its lawns clipped to precise perfection, and led her down a bank of stone steps, romantically lit with small twinkling lights. They had led to his very own sprawling deck that accessed the lake. They had stood looking over the glassy dark beauty of the water and it had been magical. Crisp and cold and absolutely perfect.
Was it any wonder that she sometimes felt as helpless as a moth, dazzled by the force of a flame that shone brighter than anything she could ever have imagined?
She gazed at him, so beautiful in the shadows of darkness. His jeans joined his sweater on the ground, and then the dark boxers, and her breath caught sharply at his proud erection, which he briefly circled with his hand before moving towards her.
Sophie half closed her eyes and touched her breast, then traced the contour of her nipple with her finger. On top of the duvet, completely naked, she let her legs fall apart, encouraging a look of hot desire from Alessio as he joined her on the bed.
‘I like what I see,’ he murmured, lying next to her on his side, pressed against her so that she could feel the throb of his erection at her thigh.
‘What’s that?’ Sophie curved to face him so that they were eye to eye, her belly touching his.
She lifted her leg to cover his thigh, and then manoeuvred her body so that she could rub her wetness against him. She shuddered and closed her eyes when he gently stroked her nipple with his finger, picking up where she had left off and tracing the outline before homing in on the stiffened bud.
‘Are you going to tell me what you were thinking?’ he murmured, licking his finger before replacing it on her nipple, so that he could dampen it into even more sensitivity.
‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’
‘Now, why don’t I believe you?’
He nuzzled the side of her neck, her jawline, peppering her with the lightest of feathery kisses that made her want to squirm and wriggle against him.
He was the consummate lover.
He knew how to touch her and where... He knew how to get her to fever pitch and then take her even higher. He could make her body feel in ways she had never imagined possible.
Yet Sophie knew the limits of what they had—just as she knew that telling him what was going through her head would be a mistake of biblical proportions.
Because what had got into her that suddenly she was thinking ahead?
Why was she beginning to wonder what it might feel like when this ended amicably?
She’d jumped in, wide eyes open, and hadn’t even bothered to think ahead to how they might rub along when they returned to England.
Of course he would go back to London. And she and Leonard would once again resume their daily routine. But how was that going to feel afterthis?
‘I have no idea why you don’t believe me,’ she said, kissing him softly to extinguish a conversation she didn’t want to have.
He smiled against her mouth.
‘Because you’re not a woman whose mind is ever empty of thoughts.’
Their eyes tangled. For a few seconds Alessio was sideswiped by the oddest notion that hewantedto find out what she had been thinking...what had put that remote expression in her eyes.
