Holiday With The Mystery Italian. Ellie Darkins
wondering how he had found himself chasing again. It wasn’t a situation he found himself in often. He’d got used to a slightly embarrassed deference when he was with other people—he’d heard, ‘Oh, no, after you...’ so many times that it made him wince. He was so different from the youth he had once been in so many ways—the money, the medals, the chair—that he wasn’t sure which of the three it was that had that effect on people. All he knew was that whichever it was it didn’t have an effect on Amber. It seemed there was actually a chance that he might have a normal conversation this week. One with someone who wasn’t an employee, or a fan, or trying to get into his bed or his bank account. How refreshing. How utterly tempting.
He forced the thought away as they left the shop and the crowds thinned.
‘Now we have something to keep us entertained on the flight, what next?’ he asked. ‘More shopping? More champagne?’ Keeping themselves busy seemed like the best defence against his thoughts wandering in inappropriate directions, like sliding down the neckline of her silky blouse.
She glanced at the screen in the centre of the terminal. ‘They’ve announced the gate number. We get priority boarding, right? Might as well head straight over.’
‘Sure, if you want.’ What he wanted was to take her shopping for one of the teeny tiny bikinis he could see in the window of the shop opposite. What, so that he could torture himself by looking at something that he couldn’t have? He’d need his self-restraint locked down before they reached his pool later, with sunshine and Prosecco in abundance.
He just hoped that she was going to be taking care of her own sunscreen. The thought of smoothing his hands over her shoulder blades, lifting her blonde hair to one side and tracing the nape of her neck with his fingers, rubbing cold lotion into hot skin... He imagined her, muscles relaxing under his touch, leaning her weight back against him as his hands skirted her sides, dipped into the hollows of her waist, found twin indentations at the base of her back. Would she object if his hands drifted lower still, if they dipped into the waistband of that tiny bikini?
‘Mother—’ Amber stopped and grabbed her foot, pulling it up to nearly waist level and inspecting the grubby mark across her shoe, which looked suspiciously like a tyre mark. ‘Watch your wheels, Mauro!’
Damn. He’d caught her toes like a complete novice and all because he’d let his thoughts get carried away, imagining something that he could never allow to happen. She was still standing on one leg, grimacing, and gripping her toes as if she were worried they might fall off.
‘I’m sorry, Amber. Here, let me see.’ Before she could protest he’d wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her down onto his lap. Caught off guard and off balance, she fell into him without protest, her bum landing on one thigh, her injured foot propped on the other.
‘Mauro! What the hell; let me up.’
His arm was still wrapped tight around her waist—even as he was doing it he knew what a bad idea it was, but he’d just run her down, and it wasn’t as if he were a waif. Between him and the chair they were well capable of doing some serious damage to a little toe.
‘How about we wait until the smart wears off, cara? Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt—I can see that it does.’
‘It doesn’t hurt so bad that I need to be in your lap.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, wishing that he could believe what he was saying. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Just think of me as a convenient seat. One of the underrated benefits of using a wheelchair, in my opinion. I’m very useful to have around when there’s swooning going on.’
‘Swooning? I didn’t swoon, you tried to cripp—’
He saw the blood drain from her face as she realised what she had been about to say and stuttered to a halt.
‘I mean—I meant—I didn’t—’
Oh, he would enjoy this. Finally, a crack in this Ice Queen’s façade. This was the most out of her comfort zone he’d seen her since that screen had pulled back and she’d realised he hadn’t taken her ‘back off’ bait.
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to speak.
‘I wasn’t thinking.’ The words rushed out of her as she desperately tried to backtrack and swerve around the very politically incorrect word that had nearly escaped her mouth. ‘I would never use that word if I was talking about...’
Flames were devouring her face and there was an earnest, beseeching look in her eyes. OK, that was probably enough.
‘Relax—’ he nudged her shoulder with his own ‘—I know that you didn’t mean anything by it. It’ll take a lot more than accidentally dropping the C-word into conversation to offend me.’ He’d learnt pretty quickly after his accident that it was the intention behind a particular word that would offend him, rather than the word itself. In his opinion, that word used among friends was far less offensive than being labelled ‘brave’ by someone who knew nothing at all about him.
In her horror at what she had been about to say, the fight had left her body, and she now sat comfortably in his lap, leaning just ever so slightly into the arm around her waist. Maybe sitting a little too comfortably. He might have lost a lot of the sensation from his legs, but his spinal injury was incomplete—doctor-speak for the fact that his spinal cord hadn’t been completely severed—and those nerves that were still attached? Boy, were they doing an awesome job right now. And his eyes? There was nothing wrong with those. Nothing wrong with his nose, either, which was drinking in the rich scent of her hair by the lungful; or his hands, which were begging for permission to take hold of that stubborn chin, angle her luscious mouth down towards his own, and take the kiss that he’d been completely unable to stop imagining from the moment that he had first seen her, however much he had tried.
Or maybe he didn’t need to use his hands at all, because she was turning towards him all of her own accord. Those big hazel eyes were locked on his, until they dropped and he just knew that she was looking at his lips. He flicked a tongue out to moisten them, to tempt her into reacting to him. Her skin flushed again as she watched him, her eyes not leaving his mouth. He moved closer, a centimetre, and then another, waiting for the moment when she blinked, when she realised he was getting too close, and froze up on him. When there was nothing but a couple of millimetres between them he breathed in another lungful of that intoxicating scent and closed his eyes, desperate for the moist warmth of her lips on his.
And then the wind was knocked from his chest and they were wheeling across the floor. Someone must have barged his chair out of the way. His hands went to his wheels as her arms tightened around him.
Brakes, Mauro. He’d never been so relieved to have made such a schoolboy error. If he’d put on the brakes he wouldn’t have just been barged across the terminal building. She’d still be sitting in his lap, her lips on his, rather than scrambling herself upright. He was going to have to be more careful if he wanted to keep his life exactly as he liked it, with nothing getting in the way of his ambition and his achievements. The only relationships he had space for were simple, honest flings where both parties knew what they were getting and were happy with the bargain.
A relationship with Amber would be anything but simple. Something about the brittleness of the front she showed the world told him that she had been broken. It was as if the pieces of her didn’t fit together quite right, leaving chinks to the hurt and vulnerable woman underneath. ‘What the hell? Did someone just push you?’ She spun around, looking for a fight. Nice deflection, he thought, wondering why she was so angry at herself.
‘Leave it, Amber.’
There had been a time when he’d have chased anyone trying to push him around—literally or metaphorically—and shown him just how much damage a bloke with a spinal-cord injury was capable of inflicting with his fists. It just so happened that when you used a wheelchair you were at the perfect height for one or two particularly vulnerable targets. But he’d long accepted that some people would act like idiots around him. He could either let the anger consume him, as it had sometimes threatened,