Secret Heirs Collection. Коллектив авторов
suggested she might want to go on the pill and Darcy had eagerly agreed. She remembered the first time they’d left the condom off and how it had felt to have his naked skin against hers instead of ‘that damned rubber’—again, his words—between them. It had been…delicious. She had felt dangerously close to him and had needed to give herself a stern talking-to afterwards. She’d told herself that the powerful feelings she was experiencing were purely physical. Of course sex felt better without a condom—but it didn’t mean anything.
But now, in the dimness of his Tuscan bedroom, he was deep inside her. He was filling her and thrusting into her body and kissing her mouth until it throbbed and it felt so amazing that she could have cried. Did her low, moaning sigh break his rhythm? Was that why, with a deft movement, he turned her over so that she was on top of him, his black eyes capturing hers?
‘Ride me, cara,’ he murmured. ‘Ride me until you come again.’
She nodded as she tensed her thighs against his narrow hips because she liked this position. It gave her a rare feeling of power, to see Renzo lying underneath her—his eyes half-closed and his lips parted as she rocked back and forth.
She heard his groan and bent her head to kiss it quiet, though she was fairly sure that the walls of this ancient house were deep enough to absorb the age-old sounds of sex. He tangled his hands in her hair, digging his fingers into the wayward curls until pleasure—intense and unalterable—started spiralling up inside her. She came just before he did, gasping as he clasped her hips tightly and hearing him utter something urgent in Italian as his body bucked beneath her. She bent her head to his neck, hot breath panting against his skin until she’d recovered enough to peel herself away from him, before falling back against the mattress.
She looked at the dark beams above her head and the engraved glass lampshade, which looked as if it was as old as the house itself. Someone had put a small vase of scented roses by the window—the same roses which had been scrambling over the walls outside—and all the light in that shadowy room seemed to be centred on those pale pink petals.
‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘That was some welcome.’
Deliberately, Renzo kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady because he didn’t want to talk. Not right now. He didn’t need to be told how good it was—that was a given—not when his mind was busy with the inevitable clamour of his thoughts.
He’d felt a complex mixture of stuff as he’d driven towards the house, knowing soon it would be under different ownership. A house which had been in his mother’s family for generations and which had had more than its fair share of heartbreak. Other people might have offloaded it years ago but pride had made him hold on to it, determined to replace bad memories with good ones, and to a large extent he’d succeeded. But you couldn’t live in the past. It was time to let the place go—to say goodbye to the last clinging fragments of yesterday.
He looked across the bed, where Darcy was lying with her eyes closed, her bright red hair spread all over the white pillow. He thought about her going to Norfolk when they got back to London and tried to imagine what it might be like sleeping with someone else when she was no longer around, but the idea of some slender-hipped brunette lying amid his tumbled sheets was failing to excite him. Instinctively he flattened his palm over her bare thigh.
‘And was it the perfect welcome?’ he questioned at last.
‘You know it was.’ Her voice was sleepy. ‘Though I should go and pick my dress up. It’s the first time I’ve worn it.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll have Gisella launder it for you.’
‘There’s no need for that.’ Her voice was suddenly sharp as her eyes snapped open. ‘I can do my own washing. I can easily rinse it out in the sink and hang it out to dry in that glorious sunshine.’
‘And if I told you I’d rather you didn’t?’
‘Too bad.’
‘Why are you so damned stubborn, Darcy?’
‘I thought you liked my stubbornness.’
‘When appropriate, I do.’
‘You mean, when it suits you?’
‘Esattamente.’
She lay back and looked up at the ceiling. How could she explain that she’d felt his housekeeper looking at her and seeing exactly who she was—a servant, just as Gisella was. Like Gisella, she waited tables and cleared up around people who had far more money than she had. That was who she was. She didn’t want to look as if she’d suddenly acquired airs and graces by asking to have her clothes laundered. She wasn’t going to try to be someone she wasn’t—someone who would find it impossible to settle back into her humble world when she got back to England and her billionaire lover was nothing but a distant memory.
But she shouldn’t take it out on Renzo, because he was just being Renzo. She’d never objected to his high-handedness before. If the truth were known, she’d always found it a turn-on—and in a way, his arrogance had provided a natural barrier. It had stopped her falling completely under his spell, forcing her to be realistic rather than dreamy. She leaned over and brushed her mouth against his. ‘So tell me what you’ve got planned for us.’
His fingers slid between the tops of her thighs. ‘Plans? What plans? The sight of your body seems to have completely short-circuited my brain.’
Halting his hand before it got any further, Darcy enjoyed her brief feeling of power. ‘Tell me something about Vallombrosa—and I’m not talking olive or wine production this time. Did you live here when you were a little boy?’
His shuttered features grew wary. ‘Why the sudden interest?’
‘Because you told me we’d be having dinner with the man who’s buying the place. It’s going to look a bit odd if I don’t know anything about your connection with it. Did you grow up here?’
‘No, I grew up in Rome. Vallombrosa was our holiday home.’
‘And?’ she prompted.
‘And it had been in my mother’s family for generations. We used it to escape the summer heat of the city. She and I used to come here for the entire vacation and my father would travel down at weekends.’
Darcy nodded because she knew that, like her, he was an only child and that both his parents were dead. And that was pretty much all she knew.
She circled a finger over the hardness of his flat belly. ‘So what did you do when you were here?’
He pushed her hand in the direction of his groin. ‘My father taught me to hunt and to fish, while my mother socialised and entertained. Sometimes friends came to visit and my mother’s school friend Mariella always seemed to be a constant fixture. We were happy, or so I thought.’
Darcy held her breath as something dark and steely entered his voice. ‘But you weren’t?’
‘No. We weren’t.’ He turned his head to look at her, a hard expression suddenly distorting his features. ‘Haven’t you realised by now that so few people are?’
‘I guess,’ she said stiffly. But she’d thought…
What? That other people were strangers to the pain she’d suffered? That someone as successful and as powerful as Renzo had never known emotional deprivation? Was that why he was so distant sometimes—so shuttered and cold? ‘Did something happen?’
‘You could say that. They got divorced when I was seven.’
‘And was it…acrimonious?’
He shot her an unfathomable look. ‘Aren’t all divorces acrimonious?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess.’
‘Especially when you discover that your mother’s best “friend” has been having an affair with your father for years,’ he added, his voice bitter. ‘It makes you realise