“Will those friends be safe?”
“Yes. They will be observed and then once it’s established they’re not hiding us, the dogs will move on to their next target.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“Because I know how the Espositos work. They’re methodical in their single-mindedness. Also, you have to remember that they’ve learned the art of discretion – it’s how they became legitimate. Everyone knows it’s all smoke and mirrors, but it suits big business and the government to believe in their legitimacy. If they start a blood bath in England against a series of people all connected to me, the authorities will not be able to turn a blind eye. No, the Espositos will keep their dogs on a tight leash until they are certain their targets – us – have been found.”
She shivered.
He rested his chin on the top of her head. “We will be gone before that happens.”
She leaned back into him and closed her eyes. Niccolo had gone through the plan with her. The wheels were already inmotion to get them out of England. She wished they could leave right now, but it was impossible. Niccolo wasn’t prepared to leave anything to chance, including the endgame. Two nights would be spent in this house in the middle of nowhere, and then all their ducks would be in a row and they could put the plan into action.
Until then, they would stay exactly where they were, and Georgia would spend what were potentially her last hours on earth frightened of shadows.
In many ways, she’d spent her life frightened of shadows, she thought with a flash of insight that made her blink widely. Not in a literal sense, but in the sense of always hiding behind Callie and following her lead, content to take whatever path her sister chose. Even the path of Georgia’s career had come about because Callie had suggested – rightly – that it would suit her artistic side.
She’d followed the same pattern in her relationship with Niccolo. Everything had been dominated and led by him, not because he was selfish – he wasn’t in the slightest – but because she’d let him. Being with him had been such a rush that she’d been happy to do whatever he wanted, even walking out of a life-drawing class minutes after arriving because he’d called and said his meeting had finished earlier than expected and that he would be at her apartment, as he always called it, within the hour. She could have told him she was busy and that she’d see him when her class was finished, but she didn’t. The thought hadn’t occurred to her. She’d packed her art equipment away, apologised to her tutor and the other students, and hurried home to wait for him.
The two most significant relationships in her life, and she’d been the sheep…
Because, she now realised, her successful, professional parents, the ones who should have been the two most significant people in her life, had treated her with indifference.
Georgia and Callie hadn’t been created through passion or love or a deep-rooted need to procreate, but because their parents had reached the pinnacles of their respective careers by both being made consultants, and so deemed it time to tick off the next box in the checklist of their lives, the one marked ‘children’. Already in their forties, they’d gone through numerous debilitating rounds of IVF before Georgia and Callie’s embryos had taken, but there had been no effort to actuallyparent,not when paid help would do it for them.
Growing up, it had felt like only Callie could truly see her, right until the day a gorgeous Italian had taken her hand in his and locked his dark chocolate eyes onto hers.
Something in Niccolo’s touch and stare had instinctively made her feel safe, enough so that the subtle barrier she was barely conscious of raising around people to keep them at a friendly arm’s length didn’t have the chance to form. However badly their relationship had ended and for all the pain of its aftermath, it had been passionate and beautiful. The best months of her life.
Screw being frightened, she suddenly thought with a shot of defiance. She wasdonewith being frightened. Done with hiding behind others. Done with being a sheep. Done with letting her life be influenced and dominated by other people’s choices. She’d already proved she was stronger, physically and mentally, than she’d ever dreamed she could be.
If these were to be her last few days on this earth…
With a burst of impetus, Georgia stepped out of Niccolo’s hold and drew the French door’s heavy curtains with a decisive yank before spinning around to face him. “Let’s close all thecurtains and blinds in the house and tune the outside world out of our minds, and go to bed.”
Eyes glittering, he arched an eyebrow.
She closed the gap between them and rested her hands on his broad, naked shoulders. Rising onto her toes, she gazed deep into his eyes. “I don’t want to spend the next two nights worrying about all the ways the plan can fail, Nic. I want to spend it living.” She craned her face closer, eyes fluttering shut as she breathed him in and brushed her mouth to his for a featherlight kiss, and whispered, “I want to live it with you.”
Chapter Eight
Niccolo satin roughly two inches of hot water, cleaning his body as thoroughly and as carefully as he could while keeping his stab wound dry… and while trying to ignore the straining erection between his legs.
Georgia had practically danced around the house closing all the curtains and blinds, cocooning them inside, and then she’d run the bath for him. While he’d lowered himself into it, she’d tied her hair into a knot on the top of her head and stepped into the walk-in shower in the corner of the bathroom they were sharing. Now she was lathering herself with a seductiveness that had turned his loins to lava.
Where this change in mood had come from he couldn’t begin to guess. Didn’t have the capacity to guess even if he wanted to because,Dio, she was so damned sexy. The way she soaped those glorious breasts… the way she slipped her hand between her legs and closed her eyes and parted her lips…
The memory of the night he’d left the bed to get them a drink and returned to find her lying on her back with the bedsheets thrown off, one hand squeezing a breast, the other between her legs, her eyes glazed and her lips parted just as they were now…
She’d ignored him, he remembered. But she’d been wholly aware of him. Wholly aware when he’d spread her legs to kneel between them, taken his cock that had gone from flaccid to rock hard in a beat and began to masturbate over her.
He would never forget the way the tendons of her neck had strained or the flush of colour that had stained her cheeks when she’d brought herself to a climax. It had been all he could do to hold on to watch and climax with her. It had been the most thrilling solo orgasm of his life.
And now she was rinsing the suds off the beautiful, voluptuous body pregnancy had only enhanced and given him more of, and stepping out of the shower, and all he could think was that it was no wonder he’d spent the last four months celibate.
Georgia was all the woman a man needed. How he’d ever allowed himself to believe he could live without her was a question for the philosophers. Niccolo’s heart and body belonged to Georgia, his shy virgin whose shyness had lasted about five minutes before the heat between them had burned it away.
The only sound the water sloshing in the bath as he rose, Niccolo climbed out.
