Mirroring her hands, his palms moved from her head to her hips, dragging her against him, against the hard ridge of his arousal. The noise she made, primal, instinctive, spun out from her mouth into him, and he turned them, walking her backwards until her backside met the large office table.
He lifted her, effortlessly, up onto the table and pushed his way between her legs in a move that was both possessive and domineering at the same time.
Oh, why was itthisman? Why him?
Why was it only Micha who had ever made her this way? This crazy, this aroused, this hedonistic, this wanton?
She closed her eyes, her head falling back as his lips traversed the column of her throat and across her collarbone. Delight fanned out in sparks across her skin, sinking into her blood, her bones, her soul.
If she thought he’d stop, if she thought he’d lift the shirt from the waist of her trousers, she’d been wrong. Instead, with a near ruthless efficiency, he simply hooked his finger around the front of her basque and pulled, exposing her breasts to his sight and her nipples to his tongue.
Wet heat pooled instantly between her thighs and where she would have pulled her legs closed, she instead clamped around Micha’s hips, securing him in place, so that he could tease every single erogenous zone she knew of.
She leaned back to give him more access, his mouth closing over one nipple, over the silk of her shirt, his tongue leaving a damp stain on her breast, cooling to tease the taut flesh as he turned his attention to the other.
Until, he returned hungrily to her mouth. With one hand on her jaw, and the other swept around her backside, pulling her hard against him, she felt devoured. Completely and utterly. There was no escape and she wanted none. Pleasure and pressure were building in her, the restlessness frustrating as what she wanted ebbed and flowed from her reach.
‘Maria.’
Her name, half plea, half promise, on his lips, in his voice…it was as if it had travelled back through the years, drenched from the depths of her memories. She opened her eyes, and saw him gazing back.
Him.
Micha.
The boy who had broken her heart.
She shouldn’t be doing this. She couldn’t. Not again.
She pulled back from his hold, and she saw the moment the shutters came down, cutting her off from the savage heat of the previous moment.
‘This was a mistake,’ she said, scrabbling for the broken shards of her armour and pulling them about her defensively.
‘Don’t do that,’ he warned, with a thread of darkness she’d not heard before.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t demean this,’ he commanded.
‘Why? You did,’ she threw at him as she pushed past him with her shoulder.
Micha reached out and clasped her wrist, stopping her when she would have left, spinning her back to face him. He had been talking about their kiss, but she was talking about the past. Her fury sparked gold shards of lightning in the depths of her chestnut-coloured eyes. He’d always been fascinated by the colour, as if one wasn’t enough for her, she needed as many as she could get: browns, golds, some flashes of something near green.
The rest of her family had brown eyes so dark they appeared nearly black. But Maria had inherited her eyes from her mother, who had married into the Gallos. And now, they displayed fury in multicoloured hues.
‘I went where your grandfather sent me,’ Micha ground out. He refused to think back to that day, that time, when she’d severed his heart, gleefully telling him that she’d do anything to run Gallo Group, knowing that Gio had wanted her to marry Antonio.Cristo, here she was, exactly eleven years later, ready to do just that. He’d made the right decision then to leave. To protect himself and his mother. Because no one else would.
‘You could have said no to him,’ she accused.
This time he did laugh out loud. ‘Yes,cara. Because we all know that Gio would have taken no for an answer.’
‘Youcouldhave. You might have been the only one able to do it out of all of us,’ she said, and he wondered whether he saw hurt there in her gaze or whether he was just so desperate to see it that he was imagining it.
‘What about you?’ he returned. ‘When did you ever say no to your grandfather?’
She was shaking her head, sending the tumble of her curls swaying across her shoulders, when he let go of her wrist. Her obtuse denial infuriated him.
‘You deny it? Even now you’re rushing to do his bidding,’ Micha pointed out. ‘You feel nothing more for Antonio than familial love, yet you are going to marry him just as Gio wanted.’
