Her body arched beneath him, pressing closer as if the contact had become necessary rather than optional. He shifted carefully so he didn’t crush her, one knee sliding between hers as his hand moved from her waist along the curve of her hip. The thin fabric offered almost no barrier to the heat of her skin beneath it. His fingers continued downward, tracing the line of her thigh as though memorizing the shape ofit.
Every inch of contact sharpened his awareness of her. The warmth of her body. The quickening rhythm of her breathing. The way her fingers tightened against his shoulders as if she were holding on to him rather than resisting.
His control was still there.
But it was beginning to strain.
She gasped as his hand slid beneath the hem of her skirt and pushed the fabric higher, baring the long line of her thigh before he unfastened the zipper at her hip and dragged the skirt off her entirely. Her blouse followed next. He paused just long enough to look at her lying there in nothing but her panties, her skin warm beneath his hands. The heat of her as her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“If we do this now,” he said against her mouth, “nothing between us will be simple.”
“It wasn’t simple to begin with,” she replied.
He kissed her again, harder this time, the restraint he’d held all evening finally beginning to crack. His mouth lingered against hers,deepening the kiss until the world narrowed to warmth and the helpless sound she made against his lips. His hand slid higher along her thigh, the movement unhurried but unmistakably possessive, his palm tracing the length of her leg as though he intended to memorize every inch ofher.
His cell phone rang.He ignored it and she pulled him closer.The phone rang again.Magnus swore and pushed up off thebed.
“Don’t answer it,” she pleaded.
“I have to. As the Severin Captain I’m available 24/7.”He crossed to the table and picked up the phone, crossing to stand by the windows.“Severin.”
There was a pause across the line. An inhalation, the faint sound of air moving through teeth before the voice came on—low, dark, threaded with restrained fury. “Vittorio Donati,” he announced at last. “You have something of mine that I want back.”
Magnus’s gaze shifted across the room to the bed.Elia lay curled against the dark sheets where he’d left her, hair tousled across the pillow, the lamplight spilling over the full curve of her breasts and the narrow line of her waist. The outfit he’d bought her was gone. She wore only her panties now, one knee bent, the other leg stretched along the mattress as if she’d been a heartbeat away from pulling him back down toher.
A minute. Maybe less. That was all that had stood between her and losing hervirginity tohim.
Magnus’s expression hardened as he looked at her.“No,” he said coldly into the phone. “You’re mistaken.”
“Let me tell you why I’m not mistaken.”
Magnus’s expression shifted as Vittorio continued speaking, the air in his lungs turning to ice.“That’s an interesting claim,” he said with exquisitecalm.
“You’ve taken possession of something that belongs to my family. You will both meet me tomorrow at the Alabaster Club. Eleven. Return her tomorrow, or she becomes a liability.”
Something dark settled in Magnus’s chest. “No.” The word came out flat and absolute. He didn’t raise his voice, but something in it went lethal. His gaze shifted once more to Elia on the bed—half-naked, flushed, unaware that her existence had just been reduced to leverage in another man’s mouth. “You don’t get to threaten her,” he said, each word stripped of heat and edged in steel.
Vittorio inhaled, as if preparing to respond.
“You’re also mistaken about one thing,” Magnus cut himoff.
Vittorio didn’t reply.
Magnus continued, each word measured. “No one threatens a woman under my protection. We’ll discuss terms tomorrow.” Then he ended thecall.
His gaze slid toElia.
She was curled against the pillows, hair tousled, the sheet barely covering her breasts, her body still flushed from the moment they’d nearlycrossed a line neither of them could undo. Aminute later and she would have been naked beneathhim.
Vittorio Donati thought he could demand her return.
Magnus knew something the man clearly did not. Elia Lucia wasn’t something Magnus had taken.
She was someone he intended tokeep.
Elia sat up, her hair disheveled, her mouth swollen from his kisses. She’d crossed one arm shyly over her breasts.“Who was that?” she asked. “What did he want?”
Magnus turned toward her.“That was your father,” he announced. “And he’s insisting I return you.”
