Admit he’d never loved her in the first place?
He sighed. ‘It’s a long story.’ Where would he even begin? Especially when all he wanted was to not remember any of it. His gaze caught hers and held. ‘And I’d rather get lost in you than a past I cannot change.’
The breath she released was audible. Slow and rough as her pupils dilated again. She eyed him for long beats, her blue gaze searching his as if trying to decide whether to push or not. Whether to stand her ground or surrender to the heat flaring between them once more.
With the tension in his muscles reaching screaming point, Alessandro was about to open his mouth and prompt her but then, wordlessly, a decision obviously being reached, her hands slid to the hem of her sleep shirt, pulling it up and off her body and tossing it to the ground at his feet.
Alessandro’s breath was a hiss as her full frontal nudity shot like a bullet straight to his dick. He might have seen her naked only minutes ago, he might have seen her nakeda lotthese past few weeks but the sight still arrested him. The swing of her full breasts, the curve of her hips, the suppleness of her thighs and the utter fascination of where they met at the top.
Before he could step forward, she was reaching out, snagging his belt, dragging him close, her fingers working the buckle as Alessandro’s brain got up to speed. It got up to speed fast as she yanked down his zipper and reached inside his underwear to free his aching cock.
‘Le cose che mi fai,’ he muttered.
The things she did to him.
And then there was no more space for words. Just two hungry mouths open and questing, two tongues tangling and two hands urging him closer.
Somehow, she boosted herself up on to the vanity, angling her hips just right, bringing him to her centre, not stopping to remove his clothes just pushing them aside, his cock jutting out of his fly as the head of it found the heart of her and, with one snap of his hips, he was inside her, hot and tight and wet and all the noise in his brain ceased, replaced by the noises ofher– of Nat.
Her gasp at his entry and her moans as he pounded into her, and her whispered, ‘Yes, like that, just there, just like that,’ each word taking him away from his past and grounding him here and now,with Nat, as he thrust and thrust, the simmer of his release hurtling towards boil.
She fell back on to her elbows and Alessandro didn’t miss a beat, tearing his mouth from hers to latch greedily on to a nipple, dragging in air as he rubbed the stiff pucker of it against his teeth. Her sharp cry urged him on even as her fingers ploughed through his hair and twisted painfully.
He grunted but didn’t stop, her hand holding him captive to her breast as he thrust and sucked, the whimpers of her pleasure and the hot, tight, clutch of her around his cock driving him on. His hand slid south, his fingers probing and finding the hard knot of her clitoris and flicking.
‘Alessandro!’
It was said on a high, breathy moan as she tightened like a vice around him and came, her body bucking and writhing and catapulting him, his heart thundering, to his own cataclysmic release.
Much later, in his bed, Nat lay draped down his side, her head on his shoulder, his fingers absently running up and down her arm. Sleep hovered around them in a post-coital haze that was both energising and paralysing at the same time.
Somewhere in the sticky morass of her thoughts, she knew she shouldn’t have succumbed to the temptation of him tonight. A stronger woman would have pushed harder. A smarter woman would have taken the opportunity to talk about his past for a change. He’d finally uttered his wife’s name and she could have used that to get him to open up more about the woman that held him fast in the clutches of grief.
But the way he’d expressed his desire, the way he’d looked at her with those wounded eyes, she’d have given him anything.
She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, revelling in its warmth and their combined aroma. Her hand was resting on his belly and she trailed her fingers up his chest. ‘Your cousin looked at me very strangely this afternoon when I opened the door.’
It had puzzled her at the time but been quickly forgotten in the delight of meeting someone who had obviously known Alessandro for a long time. It had been informative, not least because she realised that Val was the cousin Alessandro had told Peyton about when she’d brought McKenzie to A&E that day she’d been ill.
‘He was probably trying to work out how available you are,’ Alessandro murmured, his voice sleepy but his body not so loose now.
‘You seem close.’
‘We are. We grew up in the same village. Our fathers were brothers. My parents, they were very… passionate people… theyargued, a lot. They split up and got back together and split up and got back together. They were up and down like yo-yos. I would get shuffled to Zia Rosa’s when things were in upheaval. Which was often. It didn’t matter that she was deaf or had six kids of her own, she always took good care of me. She and my uncle had this totally different relationship. Zio Ben adored Aunty Rosa.’
Nat tried not to get too excited about the level of information Alessandro was offering. He was usually more guarded and she revelled in knowing him better. ‘Do you have siblings?’
‘No. Just me. Which was probably a good thing. My father finally left for good when I was fourteen and my mother really fell apart. We both moved in with Rosa after that.’
His words seemed devoid of emotion – just a factual recounting – but Nat knew what it was like to have a split home. She rolled on her stomach and propped her chin on Alessandro’s chest. ‘Did you miss your father?’
His fingers stroked a path up and down her arms as he shook his head. ‘Not really. I barely knew him. He travelled with his work a lot. He wasn’t exactly a hands-on father. He left it up to my mother mostly. And then when he was home they were usually arguing.’
Nat’s heart broke for him. Her own memories of her father, before he’d walked out and become emotionally unavailable, couldn’t be any more different. Maybe that explained Alessandro’s clumsy fathering. No solid role models. Maybe he, too, had left the parental role up to Camilla.
‘I’m surprised you married at all with that kind of history.’
The sultry caress of his fingers stopped for the briefest of moments before they resumed and Nat knew she’d entered an area crisscrossed with land mines.
