But staring at yet another example of Umberto’s collection of things quickly lost its appeal.
She drifted over to a series of glass doors that took the place of any outside wall in this room and looked out, expecting to see more bucolic fields brimming with flowers, each competing to be brighter and more riotous than the next.
Instead, she stopped dead.
Because this particular room did not face the vineyards or the fields or the gardens, as expected. This one looked out over a half-shaded terrace that boasted a set of pools. If memory served, each one was set to a different temperature and they were all arranged so that a person could float in any one of them and look out at the landscape as if they were part of it.
Though what she was looking at right this particular moment was not a part of the landscape, for all that it was…primeval.
A man was rising up out of the hot pool, the vapor rising up from the water’s surface with him and making it seem as if he, himself, was generating the kind of heat that steamed up a spring morning.
Ivy felt herself freeze. As if her muscles themselves betrayed her, unable to make sense of what she was seeing.
But she couldn’t look away.
He rose slowly, climbing up the ladder at the side of the pool with a kind of careless athletic grace that made her head go light. She was half convinced that she’d lapsed off into sleep on one of the self-referential settees inside, suffering from heretofore unknown effects of jet lag from a simple ninety-minute flight from London down into Italy. Because otherwise, she couldn’t account for this.
His back was toward her. And yet her mouth went dry as she found her gaze moving over the impossible, powerful shifts of lean muscle beneath golden skin as he lifted himself from the water. He moved up another step and she blinked, because she could suddenly see what had to be the most perfect, bare-naked ass not currently cast in marble and tucked away in a museum that she’d ever beheld.
Still he rose, some kind of ancient god brought to life, as if the old Roman deities had never really disappeared at all. As if he had been here all along, Neptune himself, carved from wonder and sex, water and desire.
He stood at the top of the ladder now and she watched as he speared a powerful hand into his dark hair, currently slicked to shape his skull. A normal, everyday movement that this man—if he was a man and not a figment of her imagination—made into poetry.
Ivy was still frozen solid as if her bones had locked her in place while inside, everything that could soften, melted. And ran hot. She felt as if she was boiling, as if her body couldn’t handle this, because what mortal could?
He turned and she saw the rest of him, like the slow dawning of the sun. The wide shoulders, the chest a hagiography of male musculature, more golden skin dusted with dark hair, and all of it arrowing to a narrow waist. And below, a large and heavy cock that did not appear to be reacting to what she imagined were the cooler temperatures outside that hot tub.
Or then again, more worryingly, perhaps thiswashis reaction. Maybe that enormous appendage was, in fact, his shrinkage.
The idea made her entire body break out into goose bumps.
Yet she kept looking. His thighs were powerful, suggesting levels of performance and dedication that she found staggering. But not as staggering as the clear evidence that he did not have a single hint of a tan line. Anywhere.
It was as if he had been created out of Roman gold, dancing sunshine, and pure lust.
Her own breath fogged up the glass window in front of her and Ivy could move then. Suddenly. She found her hand was shaking, but she wiped the fog away.
To find him staring directly at her.
Everything in her froze again. Then seemed to blare back into light and sound andsensationwith a punch that made her feel as if she had been knocked back across the room. It was a disorienting shock to realize she hadn’t moved, but the bigger shock was staring straight at her through the glass.
Ivy knew that face. She knew those dark jade eyes, lit as ever with amusement and mockery. That perfect nose of his that would not look out of place on precious old coins and that cruel mouth that was so often—like now—curled to one side. Derision a certainty.
He stared back at her and she could only imagine what she looked like from his perspective. Panting up a windowed door, clinging to the glass as if it was the only thing keeping her upright.
Oh yes, she knew that face. She knewhim, for her sins.
She also knew that something terrible had happened in the years since she’d last seen him in the flesh. Because Ivy had known this man since he’d been younger, more obviously feral, all of him somehowsharper. His face had been more of a hatchet when he was twenty-two, a deadly object if wielded correctly but more a tool than any weapon.
Now, though he was no less of a blade, that face of his washoned. Not the careless sharpness of his youth, but the refinement of his years. Lethal, in other words.
He did absolutely nothing to cover himself, of course. Instead, all he did was stare right back at her as ifshewas the one parading around nude on a bright and sunny April morning in a place where there could be no possible expectation of privacy. He stared at her as if she was the foolish girl she’d been when she’d lived here, always out of her depth and incapable of understanding what was happening all around her—especially if he was involved.
He stared at her and brought back memories of her embarrassing adolescence that she’d thought long-banished to the dustbin of recollections that were no longer welcome now that she was older.
He stared and when she didn’t respond, he lifted one dark brow.
Daring her.
