One Night in... Milan: The Italian's Future Bride / The Italian's Chosen Wife / The Italian's Captive Virgin

Now she knew what it felt like to be just one of a large crowd. Self-contempt engulfed her, followed quickly by hot suffocating shame.

Maybe she moved or maybe she even groaned. She didn’t think she’d done anything but he suddenly shifted, levering up his torso so he could withdraw that all-powerful proof of his prowess from inside her, and the worst shame of all came when she was unable to still her damning quivering response.

At least the way he shuddered told her that he was experiencing the same thing.

Pushing up on to his forearms, he lifted his dark head off the pillow and looked at her. One of those thick silences seized the next few seconds while Rachel tried hard not to burst into tears. Her heart was still pounding, the desire to duck and hide away almost impossible to fight. It didn’t help that his expression was so sensuously slumberous, like a man who was feeling very—very satisfied.

‘I …’

It was the only word Rachel managed to drag free from the tension in her throat.

‘You—what?’ he prompted huskily, reaching up with a long, warm, gentle finger to run it along the trembling fullness of her pulsing lower lip.

‘I th-think we got carried away …’ She breathed the words out over his finger because he had not lifted it out of the way.

‘Well, you carried me away,’ he said with an odd half smile that did not seem to know whether to be cynical or just rueful about the whole thing. ‘You were—special.’

‘Th-thank you,’ she mumbled unhappily.

‘Quite an unexpected …gift to come out of this mess tonight, which makes me so glad I did not turn away from it when I had the chance …’

A gift—he saw her as a gift?

Cynical, Rachel named his half smile, and tensed as the warmth still sandwiched between their two bodies began to chill.

‘Well, turn away now, Mr Villani,’ she responded frozenly. ‘Because it’s the last gift you are going to get from me!’

She gave a push at his wide shoulders and obligingly he rolled away to lie on his side, watching as she scrambled off the bed, then began hunting the littered floor for something to wear to cover up her nakedness. Catching sight of her dress lying there on the floor in a brazen swirl, she shuddered, hating the sight of it, and made a wild grab for his shirt instead.

‘You sound very certain about that.’

‘I am.’ Rachel had to fight with the shirt sleeves, which had become tangled inside out.

‘We were really great together … ‘

‘Well, you’re such a great lover,’ she flicked back. ‘Better than most, if that gives your ego a boost.’

‘Grazie.’

Get lost! she wanted to scream at him. A gift—a gift!

The shirt slithered over her now shivering body and she dragged the two sides together with fingers clutching at the fine cloth like tense claws.

Flushed, angry, and aware that any second now she was going to explode on a flood of wild, uncontrollable I-hate-myself! tears, ‘Is there another bedroom I can use?’ she asked, chin up, blue eyes refusing to do anything other than look directly at his smooth, sardonic, lazily curious face because she was determined to get away with at least some small part of pride intact.

‘You don’t need one. This bed is easily big enough for the two of us.’ He was supremely content in his languid pose.

Refusing to get into an argument with him, Rachel turned to walk towards the bedroom door.

‘I don’t do one-night stands,’ he fed gently after her.

She stopped, narrow shoulders tautening inside his oversized shirt. ‘Neither do I …’ she felt constrained to reply.

‘Good. So we understand each other.’

‘No.’ Rachel swung round. ‘I don’t understand!’

He was already off the bed and reaching for his trousers, so casual about his nakedness that she had to fight not to blush. He was incredible to look at: all golden and glossed by hard muscle tone, made all the more blatantly masculine by the triangle of black curls that swirled between his burgeoning pectorals and then drew a line down his torso to the other thick cluster curling around the potent force of his sex.

The stupid blush broke free when she recalled what that part of him had felt like erect and inside her. She tried to damp it all back down again but it was already too late because, as he was about to thrust a shockingly muscled brown leg into his trousers, he glanced at her and went as still as the dead.

Her breathing went haywire, her old friend panic rising up from places she did not know it could rise up from—her tender breasts, her taut nipples stinging against the cloth of his shirt and that terrible hot spot still pulsing between her legs, which made her draw in her muscles in an effort to switch it off.

He dropped the trousers. And she knew why he had. Seeing the way she was looking at him had turned him on like the floodgates opening on a mighty dam. What she’d thought potent before was suddenly downright unbelievable. He started walking towards her and she actually whimpered as she put out a trembling hand in the useless hope of holding him back, while her other hand maintained a death grip on the shirt to keep it shut across her front.

‘No, please don’t.’ Her little plea came out all husky. Already her legs were threatening to collapse. ‘We-we’ve made this situation messy enough as it is without adding intimacy to it—please!’ she cried out when he just did not stop.

‘I have just come inside you with the most amazing pleasure I have ever experienced,’ his dark voice rasped over her. ‘Intimacy is here, mia bella. It is too late to switch it off.’

But it wasn’t—it wasn’t! ‘I don’t want—’

‘Oh, you want,’ he refuted. ‘It has been vibrating out of you from the first moment we met. And I would be a liar if I did not admit to feeling the same way about you—so quit the denial.’

‘Sex for the hell of it?’ Rachel sliced back wildly.

‘Why not?’ Capturing her warding hand, he used it to draw her in close. ‘We are stuck with each other for the next few months while this thing plays itself out, so why not enjoy what we do have going here which is not part of the lie?’

‘If I walk out of here dressed like this and tell anyone waiting out there that I changed my mind because you just were not good enough—that should finish it,’ she suggested wildly.

‘Are you telling me that my finesse is in need of practice?’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Since we both know that you seem to be pretty much a natural sensualist, Miss Carmichael, I give you leave to teach me all you know.’

‘What is that supposed to imply?’ Rachel stared up at him.

He grimaced and she didn’t like the cynical gleam that arrived back on his face. ‘Either someone taught you how to give a man unbelievable pleasure or it just comes naturally to you,’ he enlightened. ‘I was attempting to give you the more honourable benefit of the doubt.’

He was daring to suggest that she’d been trained like a concubine to pleasure men—?

First a gift, now a trained whore. Rachel stiffened like a board. ‘How dare you?’ she breathed furiously.

‘Very indignant,’ he commended. ‘But I have just had the life essence squeezed out of me by the kind of muscles I did not know a woman could possess and you kiss like a delightful, greedy, well-seasoned Circe, amore—dangerous, but I’m hooked.’

‘I think this has gone far enough.’ She went to twist away from him.

He spun her back, broke her grip on the shirt front and ran his two hands inside it in a sensual act of possession that claimed her slender waist. Two long thumbs stroked the flatness of her lower stomach and her flesh turned into a simmering sensory mass. When she released an agonised breath he watched the way her pale hips swayed towards him as if they could not stop from hunting out closer contact with the burgeoning jut of his sex.

‘Look at you,’ he murmured. ‘You cannot help yourself. That deliciously damp cluster of curls I can see crowning your thighs is crying out to feel me there again.’

‘No,’ she denied, knowing it was horribly, shamefully true.