Unexpected Pleasures (23 page)

But this time she could hardly have left with Carlo. His cousin was dead, after all, and the small car Sasha drove was parked outside. It was adrenalin-fuelled anger that was making his pulse race and his stomach muscles knot, Gabriel told himself. He checked the downstairs rooms and found them empty, then moved towards the stairs.

* * *

T
HE
SOUND
OF
the Mercedes’s engine purring past her window woke Sasha from her brief sleep. Gabriel was back. She pushed back the bedclothes, relieved to discover that her headache had eased. She heard Gabriel rapping on the main door to her suite, calling out her name impatiently.

‘Yes, I’m here. I won’t be a minute,’ she called back, abandoning her attempt to get dressed when she heard him come in and cross the wooden floor to the suite’s private sitting room. In another minute he would be in her bedroom. Panicking slightly, she reached for a fresh towel and wrapped it around her body, calling out to him, ‘Don’t come in, Gabriel, I’m not dressed.’ But it was too late. He’d already pushed open the bedroom door and was standing in the middle of the room, frowning darkly at her.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded sharply.

Sasha frowned. His eyes were searching the room as though he was a jealous lover, expecting to find a rival. Her imagination was playing tricks on her, she decided.

‘Why are the shutters closed?’

‘I had a headache, so I decided to go to bed for an hour,’ Sasha told him.

‘On your own?’

Sasha stared at him. What on earth had got into him? Surely he didn’t seriously believe that she had a lover hidden away in here?

‘I had a headache,’ she repeated. ‘Going to bed to get rid of it is something that people do, Gabriel.’

His mouth compressed, and suddenly Sasha could almost smell the past: the sleepy afternoon air of the yacht’s cabin scented with the sensuality of their sex. She could feel the heat crawling over her skin. Without a word, just by looking at her, Gabriel had taken her back to that time.

‘
You
may still go to bed in the afternoon for sex,’ she told him fiercely. ‘But I most certainly do not.’ Did she sound as though she wanted to? Was she unconsciously giving him an unsubtle message that she wanted him? ‘What did you want me for?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to get dressed; the boys will be back soon.’

He put down the large square package he was carrying and looked at his watch. ‘They won’t be back for another two or three hours yet,’ he said, before picking up the package and holding it out to her.

‘What...what is it?’ she asked him warily.

‘Why do you not open it and see?’ He walked across the room to the door, but instead of going through it he closed it and turned around. ‘Open it, Sasha,’ he repeated coolly.

As soon as she had removed the outer wrapping paper and lifted the lid of the box inside it, to see the familiar name on the tissue paper, she knew. Her hands trembled as she removed the tissue, her mouth tightening when she found the small individual jewellers’ boxes beneath it. She opened the top box, a wave of anger surging through her when she saw the familiar diamond ring. Snapping the box shut, she looked up at Gabriel.

‘You’d better check that it’s all there,’ he told her curtly.

‘What is this, Gabriel?’ she demanded, ignoring his command, and somehow managing to keep her voice from cracking with anger.

‘It’s your jewellery. What does it look like?’

‘No, it isn’t.’ Sasha shook her head, cramming the lid back on top of the box and thrusting it away from her. ‘I sold my jewellery.’

‘And I bought it back for you.’

‘You had no right! Do you realise what you’ve done? How much did you pay for it? More than I sold it for, I’m sure.’ His silence gave her the answer. An angry flush burned her face. ‘How dare you do this to me, Gabriel? The reason I sold the jewellery was so I could provide a home for my sons and myself, so that we could have our independence from you. You had no right—’

‘I had
every
right.’ Gabriel stopped her, furious himself. Didn’t she realise how lucky she was? How generous he was being? Or how controlling? an inner voice suggested. How determined to keep her in debt to you? He silenced the small, self-mocking voice. ‘I have the Calbrini name to think of. How do you think it looks to have you selling the jewellery Carlo gave you?’

‘Not as gossip-worthy as you buying it back,’ Sasha said bitingly. ‘Everyone knows that Carlo died virtually bankrupt. I had nothing to be ashamed of in selling my jewellery, Gabriel. But now thanks to you—’

‘Thanks to me, what?’ he demanded dangerously.

‘Do you really need me to tell you? Why did you buy it back, Gabriel? So that it would make me feel indebted to you? Grateful to you? So that you would have control over me? By buying the jewellery back you’re forcing me to pay for it again, and to be left in debt for whatever extra you handed over to the jeweller. You’ve stolen my freedom from me, Gabriel,’ she told him, white-faced with anger. ‘Just like your grandfather stole your mother’s freedom. But I’m not her, and I won’t be bought or bullied, and I won’t be forced to live in perpetual debt to you.’

She was shaking from head to foot as the true realisation of what he had done to her began to sink in. She picked up the box and thrust it towards him. ‘Here—take it. I don’t want it. And I don’t want you. I won’t let you force me into playing the role you’ve chosen for me, Gabriel. I’m not your mother. I’m me.’

‘At least my mother didn’t sleep around and share her favours with two men at the same time. You’re right. You aren’t her. You’re a—’

It was too much for Sasha’s self-control. The anger inside her boiled over. She raised her hand and slapped him across his face—hard. Immediately Gabriel dropped the box and grabbed hold of her.

Sick with shock and shame, Sasha shivered with self-disgust. This was what happened when Gabriel invaded her life. He brought with him memories from her past that aroused the kind of emotions she wasn’t equipped to withstand. Even now, with anger and shame swirling through her, she still wanted him, she admitted. She had to put some distance between them.

‘Gabriel, let me go,’ she begged, twisting and turning in his grip, forgetting that all she was wearing was a towel. It slipped off at exactly the moment Gabriel lost his self-control and picked her up bodily to stop her struggling.

Sasha sucked in an unsteady breath as she saw the look in his eyes when his hands encountered naked flesh instead of the towel.

A thick, dangerous silence gripped the room.

‘Gabriel,’ Sasha pleaded again, but it was too late. He was already kicking the towel and the contents of the cardboard box out of the way and carrying her over to the bed.

‘You’re right,’ he told her thickly. ‘You are in debt to me, and I intend to claim full payment—right here and now.’

CHAPTER TEN

H
ELPLESSLY
, S
ASHA
LOOKED
back at him as her original anger transmuted into a sharp thrill of longing, and the hand she had lifted to push him away curled round his neck to urge him down towards her.

This, of course, was why she had needed to keep a distance between them. Because when she was near him all she could think of was how much she ached for him.

The seventeen-year-old who had gazed at Gabriel and created a fantasy world of love to enclose the two of them had had no awareness of the reality of what she would feel for him. Sex to her had been something that went hand-in-hand with love, was a mere by-product of it. She had been totally unaware of its compulsive urgency and energy, its ferocity and intensity. She had had no idea that this was how she would come to feel. That girl was not to blame for what she, as a woman, was feeling now, Sasha recognised.

She closed her eyes and ran her hands feverishly over Gabriel’s torso, avidly relearning its shape, tugging buttons free of buttonholes as he kissed her, plunging her straight down into the depths of her own desire to that place where there was no reason, only the voices of her senses, whispering to her to hurry, to take what she could while she could, while there was still time.

She pushed his shirt off his shoulders, her eyes open now, as she watched him shrug it off completely, her body following his as he moved back to unfasten his belt. She leaned forward, tracing the line of his collarbone with her finger tip and then following it with small, slow kisses, breathing in the raw male scent of him as she stroked and kissed her way down his body. She was completely lost in the world of her own longing.

His belt was unfastened, his hands on the waistband of his chinos. Sasha lifted her hands and placed them against his chest, pushing him flat on the bed and then replacing his hands on his waistband with her own.

Slowly and carefully, inch by inch, kiss by kiss, she eased down his zip, relishing the sensual pleasure of slowly exposing to her touch and her gaze the plain of his belly crossed by the neat line of dark hair. She circled his navel with the tip of her tongue and then lifted her head to look, solemn-eyed, where the neat line of dark hair started to thicken. Beneath her hand, through the fabric of his chinos, she could feel his erection. A pulse quickened in her own body. She tugged impatiently at his chinos, exhaling in fierce relief when he responded to her need and stood up to remove the rest of his clothes.

On the beach there hadn’t been time for her to look at him properly, but now she could. Her heart lifted and lurched against her ribs, her nipples tightening as white-hot desire—a woman’s desire, not a girl’s—shot through her. This too was something she hadn’t known at seventeen. This fierce desire, stripped bare of the sweetness of fantasy, this real woman’s need for an equally real man in the most elemental way there was. At seventeen all she had really wanted and craved from him was emotional love. Now, here, in this bed, she was fully prepared to sacrifice love for the physical satisfaction he could give her, Sasha decided fiercely. She was a woman now, with a woman’s right to indulge her own sexuality and need. What had happened between them on the beach had turned the key on ten years’ worth of sexual denial and repression.

But she couldn’t afford this kind of self-indulgence, a warning inner voice reminded her. She was not free to do so. She was a mother, as well as a woman: a mother who needed to think first of her sons and not herself. Gabriel was their guardian, and she couldn’t give him the weapons to corrupt their innocent belief in her.

As though he had guessed what she was thinking, and already sensed her withdrawal, Gabriel reached for her, telling her fiercely, ‘It’s too late for second thoughts now, Sasha. I mean to claim what’s rightfully mine. And I intend to show you just what you gave up when you walked out on me.’

The softness of his voice, so loaded with sensual promise, made her tremble with longing. He was stroking her skin with the lightest of touches, the merest brush of his fingertips against her flesh, which suddenly burned for so much more. It was as though he was deliberately teasing her body, Sasha recognised, as he kissed her mouth lightly and then withdrew from her, only to repeat the brief kiss again and again, whilst the teasing, trailing movement of his fingertips against her skin became a form of slow torment.

Desperate for more than he was giving her, she tried to hold him closer. But he simply closed his hands round her upper arms and kept her still while he kissed her throat and then her shoulders, so briefly that she had to hold her breath so as not to miss the sensation.

‘You want me,’ he whispered to her. ‘Don’t you?’

All she could do was let the convulsions of open pleasure that seized her body give him his answer, and then moan against the liquid heat of her reward when his lips skimmed her breast, moving closer to her nipple. It was impossible to stop her body from straining eagerly towards him, or her hand, miraculously freed from imprisonment, from cupping the back of his head to urge him closer. The slow, erotic pull of his lips on the hard peak of her breast had always had the power to turn her belly liquid with erotic delight. But her memory had failed to provide a true record of the intensity, Sasha recognised weakly, when the teasing sensation of Gabriel’s tongue-tip circling her eager flesh became the heat of his mouth closing on it. Pangs of pleasure so intense that they made her cry out seized her, gave her over to wave after wave of surging arousal. It flooded her and possessed her, picking her up and carrying her with it.

Without her saying a word, Gabriel found the soft wetness his touch had made ready for him. The feel of his fingers against her sex drove her desire higher, her whole body arching up to the heat of his mouth to the caress of his fingertip circling the swollen ache of the source of her female pleasure.

For a few seconds it was enough. But her body held memories of other, deeper pleasures, and it demanded that the circling fingertip become a slow, deliberate stroke over the whole length of her outer sex. Not just once, but over and over again, until she was grinding her hips and her teeth in frustration, then reaching up to grip hold of Gabriel in her need to feel him fill the waiting emptiness inside her.

‘You want me?’ He had moved back a little from her to position himself between her legs.

Sasha nodded her head and watched him, waiting, holding her breath as longing flooded her body.

His hands were on her hips. He was bending his head over her body, lowering it, his breath warming her belly.

Sasha drew in a defensive breath and tensed her body against an intimacy she didn’t think she could survive. This wasn’t what she had expected, or wanted. It was too intimate, too personal, too liable to strip her of all her defences and leave her exposed to him.

But it was too late to stop him. Gabriel’s tongue-tip was already delicately stroking between the swollen pads of flesh that had opened as if in sensual offering, causing a rush of hot, shocked delight to invade her.

His tongue brushed slowly over the pulsing swell of aroused flesh it was seeking. Sasha tried, but failed to hold back her cry of pleasure. It radiated out from the place where the slow brushstrokes had become a sensually rhythmic slide. She could feel the swift assent to her climax coiling tightly inside her. It was too late now to escape. Her back arched of its own accord, her toes curling tightly as the feeling inside her soared towards its cataclysmic point of explosion. She felt Gabriel move, his weight settling against her, his heat between her thighs as he lifted her hips and thrust powerfully into her.

For the space of several strokes her body trembled on the edge of release, her muscles greedy for the sensation of his movement within them. And then the deep, gripping spasms of pleasure took over, possessing her completely as he drove through them to take her even higher. She could feel the sudden hot spill of his own climax with its added frisson of extra sensuality, and then the intensity was dying, leaving her lying defenceless and dependent on the support of Gabriel’s arms in its retreating tide.

For a long time it was impossible for her to speak. All she could do was lie there, listening as the harsh sound of Gabriel’s breathing softened, and accept the spasmodic aftershocks still galvanising her body.

Finally Gabriel released her and moved away from her. ‘You have thrown in my face all those things Carlo gave, but we both know that he never gave you what I just have.’

His words reached her as though they had dropped like stones into deep water from a great height, disappearing from view but leaving behind them echoes of their existence that would last for ever.

‘There’s more to life and living than sex, Gabriel.’

‘You can say that now,’ he mocked her. ‘But ten minutes ago—’

‘I can’t change the past, but I can control my future,’ Sasha retaliated. ‘I won’t be used as your sexual plaything, Gabriel. I have my sons to consider. No amount of pleasure in bed with you can come anywhere near being worth compromising my relationship with them.’

‘You say that now. But we both know that I can make you change your mind.’

Sasha closed her eyes, not wanting to watch as he gathered up his clothes, not wanting to know when he left her. But of course she did.