LITMIR.BIZ

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recognised, her gaze drifting over to the romantic table set for two. ‘Downstairs I think,’ she said as she looked back at him.

      He just nodded and straightened up from the door. ‘Five minutes, then,’ and he walked away—and if he glanced at the table by the window, Lizzy didn’t see him do it.

      Five minutes later she walked down the stairs to find Nina waiting for her. ‘Signor Luc is in the small dining room, signora,’ she said. ‘I will show you the way.’

      He was sitting at a round dining table idly pinching prawns from a steaming bowl of pasta while he waited for her to arrive. Another red hibiscus flower stood in a tiny white vase in the centre of the table and the candlelight came from several sources, flickering across the white tablecloth and against fine crystal wineglasses and his lean dark face.

      He came to his feet when he saw her hovering in the doorway, his golden eyes shadowing over as he scanned them down the short dusky mauve empire-line dress she’d decided to wear. Nerve-ends fluttered in response to his sombre scrutiny, and Lizzy hated the self-conscious bloom she felt warm her cheeks.

      It didn’t help that everything about him was so sense-crushingly elegant. Somehow in the last five minutes he’d managed to change into a white shirt left open at his throat and a pair of black silk trousers that accentuated the powerful length of his legs.

      ‘Pre-planning,’ he said, using her word from earlier with a dry cut to his voice.

      ‘I wish you would stop reading my mind,’ Lizzy complained as she walked forward.

      ‘Your face is—expressive.’

      Oh, I really needed to know that, Lizzy thought helplessly and muttered a husky thanks when he politely held her chair for her.

      ‘I know you are probably not hungry,’ he said in a lighter voice as he returned to his own seat. ‘But try to eat some of this for Nina’s sake. I think she’s confused enough about what’s going on between us, without us offending her by rejecting her food.’

      Lizzy nodded. She had seen the anxious expression on the housekeeper’s face when she’d come down the stairs. For a honeymoon couple supposedly so wildly in love with each other they’d been willing to take on the censure of the world just to be together, the way they were behaving had to look strange.

      So, on a deep breath that pulled in a bit shaky, she reached out for the bowl of pasta and spooned a few helpings onto his plate, then did the same for her own. Luc produced a bottle of champagne from an ice bucket set by his chair and popped the cork.

      ‘More pre-planning?’ Lizzy mocked.

      He just sent her a brief smile as he poured frothing foam into two crystal flutes. ‘You don’t touch this until you have eaten some pasta,’ he instructed.

      Lizzy uttered a small laugh. ‘You sound like my father.’

      He stiffened. ‘That was not my intention.’

      Staring at the carved lines on his face, she realised that she’d touched that raw nerve again in this man with nerves made of steel.

      He didn’t like to be compared with her father, she realized. It offended him. Nor did he always recognise a tease.

      And he didn’t like virgins.

      The supper continued in near silence after that, his withdrawal from the sparring arena as obvious as the stern expression he wore on his face. And Lizzy had killed her own chances of managing light conversation when she’d let herself remember what was supposed to come next.

      Her main problem being—she didn’t know what came next. She’d known on the flight over here. For the whole week before the flight over here she’d known exactly what was going to come next because Luc had spelt it out to her in cool, precise language.

      Marriage, sex, babies—little De Santis cubs.

      ‘It’s late.’ She stood up, with no idea why she picked that precise moment to throw in the keeping-up-appearances towel. ‘I think I’ll—go to bed.’

      She didn’t look at him, but she could feel his eyes on her, feel his sombre mood. And he didn’t say anything, just sat there lounging in his seat twisting a champagne flute between his fingers as he watched her make her retreat.

      The pale blue curtains had been drawn across the window and the intimate table for two had been cleared. The bed had been turned down and the lights in the room had been reduced to a misty glow either side of the bed. As she stared at the bed Lizzy hugged herself and shivered as if she were standing in the coldest place on earth.

      Slipping out of her clothes and into the smoothest white silk nightdress she’d ever run her fingers over, she tugged pins out of her hair until her scalp stung with the angry, frustrated violence she used.

      She didn’t look in a mirror—she didn’t want to see what was written on her face. She just crawled between the cool linen sheets, punched the pillow with a clenched fist, then laid her head on it and willed herself to go to sleep.

      It took hours—hours of lying there willing and wishing, and replaying the events of the day through a revolving door of spinning images and arguments and…waiting. At some point she must have accepted that her wedding night was going to be the same sterile event her wedding day had been because she finally managed to relax and drop into a deep, dark sleep.

      She was warm and relaxed and beautifully comfortable dreaming about gentle waves rolling into a soft sandy shore, when the feel of a set of long fingers gently massaging the silk covering her stomach brought her awake.

      She opened her eyes, felt the lazy moist warmth of a pair of lips taste the sensitive hollow by her ear—and tensed.

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      ‘NO, BE STILL,’ Luc’s dark husky voice commanded.

      But the vibrating rush of sensual panic made Lizzy’s heart beat a fast tattoo against her ribs and on a soft breath she flipped onto her back, eyes wide and staring up at him through the darkness.

      ‘I thought you—’

      He kissed the words away, sealing his lips to her lips and gently teasing the tiny tremor with his tongue. ‘We are going to rescue our wedding night, amore,’ he told her, ‘and we will take it very slowly, so slowly you will not remember to be scared.’

      Lizzy wanted to say that she wasn’t scared but she couldn’t, the hand at her stomach awakening her senses to the message being relayed to them by the slow, sensual caress his fingers made across the slippery silk. And she could feel the heat of him as he leant over her, feel that the full length of his body pressing intimately against hers was naked and aroused.

      She closed her eyes and parted her lips for him, felt his sigh as he took the invitation and sank his tongue into her mouth, gently at first, then with deepening passion as she responded, catching the increasingly erotic rhythm of his tongue stroking against hers. Her hands lifted up to clutch at him, her fingernails digging into the muscles braced like stretched satin in his arms, her body arching upwards in a compulsive need to press against that massaging hand.

      As if the telling movement triggered something inside him, he slid the hand lower, skimming over her hips and her thighs to reach for the edge of her nightgown, then with a smooth, swift, experienced efficiency stripped it all the way up to her throat.

      The loss of his mouth and the slick, lithe way he removed the scrap of silk over her head set her shivering and gasping, then the kiss was deep and hungry again, the massaging hand gliding now, over her newly exposed flesh. He stroked her thighs, the gentle contours of her hip and the indentation of her waist. When she whispered something into his mouth, he rose up and looked down her length to watch as his fingers moved on over the flat of her stomach to skim across the top of one pale rounded breast.

      Lizzy closed her eyes when she felt the possessive claim that hand made and was ready this time for the burning wave of pleasure that drenched her as he

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