LITMIR.BIZ

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      She picked up her knife and fork. ‘It’s fine…lovely, in fact. You must have a very good housekeeper.’

      ‘Yes, I have,’ he said. ‘She only comes in twice a week, however.’

      Scarlett looked up in surprise from rearranging the food on her plate. ‘Is that all? I thought you’d have a daily, if not fulltime help.’

      He picked up his wine glass and met her gaze. ‘I do not like sharing my living space with people who are virtually strangers. I thought you would have remembered that about me.’

      Scarlett did, but she thought with his billionaire status it might have changed. Alessandro had always been very particular about his privacy. She hadn’t met any member of his extended family in the whole time she had lived with him. When she had asked about his parents, whether they were coming to visit or if they could visit them, he had told her they were on an extended cruise and wouldn’t be back for months. All he had told her was that he was an only child, but now she wondered if there was more to his background than he was prepared to reveal.

      ‘How are your parents?’ she asked after a slight pause.

      ‘Fine.’

      ‘Where are they based now?’ she asked. ‘Do they live in Milan close to you?’

      ‘No, in Sorrento,’ he answered. ‘They have a nice place overlooking the sea.’

      ‘So you see them often?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘They must miss you,’ she offered into the ensuing lengthy silence.

      His eyes fell away from hers. ‘Yes…’he said, with a slight frown pleating his brow. ‘I imagine they do.’

      Scarlett picked up her glass and took a tiny sip. ‘Will they come out to visit you while you’re here in Australia?’ she asked.

      ‘They have talked about it once or twice, but nothing has been confirmed.’

      ‘Do you have a photograph of them?’ she asked.

      His eyes were shadowed as they met hers. ‘No, I do not.’

      ‘Are you close to them?’

      ‘Yes and no.’

      ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

      He let out a frustrated sigh. ‘Look, my parents do not have a particularly happy marriage. I do not spend much time with them for the simple reason I do not like hearing them bicker with each other all the time. It grates on me.’

      ‘Why don’t they get divorced?’

      ‘They do not believe in divorce.’

      ‘How ironic,’ she said with an ironic twist to her mouth, ‘That you—their only son—doesn’t believe in marriage.’

      ‘It is not that I have anything against marriage, Scarlett. I know of several very happy marriages where both parties love and respect each other.’

      ‘But you don’t want that for yourself.’

      ‘No.’

      Scarlett let her gaze fall away from the determined depths of his. ‘I told you four years ago you’ll end up a lonely old man.’

      ‘I am prepared to risk a bit of late-life loneliness to have my freedom now.’

      She brought her eyes back to his. ‘So you go from one relationship to the other, a month with one woman, a week or two with another? That’s such a shallow way to live.’

      ‘You are entitled to your opinion, but it is not the way I see things.’

      She threw him a disgusted look and said, ‘Go on, tell me—what’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had?’

      His gaze meshed with hers for several heart-chugging seconds. The silence was so intense, Scarlett could hear the sound of her own breathing.

      ‘It was the one I had with you, cara,’ he said with a little smile. ‘Three months, two days and nine-and-a-half hours.’

      Scarlett’s mouth went completely dry. ‘You…you counted the days and hours?’

      She wasn’t completely sure, but she thought his crooked smile contained a hint of sadness. ‘I missed you after you had gone,’ he said. ‘I was angry at first. Angry for days, weeks even, but then I kept finding things you had left behind—an earring or a little souvenir you had bought, and forgotten to put away with the rest of your things.’

      She ran her tongue over her lips. ‘What did you do with them?’

      ‘I kept them.’

      She frowned at him as he rose from the table. ‘But…but why?’

      He came around to help her to her feet, his fingers warm and vibrant on the bare skin of her arms. ‘Do you know, that to this day I am still not sure,’ he said, turning her to face him, his hands going to her waist, his fathomless gaze holding hers. ‘Perhaps I always hoped we would see each other again.’

      Scarlett felt her breath catch like a tiny fish-hook at the back of her throat. ‘Did-did you feel anything for me back then, Alessandro, anything at all other than desire?’

      He lifted one hand from her waist and brushed the back of his bent knuckles over the curve of her cheek, his eyes now more brown than green. ‘Why do you ask? You do not still have feelings for me, do you, cara?’

      She didn’t answer for the simple reason she couldn’t get her voice to work. She had locked away her feelings for him four years ago, but her chest felt like it was going to explode with the effort of keeping them back.

      His thumb stroked over the teeth marks on her lip in a tender caress. ‘You are wavering, are you not?’

      Her startled gaze flicked back to his. ‘No…’

      He smiled a sexy blood-heating-to-boiling-point smile. ‘That did not sound very convincing, tesore mio.’

      ‘No,’ she said more stridently this time, although she shivered all over when he brought her hips up against his.

      ‘Can you feel the effect you have on me?’ he asked in a husky tone. ‘How we still affect each other?’

      Scarlett could, but she didn’t want to admit it. She tried to put some space between their bodies, but his hold was both gentle and determined. She was breathing too hard and too shallowly to get her brain to work. Her body was taking over, just like it had all those years ago. One touch from him and she was going weak at the knees, her heart racing with excitement, her blood surging to all her pleasure points in preparation for the exquisite torture of his touch.

      His head came down, and she did nothing to stop his lips making contact with hers. Instead she closed her eyes, a soft sigh escaping from her mouth into the warm, dark cavern of his as he held her captive under the searing pressure of his kiss.

      His tongue searched for hers in a single commanding thrust that sent an earthquake-like reaction right through her. Aftershocks of pleasure reverberated throughout her body, each of her limbs beginning to tremble with the sheer force of being in his arms again.

      His hands shaped her with the confidence of a lover who knew her body well and desired it greatly. She revelled in the possessive clamp of his teeth against her breast as he roughly freed it from the barrier of her clothes, the almost primitive action sending hot sparks of desire to every part of her body. His mouth suckled on her hotly, his tongue laving her nipple, his teeth grazing her again.

      Somewhere at the blurry back of her conscience she knew she should be pushing him away, not clutching at him in passionate desperation, but there was nothing she could do to hold back her response. It was as if it was hard-wired into her system; every time he touched her he set her alight with burning need, just as he had done four years ago. One kiss had started something

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