LITMIR.BIZ

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muttering from time to time. She could feel the anger rolling off him in waves—even his warm, masculine scent was infused with resentment—but she refused to look his way. She could not face him knowing what she had let him do.

      She squeezed her eyes shut. Still her muscles buzzed with the memories, her tender tissues still pulsing, still anticipating the completion that would now never come.

      God, she thought, squeezing her thighs together in an effort to quell the endless—the pointless—waiting, but she was every kind of fool. Maybe Bahir was right. Maybe she was irresponsible after all. But not in the way he imagined.

      Of course, their arrival into Pisa was delayed, the airport busy trying to catch up after the storm disruption of the previous day, the tarmac crowded with charter planes and passenger buses all jockeying for space.

      So, by the time they landed, her nerves were strained to breaking point and she no longer cared that he was the father of her child or that she had agreed to tell him so. She just wanted him to be gone.

      ‘I’m good from here,’ she said without looking at him, as her luggage was stowed into a waiting car outside the busy airport. ‘I have a driver. You might as well go.’

      She was dismissing him? His lip curled, and it was nothing to do with the smell of diesel in the air or someone’s pizza remains lying discarded and sweltering in the gutter. ‘That’s not the way it works, princess.’

      She glared sharply up at him then, probably the first time she’d looked at him since storming out of his room early this morning, and he knew he’d rubbed her up the wrong way by reverting to her title. Tough. The less personal they kept this, the better for both of them. ‘The deal was to see you safely home.’

      ‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

      ‘It’s not up to you,’ he said, tossing his own overnight bag into the trunk alongside her bags, before nodding to the driver to close it. ‘And it’s not up to me. I made an agreement with Zoltan and that agreement stands.’

      ‘There’s no need …’

      He pulled open the back door for her. ‘Get in.’

      ‘But I don’t want you …’

      He leaned in close to her ear, close enough so that anyone sitting at the outdoor tables nearby might even think he was whispering sweet nothings into her ear. ‘You think I want you? You think I want to be here? But this isn’t about what I think of you right now. This isn’t personal. This is duty, princess, pure and simple. I said I’d do this and I’ll damned well do it.’

      He drew back as she stood there in the open door for what seemed like for ever, looking like she might explode, her eyes filled with a white heat, her jaw so rigidly set it could have been wired in place.

      ‘Any time this year would be good, princess. I know how you’re in such a hurry to be reunited with your precious children.’ Not to mention how much of a hurry he was in to be done with her for good.

      Her sorceress’s eyes narrowed then, and something he’d swear looked almost evil skittered across their dark surface while her lips stretched thin and tight across her face. ‘You’re right, this is all about duty,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten that for a moment. Just don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you.’

      He didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. He didn’t want to know. He slammed the door behind her, and after a few words, giving the driver a day off, took the keys and the wheel. There was no way he was sharing the back seat with her. At least driving along Italy’s frenetic autostradas would give him something relatively sane to think about.

      It sure beat thinking about her.

      He headed the car north towards Genoa and the exit that would take them into the northern Tuscan mountain region where she lived, while she sat glowering behind her dark glasses behind him. Such a different woman than the one who had graced his bed last night.

      What had that been all about? What was her problem? Had that been some perverse kind of pay-back, a kind of getting even for him cutting her off all those years ago?

      Was she still so bitter that she would seek any chance at revenge, including finding any justification that she could to stop him mere moments from plunging into her?

      What other reason? Because she could hardly take umbrage at being thought irresponsible. God, the entire world’s media had used that word in reference to her at one time or another, and with good reason. It could hardly be considered an insult. One didn’t have to look further than not one, but two illegitimate children to prove that.

      The traffic was heavy on the autostrada, but the powerful car made short work of the kilometres through the wide valley to the turn-off onto the narrower road that led towards the mountain region where she lived. Discovering that had been a surprise. He’d figured she’d still be living somewhere close to a city, somewhere she could party long into the night before collapsing long into the day. But she had children now. Perhaps she left them with their nanny while she partied. Maybe she was responsible enough to do that. That would be something.

      The pace slowed considerably after they’d left the autostrada, the road wending its way along a fertile river valley flanked by looming peaks and through picturesque villages, where the corners of buildings intruding on the road, and blind corners that left no idea what was coming towards you, became the norm.

      He dodged yet another slow-moving farm tractor. This was clearly an inconvenient place to live. But maybe she didn’t come home too often.

      He glanced in the rear-view mirror to see her leaning back against the leather upholstery, her eyes still hidden under those dark glasses. But nothing could hide the strain made obvious in the tight set of her mouth.

      So she was tired. Who wasn’t after last night?

      He had no sympathy. None at all. At least she’d enjoyed some measure of relief. Unlike him, who had burned unsatiated all the hours till daylight, and then some just thinking about her spread out on his bed, wanton, lush and, oh, so slick.

      He had been just moments from the place he had longed to be ever since she had appeared like a sorceress on the terrace, gift-wrapped in a transparent layer of silk …

      ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she said from the back. ‘You have to turn left here.’ He had to haul the car around or he would have missed the turn completely.

      ‘How far?’ he said as the road narrowed to little more than a one-lane track up the side of a mountain and a snow sign warned of winter hazards.

      ‘A few kilometres. Not far.’ He wanted to snarl at the news, more anxious than ever, the closer they got to her home, for his duty to be done.

      On the autostrada, with the power and engineering excellence of the car at his disposal, those few kilometres would have taken no time at all. On this narrow goat’s track, with its switchback bends and impossibly tight, blind corners, it was impossible to go fast, and the climb seemed to take for ever. Longer than for ever, when all you wanted was for it to be over.

      The tyres squealed their protest as he rounded another tight bend, pulling in close against the mountainside as a four-wheel drive coming the other way spun its wheels just enough to the right that the two vehicles slid past with bare millimetres to spare.

      He took a ragged breath, relieved at the near miss. What the hell was she doing all the way up here? It would be hard to find somewhere more remote, and there was no way he could reconcile the Marina he knew—the high-living girl who was as wilful as she was wild and wanton—with somewhere so rustic.

      Though he could see why anyone not enamoured of the party world would want to live here. For, as they scaled the mountain, the vistas grew more and more impressive, of ridge after ridge, valley after valley framed by even higher peaks to one side of him and a range of grey-green mountains in the distance.

      ‘Just on the next bend,’ she said at last. ‘The

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