She giggled. “What a coincidence. He thinks of you just as highly and feels as much goodwill toward you.”
“Infischio di lui—I don’t give a damn about him or what he thinks of me, or whether he’d like to have my head on a pike.”
“Ooh, such aggression. Has anyone told you how absolutely beautiful you are when you’re caught in a fit of hostility?”
“Porca l’oca—damn, Phoebe, you’d test Gandhi’s restraint.”
“I’m so glad you think so.” Before he could answer, she reached up and pressed her mouth to the throbbing pulse at his corded throat. “But with the way you’re prevaricating, I’m beginning to think you really don’t want to take me to your home.”
He rumbled something that zapped her nerveless, snatched her up, took her lips to within a hair’s breadth of sanity.
When breathing became an emergency, he let her go, left her clinging, panting. “Don’t stop…”
“Have to…I started this…again…and I promised…”
Yeah, and she’d made him do both. Start this. And promise.
This time, there’d be no one to blame but herself.
Ten
“W hy didn’t you ever tell me you lived in paradise?”
Phoebe stretched up on her tiptoes, arched her back, opened her arms wider as if to encompass the beauty around her.
Layer upon layer of natural and man-made wonders stretched as far as she could see, drenched in the Mediterranean sunlight and swathed in the western sea breeze.
She’d read up on this place when she’d learned it was Leandro’s birthplace. No wonder Moorish poets described it as “pearls set in emeralds.” That was exactly what this place and the town and countryside it overlooked resembled. Pearly buildings set in emerald nature. They should have added the sapphire, aquamarine and gold of the sea, sky and sandy beaches to the setting.
The palace complex sprawled in multiple levels over the mountainous site, the park around it overgrown with wild-flowers and grass and teeming with roses, orange trees, myrtles and dense elms. Its resident nightingales had been filling the night with songs on their arrival, but now the silence was penetrated only by the sound of water surging in fountains and flowing in cascades.
Leandro came up behind her, stopped millimeters from touching her, creating a force field of screaming sensuality between them, his lips hovering in a path of destruction from her temple to the swell of her breasts. Then he took the same path up. This time he breathed, exhaled his hunger over her. “Would it have gotten you here sooner if I had?”
She collapsed back against him, knowing what a phoenix felt like, burning to ashes only to be recreated, over and over. “How much sooner than forty-eight hours could I have been here?”
“Forty-eight minutes.” His murmur thrummed inside her in a path that connected her heart and core, sending both gushing. “Forty-eight seconds. I should get my R & D department working on teleportation. All that commute time was pure torment…”
His voice plunged on the last word, lurching through her with enough power to whirl her away from him. “You should talk about torment. You invented it.”
He surveyed her, giving new meaning to lord-of-all-he-surveyed. “If I did, you must share dibs on the patent.”
“Okay, from one tormentor to another, how about we do something else for a change? Have a truce and explore your paradise?”
“The one I’ve been cast out of, you mean?”
His tone was unchanged, that teasing, tempting burr. But she felt it. Eight year’s worth of damage and disgrace. It wrung from her the now second nature urge to ease his hurt, to defend him against the pain of the past. She took a breathless step forward. “The one you can now live in again, if you only desire.”
“Oh, I desire.” He aborted her movement, hungry strides backing her up across the huge stone terrace until he had her against the three-foot-high balustrade. His gaze swept her, from piled-up hair to white wedge sandals, practically setting her on fire. “How I only desire.”
“Truce, remember?” She pushed past him to search for air.
“Va bene. I’ll honor it, even if it was a one-sided deal.” He leaned his hips against the balustrade, shoved his hands in his pockets as if they itched, stretching his pants over a sight that almost had her dropping to her knees in worship.
He beckoned to his house staff, who immediately got busy setting up an outdoor café for them. He watched them for a minute then swept a moody glance around. “This place is the one thing I regret about being who I am. My life has always contrived to keep me away from all this.”
And “all this” was something huge to be kept away from.
She walked back to him, the need to connect with him physically in a non-sexual way overwhelming her again. She took his hand in both of hers. “I’m sorry you had to sacrifice being where you wanted to be for what you wanted to be.”
“Funny, eh? To succeed to the point that I don’t get the things I really want.” Her heart no longer had distinct beats, buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Did he include her in what he wanted and couldn’t get? Before she asked, he sighed. “But being away from here was out of my hands at first. The funny part is, when it was in my reach, everything I did took it away again.”
She blinked back agitation. She treasured that he was exposing his inner self, letting her in, but she couldn’t stand to see him vulnerable or morose. “You can change all that now.”
He looked at her as if attempting to chart her brainwaves. She felt he must have succeeded by the time he looked back at the preparations. Then his expression changed back to scorching flirtation. “Let me feed you. A tour through my paradise is hard work.”
She scampered behind him to the table his people had conjured up, a dream in crisp white, luscious cream and deep emerald. Silver and crystal flashed and sparkled in the sunlight that hurtled through the canopy’s sighing folds. He dismissed everyone, then sat down in one of the fer forgé chairs. She moved to her own chair, only to be pulled down onto his lap.
She settled on the hardness she was molten for. She gasped, wriggled, wrenching a growl from him as one hand pressed her down harder to meet what felt like an involuntary thrust.
She gulped around the need to crash her lips to his, to straddle him and take him all the way in, to her heart. “So this is what they mean by the lap of plenty? Or is it luxury?”