Сара Морган – Mediterranean Tycoons: The De Santis Marriage / The Greek Tycoon's Unwilling Wife / The Sicilian's Virgin Bride (страница 8)

‘For goodness’ sake!’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Don’t you think this situation is bad enough without you trying to fly to the moon?’

He laughed! Lizzy couldn’t believe she was hearing it! ‘You have a quaint way of expressing yourself.’

If the desk hadn’t been between them she would have thrown herself at him in fury! ‘I am not marrying you!’ she had to make do with shouting out.

‘Why not?’ Throwing himself into the chair behind the desk, he arched her a challenging look. ‘Is there something wrong with me?’

‘Don’t ask me to make a list,’ Lizzy muttered, wrapping her arms around her body and glaring at him while her mind shot off in all directions trying to find the sense in this mad situation. ‘You’ve got the eyes of a lion,’ she then heard herself murmur out of absolutely nowhere!

‘Lions mark their territory, jealously protect their women, but they do not hunt,’ he responded lazily.

‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ Lizzy snapped, wishing she’d kept her silly mouth shut about his eyes.

He offered a shrug. ‘I am ready to mate. I want—cubs. I did not have to hunt for Bianca because she’s always been there in the background of my life ready to claim once she’d grown up. Now here you are.’ Those damned golden eyes fixed on her face. ‘You don’t need hunting either because I have you caught and shackled by your brother’s stealing tendencies and an attraction for me you find impossible to hide.’

‘I am not attracted to you in any way, shape or form,’ she denied stiffly.

‘Then why the sweet, tender kiss?’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ He was like a dog with a particularly juicy bone to gnaw on. ‘It wasn’t a kiss! I accidentally brushed my mouth against your throat! And I was drunk!’ she added for good measure.

‘Tipsy on months of guilty lusting,’ he taunted. ‘Your attraction for me has been right there in your body language from the first time we met in London and you couldn’t stop yourself from hungrily drinking me in,’ he declared arrogantly. ‘It was there when we met in the lift in Milan. It was definitely there last night when we danced together and I gave in to temptation and waltzed you out onto the terrace. And it was absolutely there in that dizzily irresistible brush you allowed your lips and the tender moist tip of your tongue to make against my throat.’

Feeling as if she were drowning in the hot steam of her own embarrassment, Lizzy struck back. ‘You are more than ten years older than me, and that makes you really old in my eyes, signor.’

‘Thirty-four to twenty-two is a good difference, cara.’ It was the first time he had used that endearment to her and it quivered down her spine like a terrible sin. ‘It means I can offer you experience and fidelity, having worked out my studding period when I was your age. Whereas you will give me your youth, your beauty, your wonderful smooth, tight, creamy white body—and your loyalty when you switch it from your friend and your brother to protect your father from the worst scandal you can possibly imagine if his name gets dragged into this.’

‘How cold you are.’ Arms tightening across her body, she shivered.

‘Not between the sheets.’

‘And that’s it?’ Lizzy flashed. ‘Between the sheets I get your warmer side and your fabulous experience while out of them I get to play the role of your very rich, very pampered, young trophy wife and face—saver? No affection offered, no love?’

‘Love is an overrated fantasy.’

‘Coming from you I expect that it is.’

‘Are you digging at my dysfunctional family again?’

‘I’m digging at the fact that I don’t like you very much.’

‘But you desire me like crazy,’ he confided silkily.

Lizzy made a tense movement of her body, a frown like a dusky cloud settling across her face.

‘You’re turned on just by looking at me,’ he continued relentlessly. ‘You have this instinctive knowledge that the sex is going to be so good between us and it nags at you like a persistent ache. If I stepped round this desk right now and drew you into my arms you would go up like a Roman candle.’

‘Without the bed and the sheets?’ The sarcasm was out before she could stop it. If she’d meant it as a slap at his horrible self-confidence all it did was to make him laugh—softly, deeply, a seriously disturbing, huskily attractive sound that came from somewhere low down in his chest. ‘I can be adaptable, bella mia, if encouraged.’

Hating his lazy, laid-back superior poise and self-assurance, she was riled into taking him on. ‘So if I decided one day to, say, stroll into your office and demand sex with you while you’re busy on the phone making more millions?’ she challenged.

‘Is that one of your fantasies?’ he quizzed, bringing a flush crawling up her throat. ‘Then, of course, I would do my best to accommodate you—just make sure you arrive wearing no tights.’ He ran his eyes down over her. ‘Panties can be dealt with, tights demand a distinct lack of finesse, and if your fantasy forces me to make millions while I accommodate you then, the easier you make it for me, the more pleasure you will get out of it.’

‘God, you’re insufferable.’ Lizzy spun her back to him, barely able to believe the calm insolence with which he’d said all of that and despising herself for giving him the chance.

‘Just more experienced at this game than you are,’ he told her. ‘Though sex across my desk while I talk on the telephone is novel,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe we will try it.’

Her slender shoulders hunched and she lifted up her hands to grab at them as if doing so would keep his outrageous suggestion out. It didn’t matter that she knew she had started it. He was right and he was so much more experienced at this game so all she’d managed to do by taking him on was to walk herself right into his tormenting trap.

‘Do you know where the runaway lovers have gone?’ The question came at her right out of the blue.

‘No.’ She shook her head.

‘Do you know, then, how your hair catches fire in the sunlight coming in through the window behind you?’

That oh, so silky spoken observation flared her hair around her face as she spun around. ‘For goodness’ sake, will you stop playing this crazy game now?’ she shrilled out.

‘No game,’ he denied, and he was lounging in the chair now, so damn sure of himself and everything he’d dared to say to her that she couldn’t take her eyes off him, couldn’t not be aware of the sensual pulse emanating from every part of his long, lean body—like a man with his desire on the rise. The half-lowered eyelids, the low burning glow of gold in his eyes. The mouth that had softened to show its capacity for enjoying the pleasures of the senses and the challenge in his expression that wasn’t really a challenge but a heat-seeking message of absolute promise.

‘Marry me next week and I will lift your sex life from the disappointingly mundane to the bone-melting exciting,’ he offered.

Lizzy gaped. ‘Who told you my sex life was—?’

‘Bianca, who else?’

Her best friend, Bianca, had said that about her—to him?

‘She gave you two different lovers, neither of which lasted beyond the first venture between the sheets. Englishmen, of course,’ he said, ‘with a fumbling lack of finesse.’

‘And you think speaking to me like this shows finesse?’ The heat of dismay and the sharp sting of hurt were crawling all over her. She had never felt so let down by Bianca in their ten year friendship! How dared she speak to him about Lizzy’s personal life—how dared she tell such wicked lies about it? ‘Well I don’t,’ she said grimly. ‘And I am not going to listen to any more of it.’

She turned—once again to leave.

But that relentlessly cool voice was not going to let her go. ‘Marry me next week and I will bail your father out of debt, pay off his loan and send in my own team of experts to help oversee the recovery of his company,’ it continued, bringing her to yet another quivering standstill. ‘Which,’ he added, ‘I will fund until it can stand on its own two feet. Don’t marry me next week, and I will light the litmus under an embezzlement scandal then just stand back to watch it go up.’

The bottom line, Lizzy recognised, the very lowest point he was prepared to go to to save his pride.

‘Someone owes me, Elizabeth,’ he went on grimly. ‘Either you pay the debt or your family pays that debt. The fact that I desire you is the only thing giving you the luxury of choice.’

‘This is just revenge,’ she whispered.

‘Revenge is a form of passion, mi amore. My advice would be to grab my offer while the passion for revenge still rides hot in my blood.’ Words…he was clever with words. So clever he was tying her head and her emotions into knots. Moving in a daze, she went to stand in front of one of the windows, staring out at the glittering lake backed by the misty grey mountains in the distance and the town of Bellagio just a simmering cluster of white on the opposite bank of the lake.

So near yet so far away, she thought bleakly. She could be marooned on an island with Luc as her jailor. As he’d already pointed out, she wasn’t going anywhere without his express say-so.

And Matthew, she considered. Why had he done it? He was older than her, but only by eighteen months, and he’d had good reason to resent their father for his strict refusal to accept that his son had a right to choose what he wanted to do with his own life. Had he taken the money in an angry desire to hit back at their father? Had Bianca encouraged him to do it because it was his father who’d put a stop to their romantic plans to marry two years ago?