Far From Perfect (16 page)

And finally she grasped it, receiving it as a gift into her heart and mind and body, by the grace of the beautiful man making love to her. Hot tears spilled onto her cheeks as just too much exquisite sensation imploded in the very essence of her being.

“I—”

Her mouth against the hard, sweat-sheened muscle of Nick’s warm shoulder, she bit down to prevent the telling words of love from revealing her. She tasted blood as with one last, marvelous surge he too grasped the glittering prize and emptied himself, groaning, inside her.

Nick glanced across the cabin of the Lisitano Learjet and found himself rubbing absently at the tiny wound in his shoulder through fabric layers of his suit jacket and his shirt.

It didn’t hurt, but somehow every time he looked at Anna, as he was now, he felt again the supreme pleasure that had accompanied the tiny sensual pain.

His sex hardened, recalling the perfection of her naked body. Today, for travelling, she was wearing a pair of snug-fitting jeans and an almost severe white blouse primly buttoned. Yet to Nick, she looked uniquely enticing and arousing. The lush, yet innocent curve of her eyelashes as she peered at the copy of Vogue Italia she was flicking through induced a twist of longing in him that he found difficult to tame. It was erotic, and yet something different, something indefinable.

Fighting for control, Nick watched as Anna frowned at something she was reading, and he felt an immediate urge to press his lips to her puckered brow and banish whatever was vexing her with a soothing kiss.

He’d made a shocking miscalculation. One so disturbing that had the equivalent taken place in his business dealings he would have lost thousands, possibly millions.

The physical reunion that he and Anna had shared had rocked him to his core. He’d never expected it to reach so deep inside him.

Anna was undoubtedly beautiful—as lovely as an angel—and even four years ago, unschooled, she’d been a remarkable lover. But that strange, accidental, almost unlooked-for night at La Girandole had been a revelation. The way she’d responded to him. Her unique intensity. The magical way she’d touched him and enveloped him and almost climbed inside his living soul had shaken everything he’d previously believed about sex and women.

Nick had enjoyed some pretty spectacular nights with some exceptional women in the four years since the teenaged Anna had stolen into his bed at Villa Rosa, but not one of them had unnerved him the way she had.

And she unnerved him now.

He’d thought he could read her easily, but all of a sudden she’d become opaque to him. Oh, she’d been affectionate enough after they’d made love, tender even, but she’d still maintained a subtle almost indefinable distance. There had been no fireworks and recriminations after this coupling. But there had been no clinging either. No staking of claims. No female territory marking. She acted as if they were exactly what they’d said they were.

Friends.

Friends who’d made love. Friends who were working together on a project.

Which was precisely what he wanted, wasn’t it? What he’d hoped for. Part of the plan. He’d reasoned with himself that they could enjoy each other for the duration of their fake engagement, and that’s just what they were doing. And afterwards they’d part again amicably. He would move on to his next partner, as he always did. And Anna, sensually primed and freed from her unfulfilling relationship with Martin Johnson, would find a man who could meet all her needs and expectations, both physically and emotionally. Maybe even a man she could marry and spend her life with?

That sensation Nick found hard to name surged inside him again, tightening and coiling. To the point of pain. He smoothed his fingers over the fine silk-mix of his jacket again, massaging his non-painful shoulder as if trying to induce a real discomfort that might distract him.

Dangerous thoughts threatened to well up and he mustn’t allow them to. That way lay disaster for Anna—and for him.

Awareness prickled through Anna’s body.

Placing her fingers across the face of Maria Rossi, who had been gazing up at her with sultry insolence from the Italian fashion spread, she looked up and glanced across at Nick. Exactly as her sixth sense had predicted, he was looking back at her with unnerving intensity.

Mad heat surged through her body, and she felt an imbalance somewhere in her mid-section that had nothing to do with airsickness.

Time after time, in the last couple of hurried days while they’d been preparing for this whistle-stop trip to Italy, she’d caught Nick staring at her with this same odd assessing expression on his face. Asking the same questions with his laser blue eyes, the ones that never seemed to reach his sculpted lips. Even though he’d barely touched her—other than in the most circumspect, social way—since two nights ago.

“What?” she demanded without thinking, meeting his gaze as boldly.

“I was just about to tell you that we’ll be landing at Cristofero Colombo in a few minutes. You seem to be deeply absorbed in your magazine.”

How could he sound so cool, so detached, after the conflagration that had raged between them in bed? In a lot of ways, it had barely seemed to have affected him, while for her…well…everything had changed.

Biting her lip, she looked down at the magazine again. Maybe
there
was the reason that their night together hadn’t rocked his world as it had rocked hers.

“Wouldn’t you be?” she suggested tartly, holding up the page for him to see.

Nick gave her a bland look, still apparently unmoved, even by the sight of a woman who might, or might not, still be his real girlfriend. Exceptional sex might be something he enjoyed with La Rossi too. The Italian actress was an internationally acclaimed beauty and one of the world’s most sensual film stars.

After a long pause, Nick sighed.

“Yes, Maria is a friend of mine, as you well know.”

“Oh. Really. And are you
friends
the way that you and I are
friends
?”

What
is
the matter with me?
Anna fought the urge to crumple the glossy pages.

I mustn’t show him I’m jealous and I mustn’t show him how I really feel. It won’t get me anywhere and it’ll only cause friction between us.
Friction was something Carlo would spot, no matter how ill he was. Not to mention everybody else who was supposed to be taken in by this charade.

Nick seemed unfazed by her accusation.

“There are different of kinds of friendships, Anna,” he said evenly, his hand lifting momentarily to his shoulder, as if to remind her of the character of their particular relationship. Anna felt a fresh rush of heat, remembering…

“And no two are the same,” Nick went on, calmly reaching for the buckle of his seatbelt. “Now buckle up. We’re landing in a minute.” His crisp, businesslike tone indicated that for him at least, the discussion was over.

But demons seemed to have taken command of Anna’s tongue. “It
was
her, wasn’t it? The one who phoned when we were at Deighton Industries?”

A plume of backhanded satisfaction shot through her at the sight of Nick’s suddenly quelling glance. She’d rather it hadn’t been Maria Rossi—even though she knew unequivocally that it had been—but at least she’d got some kind of reaction from him!

“Maria needed some advice from me, and naturally I needed to see her in person.” The moment of irritation, or whatever it had been, was gone as fast as it’d appeared, and once more he wore his beautiful, unrevealing mask. “I would have done exactly the same for you if the tables had been turned. Now please fasten your safety belt. Or do I have to fasten it for you?”

Come on then!
she wanted to challenge him.
Either that, or just stop treating me like a child. I was grown up enough for you the other night.

But instead, she just said, “Of course.” Then, setting aside the magazine with controlled, tightly buttoned-up care, she reached for the buckle of her belt.

For a VIP like Nick, airport formalities were relatively painless, and in no time at all they were speeding out of the city of Genoa towards the exclusive private clinic where his father was recovering.

The back seat of the luxurious Lisitano limousine was almost as spacious and well-appointed as the Learjet had been, but Anna still felt oppressed and claustrophobic despite the opulence. Nick was working his way through the briefcase full of papers that one of his personal assistants had handed him at Cristofero Columbo Airport, and the fact that his attention was now elsewhere should have been a respite.

But it wasn’t. His presence and proximity seemed to bear down on Anna, almost physically pressing on her skin and sensitizing it, and she could only thank her lucky stars that Nick had deemed it impractical for the two of them to return to Italy in the Vampiro.

“I’m sure you’d enjoy the ride,” he’d told her, his blue eyes thoughtful, almost wary. “But alas, my vampire car has next to no boot, and I doubt what little space there is could accommodate even a fraction of the luggage required by the average woman, even for a trip of a few days.”

On the point of rebuking him for male chauvinist pre-conceptions, Anna had held her tongue and dismissed the remark with a nervous laugh. Boot space wasn’t the issue at all. Distance between them was. And she sensed Nick was just as leery as she was of the enforced intimacy of the Vampiro’s compact interior.

The vast acreage in the Lisitano
Lusso limousine was bad enough.

Even though she’d always enjoyed the Ligurian countryside—a tapestry of vineyards and lemon and olive groves once they’d left the Genoese sprawl—there seemed to be nowhere to look but the interior of the quietly gliding car. Nick’s long legs stretched out in front of him, far too close to hers.

Sealed in by steel and tinted glass, Anna felt as if she were in a capsule of compressed tension, with Nick at its heart. His subtle cologne was intensified by the confined space, and it was seeping into her brain and intoxicating her, warping her back to the night at La Girandole, and the feel of that hard, beautiful body clasped against her. He might be clad in another of his dark, exquisitely tailored suits, she was just as aware of him as she would have been if he’d been stark naked and lying on top of her.

“Speak then, if you’re going to.”

Nick’s sudden, faintly impatient words made Anna physically leap in her seat. Clearly his attention had not been entirely on the papers and files he’d been steadfastly working through. His Mont Blanc hovered over a document as he looked up and fixed her with blue, questioning stare.

“What do you mean?”

Nick’s eyes narrowed, and in what looked like long-suffering gesture, he capped his elegant pen and laid it down in his briefcase, which he set aside in the limousine’s capacious foot well.

“Anna, you’ve been staring at me non-stop for the last fifteen minutes at least. I’m guessing that means you want to speak to me?”

He crossed one long, lean leg over the other and stretched his arms out across the back of the seat, the action blatant and challenging. Daring her to look more, look closer, to ogle him in all his male pulchritude.

“I wasn’t staring,” she fibbed, “And even if I was, how could you tell, you’ve had your nose stuck in your work since we touched down.” Wild heat surged through her veins, triggered by the lie and by the deceptive indolence of his pose.

“A man can always tell when a woman is checking him out. Especially one he’s sleeping with.”

“
Slept
with,” she corrected him, “There’s only been the once…and four years ago…and that other thing. In the kitchen.”

“Surely that’s not going to be all, is it?” He cocked his head to one side, his brilliant eyes narrowing. “You still want me. I still want you. We’re still
friends
.” His emphasis on the word was silken, almost insulting, and for a moment he looked impossibly predatory. Then his expression softened and became kinder.

“You know how much I care for you, Anna.” He sat up and leant towards her. “And we’re good together. Surely we can take some pleasure in each other for a while?”

One long hand reached out, curved against her cheek, perfectly matching its contour. The pad of his thumb brushed her lips, light as the kiss of a butterfly, yet supreme in its dominance of her response. Against every command from her higher brain, Anna found herself leaning into the pressure, wanting to kiss not only his thumb and his hand, but every last bit of him. Within the space of only seconds, he’d rendered her entire body a slave to her senses.

The back of the car was a cocoon. They were cut off from the driver and the world by one-way tinted glass. A vision of falling into his arms and his kisses and his total possession here on this soft, fragrant leather upholstery bloomed fully formed in Anna’s mind. Her body primed itself for him, and she gasped as her nipples suddenly felt tight and aching beneath her starchy blouse, and lower down she grew shockingly moist and honeyed. The pressure of Nick’s thumb delicately increased and her lips parted, tasting his skin.

Desire, the same raw emotion she’d experienced two nights ago, catapulted through her, unrestrained and uninhibited, all connection to good sense and better judgment now severed.

Anna could only feel and want and—yes—love. She sucked on Nick’s thumb and slumped like an unstrung puppet against the back of the seat, aware of him following her momentum and making a small sound of male satisfaction as he reached for her with his free hand. Edging his body ever closer to hers, he permitted the evocative caress a moment longer and then gently removed his hand and pressed his parted lips over Anna’s.

Oh, how she’d longed for this kiss.

For the two whole days since La Girandole they’d shadow-danced around each other, and every fiber of Anna’s being had yearned for the taste and touch of Nick. Whimpering, she allowed him to commandeer her mouth, her tongue—darting and subduing her with his own tongue and with the intense force of the kiss. He too had been yearning, she knew it. He too had been waiting for the fire, kindled originally here in Italy, to break its bounds.