A Shadow of Guilt(41)

‘I didn’t want to reject you.’ Gio’s voice was rough and husky, weakening Valentina’s resolve. ‘Walking away was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I did it because I knew if I’d taken you, you would have woken afterwards and despised me even more than you already do.’

Those words lanced her deep inside. She thought he’d rejected her because he just didn’t want to sleep with her enough. She felt like an abject fraud because, if anything, she might have despised herself for being so weak, not him, but this was her only defence against Gio now. She tipped up her chin. ‘And what makes now any different?’

‘What makes it different is that I’m willing to risk your hatred because I want you too much. I’m not strong enough to stand back and watch some other man become your first lover.’

Valentina saw Gio’s hands curled to fists and felt his very tangible passion. The thought of some other man touching her, kissing her, almost made bile rise from her gullet.

Without Valentina realising it, Gio had come closer. He reached out a hand now and cupped her jaw, his fingers trailing against her neck where she could feel her pulse beating almost out of control.

He just said, ‘You want me … you can’t deny it, not here and now.’

‘I …’ she croaked and stopped, feeling seriously out of her depth. She couldn’t deny it. To deny it would be to utter the worst of falsehoods. Gio knew it. She knew it.

And in that moment she also knew that she was tacitly acquiescing because she had no choice. This had been building and building between them from the moment she’d seen him at the wedding just weeks before. And a long time before that, a small rogue voice insisted.

Gio smiled and it was unbearably bleak. ‘I’m giving you full permission to despise me all you want in the aftermath, Valentina, because I know you will. At least this way there can be total honesty between us. It’s physical, that’s all.’

His acceptance of her antipathy made something ache inside Valentina, but the promise of no emotions also freed something. She knew she could never love someone and risk losing them again, the way she’d lost Mario. Something pure and innocent inside her had been lost for ever that night. The grief was too deep, too raw. Gio was too inextricably bound up with pain for her, and guilt. The guilt of the shameful secret she was still too cowardly to acknowledge.

The shadow of Mario’s death was too long. But she wanted him. She’d never connected with another man on such a visceral, physical level. This would burn out, it had to. Intensity like this couldn’t last….

As if reading her thoughts, Gio said, ‘This will burn out, and when it does … we’ll move on.’

We’ll move on. Valentina wondered if they really could move on, find some kind of closure. For a long moment nothing was said. Valentina looked into Gio’s eyes until she felt as if she were drowning. And then she felt some great resistance she’d been clinging on to dissolve within her. She couldn’t fight this.

She put her hand over his on her jaw and turned her face so that she could press a kiss to his palm. She closed her eyes but she could feel the tremor that went through his body, or was it hers? She couldn’t tell.

Gio moved closer to her, putting a hand to the small of her back, and tugged her closer. Valentina sent up a fervent prayer that they could move on from this, because she didn’t have the strength to stop now. And as his mouth met hers and she melted into him and his kiss, it felt so right.

Gio was trying to curb the rush of desire sending his brain into a fiery orbit. Valentina felt so unutterably good in his arms. Soft and pliant and curvy. Her breasts were pressed against his chest and he could feel the thrust of hard nipples. Letting his hand drop he found the sweet curve of her bottom and cupped it, softly at first and then harder when he felt the instinctive sway of her hips towards him.

Victory was heady and he was rapidly getting lost in the nectar of the sweetest kiss. As sweet as it was though, he wanted more; he wanted harder, darker. He wanted to be inside her, and he had to be careful. She was innocent. Exerting extreme self-control Gio managed to somehow break the connection and pull back, almost groaning when he saw how long it took for Valentina to open heavy-lidded eyes, their dark depths even darker, pupils huge. Her lips dark red and swollen.

‘Let’s take this slow … OK?’

Valentina sucked in a breath, trying to force oxygen to her short-circuiting brain. That had just been a kiss and a relatively chaste one and already she felt as if she were burning up from the inside out.