MARIETTA CLUNG TO Nico’s back as he paused at the top of the cliff, her belly a cauldron of excitement and nerves. She couldn’t believe they were doing this.
She peered over his shoulder, all the way down to the crescent-shaped strip of white sand at the foot of the cliff. It was a very, very long way down, and the steps hewn into the rock face were much steeper than she’d imagined. Her arms tightened reflexively around his neck.
‘I’ve got you, chérie.’
His deep voice seemed to resonate through her chest, and the unexpected endearment made her pulse hitch.
‘Ready?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
As ready as I’ll ever be.
And then he started down the steps and the buzz of anticipation turned into a wild flutter. They were doing this. And she really couldn’t believe it. Not after last night, when he’d stormed off and she’d been certain she had pushed him too far.
She’d sat by the pool, watching the rich golds and ambers and deep purples of the sunset bleed into one another, and tried to attribute her uncharacteristic behaviour to having had too much sun during the day. Too much wine with her supper.
But neither of those excuses was valid.
The truth was she had wanted to provoke him—because a reckless yearning had been building in her all day. A yearning to find out if a man like Nico could be attracted to a woman like her—a woman whom society largely viewed as disabled.
She knew the wheelchair frightened most men. Some wrongly assumed she couldn’t have sex or wouldn’t enjoy it. Others, she guessed, were repelled by her useless legs. Davide had been different in that regard, and their sex-life had been healthy, satisfying—though not the kind of passionate, all-consuming sex she’d fantasised about as a teenager.
She had a feeling deep in her belly, where the butterflies had gathered en masse now, that sex with Nico would be the kind of wild, passionate sex she’d long ago resigned herself to never experiencing.
And Nico was attracted to her. She had seen the evidence as soon as she’d made that provocative suggestion about swimming naked at his beach. Had seen it stamped on his face—a raw hunger her body had instinctively responded to with its own powerful throb of need.
He had almost kissed her. Standing there grasping her chin and glaring down at her, anger and desire pulsing off him in waves, he had looked like a man fighting for control.
And, oh, she had wanted him to kiss her. Even knowing that if he did it wouldn’t be gentle. That there would be fire and fury behind his kiss. When he hadn’t—when he’d walked away from her instead—her disappointment had been so intense it had felt like a physical blow against her ribs.
He’d negotiated the last few steps now, and Marietta’s eyes widened as he carried her across the sand to where a blue-and-white-striped awning stood in a sheltered lee off the cliff. Beneath the awning lay a picnic rug and a bunch of big, comfy-looking cushions, and on a corner of the rug, shaded from the direct heat of the midday sun, sat a large wicker basket.
‘Nico!’ Her voice came out breathless. ‘How many trips did this take you?’
‘A few.’
He knelt on the rug and she slid off his back, the friction between their bodies teasing her already over-sensitised nipples into hard, aching nubs. She plucked her tee shirt away from her breasts before he turned, glad that she’d put the loose-fitting white tee on over her yellow bikini top. She slipped her hands under her legs and straightened them out in front of her.
Nico propped two cushions behind her back. ‘Comfortable?’
She nodded, looked around her. ‘It’s beautiful, Nico.’
She ran her hand through the warm sand. The pearly-white granules felt luxuriously soft as they sifted through her fingers. She looked towards the calm water in the inlet. It was a clear, stunning turquoise—the kind seen on postcards of exotic locales that most people only ever dreamed of visiting. Best of all, the cove was utterly, totally private.
‘I can’t believe you’ve never been down here before.’
Nico shrugged and kicked off his sneakers. He wore khaki shorts and a black polo shirt and he looked big and vital and masculine. He lifted the lid off the hamper. ‘I didn’t know what you’d want to eat...’ He started pulling out items. ‘So I brought a bit of everything.’
He wasn’t joking. There were fruits, olives, crackers, breads, pickles and a variety of meats and cheeses in a small cooler, plus water, soda and two bottles of wine—a red Cabernet and a chilled white. Cutlery, plastic plates and glasses emerged as well, along with condiments and a packet of paper serviettes.
Marietta couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I bet you never go anywhere unprepared.’
Nico opened a water bottle and handed it to her. ‘Who’s the guy you want to be with when disaster strikes?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You,’ she conceded.
A smug look crossed his face. He planted his hands on his thighs and surveyed the enormous spread of food. ‘I hope you’re hungry.’
‘Not this hungry.’ She reached for a bunch of green grapes and smiled. ‘But I’ll give it my best shot.’
In the end, however, Marietta found she could eat very little. Thoughts of what they might do together after lunch made her stomach too jittery. She did manage a small glass of white wine, hoping it would lend her some much needed Dutch courage.
Now she lay on her back under the awning, her eyes closed, wondering if she needn’t have bothered with the wine. If perhaps she’d been a fool to think anything was going to happen beyond a picnic lunch on the beach. Because Nico hadn’t suggested they swim, nor made a move to touch her, nor even so much as uttered a word in the last fifteen minutes.
Yet a definite tension permeated the air. Her sixth sense could intuit it—just as her other senses could detect him. The scent of soap and the faint tang of clean, male sweat. The sound of his breathing, deep and even. And his heat. She could feel the heat that seemed always to radiate from him, as if his body were a non-stop furnace. Whenever he was close that heat enveloped her, penetrating her skin, sinking into her bones and making her feel as if she were melting.
She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him. He lay beside her, his eyes closed, but she knew he wasn’t sleeping. Nico didn’t strike her as the kind of man who indulged in daytime naps. In fact she half suspected that even at night he slept with one eye open. She let her gaze drift down, away from his strong profile, and mentally braced herself for the heart-stopping impact of his bare torso.
He was utter perfection. Hard muscle, smooth skin, dark, crisp hair in all the places a man should have hair—including a liberal sprinkling over his sculpted pecs and a narrow line bisecting his washboard abs. A black ink tattoo adorned his upper left arm and a long rough-edged scar curled over the same shoulder.
I’ve seen more things in this world than you can imagine—and most of them I never wish to see again.
His words from the previous evening came back to her, sending a shiver through her now as they had then. Nico had sounded so grim in that moment, so haunted, and she’d wanted to ask him what he’d seen that had been so terrible he never wanted to see it again. That had made him into a man who guarded his privacy and kept himself aloof from the world. But she had reined in her curiosity, knowing it wouldn’t be welcome. Knowing instinctively that if she probed, their conversation would be over before it started.
Her gaze trailed the jagged line of the scar, and she recognised the tattoo on his arm as the emblem of the French Foreign Legion. Had the awful things he’d seen been the horrors of war? Of course. They must have been. Soldiers who served in conflict zones witnessed first-hand the worst of mankind’s atrocities.
‘Why did you join the Legion?’
She grimaced as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant to speak them aloud. She opened her mouth to retract the question—but he spoke first.
‘Because I was eighteen and full of testosterone and didn’t know what else to do with my life.’
Nico kept his eyes closed as he spoke. He’d surprised himself by answering her question. Normally he shut down conversations that ventured too far into personal territory, but right then he figured talking was the lesser of two evils. The greater evil—the dark, sexual desire prowling through him—couldn’t be unleashed. Not on Marietta.
He realised that now.
Belatedly.
Hell. What had he been thinking? She wasn’t one of the easy, vacuous, forgettable women with whom he occasionally hooked up for the sole purpose of satisfying his physical needs. She was Marietta, his friend’s sister—a woman he respected. A woman who was unforgettable.
He had told himself she was no ingénue, and she wasn’t. No innocent would have goaded him last night without understanding where such provocation could lead. What she was inviting. And yet as they’d sat there on the sand, sharing food and idle small talk—the kind of simple pleasure his late wife would have loved—he’d looked at Marietta and thought about the incident at the bistro, her concern for the young couple. And he’d realised that after everything this woman had been through, she was still pure. She still had compassion in her heart. Still cared about others.
How could he touch her and not taint her with his darkness? He had nothing to give her. Nothing to offer beyond the pleasures of the flesh.
‘Did your parents not object?’
He slid his right hand under the back of his head and continued to keep his eyes closed. She’d taken her tee shirt off after they’d eaten, and seeing her in that yellow bikini top only inflamed his libido.
‘I didn’t have parents,’ he said.
‘Oh... I... I’m sorry, Nico.’ She fell silent a moment. ‘Did you lose them when you were young?’
‘My mother died of a stroke when I was six,’ he said, surprising himself yet again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken of his childhood. Couldn’t remember the last time someone had shown an interest, aside from Julia. ‘She was a solo parent—I never knew my father.’
He heard Marietta shift, felt the weight of her gaze on him.
‘Did you live with relatives after your mother passed away?’
‘My mother didn’t have any relatives. I became a ward of the state and spent the remainder of my childhood in children’s homes and foster care.’
‘Oh, Nico... That must have been difficult.’
It hadn’t been a walk in the park. His mother had been a good woman, a loving maman, and he’d missed her. But he’d survived. Years of being shuffled around in an indifferent welfare system had thickened his skin.
‘Don’t go all sympathetic on me, Marietta. Every second person out there has had a difficult childhood.’ He opened his eyes, turned his head to look at her. ‘I understand you and Leo lost your mother young—and your father a few years later?’
‘Si. And I missed my mother desperately—which is probably why I acted out as a teenager. But Leo and I had each other. You...’ Her voice grew husky. ‘You had no one.’
And he hadn’t needed anyone. Certainly hadn’t wanted to get close to anyone. Why bother? he’d thought as a boy. Why attach yourself to someone just so they could leave you or die.
It was a pity he hadn’t remembered that lesson before he’d married Julia. Instead he’d let life teach it to him all over again—only much more brutally the second time around.
He shrugged, looked up at the awning shielding them from the sun. ‘There are worse things in life than being alone.’
‘Like going to war?’ She touched him then, trailing the tip of one finger over his scar. ‘Did you get this when you were in the Legion?’
He sat up, forcing her hand to fall away. ‘Oui.’
‘How?’
Mon Dieu. Did her curiosity know no limits?
‘It’s a shrapnel wound,’ he told her, because maybe if he shared something ugly with her she’d see the damaged man he was and realise she didn’t want him. Not the way she thought she did.
‘From an explosion?’
‘A suicide bomber.’ He twisted his head around to see her face. ‘A twelve-year-old boy.’
‘Mio Dio...’ she breathed, her expression horrified. ‘That’s awful.’
‘That’s the modern face of war.’ He kept his voice hard, unaffected, emotionless. Because that was what he’d learned to do as a soldier. Control his emotions, follow orders, focus on the job and divide those he encountered into one of two camps—ally or enemy. Except that last part hadn’t always been easy.
Marietta pressed her palm against his bare back, the contact so unexpected he nearly flinched.
‘I’m so sorry for all the terrible things you must have seen, Nico,’ she said, in that soft, sympathetic voice that seemed to curl around him, through him.
Her hand moved, stroking over his skin, setting fire to a host of nerve-endings which all led like a series of lit fuses to one place. His groin.
‘Marietta,’ he growled, ‘what are you doing?’
Marietta wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that question. She only knew that she’d felt compelled to reach out in some way, and that once she’d touched him—once she’d made contact with all that smooth, hot skin and sculpted muscle—she hadn’t been able to draw her hand away. Hadn’t wanted to.
He moved with lightning speed. Before she understood his intent he was leaning over her, one hand clamped around her wrist, imprisoning her hand above her head. His expression was dark. Almost angry.
Her heart thumped in her chest.
‘You don’t want this, Marietta.’
‘Want what?’ she whispered—but she knew what he meant. Of course she did. She wasn’t naive. He hadn’t carried her all the way down here just to have lunch on the beach.
But something had changed since they’d got here. Something had caused him to withdraw, have second thoughts.
It felt like a rejection—and it stung.
‘Not what—who,’ he said harshly. ‘You don’t want me, Marietta.’
She pushed up her chin, feeling reckless and bold. Angry even. How dared he tell her what she didn’t want? ‘Why?’
He breathed hard, his nostrils flaring. ‘I’m not the kind of man you want to get close to.’
‘Why?’ she challenged again, her blood thundering in her ears now. ‘Because you’ve seen some terrible things? Experienced some terrible things? Things you don’t think I could possibly understand?’ She struggled to free her wrist. ‘Let me go, Nico,’ she demanded.
He did, and she levered herself upright, forcing him back from her. ‘Do you think you’re the only one with scars?’ She leaned forward over her legs, exposing her back. ‘The one under my left shoulder blade is from the accident,’ she told him. ‘The rest are from surgeries—failed surgeries—and every one of them represents a shattered hope. A shattered dream.’
She dropped back to her elbows, locked her gaze with his.
‘I lay in the wreckage of that car for thirty minutes, with two dead friends and another friend dying beside me, before the emergency services arrived.’ She hiked up her chin, swallowed down hard on the lump in her throat. ‘I haven’t been to war, Nico. I haven’t seen or done the things you have. But I do know something about death and survival.’
Her blood continued to pound, flushing her skin, making the pulse in her throat leap. The after-effects of the wine combined with her anger and the sight of all that potent, half-naked masculinity before her spurred her on to more recklessness.
She reached out and laid her palm against his chest, her fingers nestling in the fine covering of crisp hairs. ‘Maybe I don’t know what kind of man is hidden away in here. But whoever he is—whoever you think he is—he doesn’t scare me.’
Deliberately she glided the tip of her little finger over his nipple and heard the sudden sharp hiss of his indrawn breath. But his big body remained taut and rigid, unmoving except for the powerful rise and fall of his chest beneath her hand. She searched his face, looking for signs of desire—for the flash of hunger she’d seen there last night—but the seconds stretched and nothing happened.
The flush receded from her skin and her insides turned cold and then hot again with a horrible, humiliating thought.
She snatched her hand back.
Dio. Had she read this all wrong? Had she imagined something that wasn’t really there?
The moment seemed to click into slow motion. Nico’s eyes narrowed, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak. But she gave her head a violent shake and fell back onto the cushions, squeezing her eyes closed. She couldn’t look at him. He was too perfect. A man like him could have any woman in the world. Why would he take her? Unless...
Her face burned. Stupid, stupid...
‘I think you’re right.’ She forced the words out between stiff lips. ‘I don’t want this.’ Pride made her voice brittle. Defensive. ‘I don’t need pity sex.’
A sound came from above her—a harsh, ferocious growl of a sound—and she snapped her eyes open.
Nico grasped her wrist, not gently, and pulled her hand to his groin.
‘You think this is pity?’
A gasp caught in her throat. Nico’s eyes blazed into hers, but it wasn’t the glittering anger and raw desire she saw that stripped her lungs of air—it was the irrefutable evidence of his arousal, big and thick and rock-hard against her hand. Heat coiled in her belly, and she curled her fingers around his impressive length. Santo cielo. He was enormous—and hard. For her.
A low, guttural curse shot from his mouth. ‘Marietta—’ The way he rasped her name was half-warning, half-groan. ‘I want you,’ he said roughly, tightening his fingers around her wrist, thrusting his groin harder into her hand to encourage her grip. ‘Make no mistake about that. But you need to be certain this is what you want—because believe me when I say this is the point of no return.’
The fierce heat in his gaze, the solid, rigid length of him in her hand, extinguished her doubts. She squeezed him, giving her answer, and he pulled her hand away from him and loomed above her. Anticipation shivered through her and then his mouth covered hers, and that sudden, shocking clash of lips was ten times more electrifying than she could ever have imagined.
The world spun and she reached blindly for an anchor, until her hands latched on to the hot, hard flesh of his shoulders. He moved and she tightened her grip on him, terrified he was going to end the kiss, but he simply angled his head so he could take it deeper. His tongue stroked over her lips, then thrust between them—and the explosion of heat and earthiness in her mouth was unlike anything she’d ever experienced.
When he raised his head colour slashed his cheekbones, emphasising their prominence, and his eyes had darkened to an inky blue. His gaze raked over her face and lower, down to her breasts in the revealing yellow bikini. He fingered the gold clasp holding the triangles of fabric together and then, with a single flick, unfastened the top. The fabric fell away, exposing her to his scrutiny.
‘Spectaculaire...’ he murmured, and cupped his hand around her right breast.
Her shoulder blades arched off the cushion, her body straining instinctively into his touch. When his thumb stroked over her extended nipple the sensation was exquisite, but nowhere close to being enough. She needed more...
She moaned. ‘Nico...’
A dark, anticipatory gleam lit his eyes. He lowered his head and sucked her nipple into his mouth, gently at first and then, when she gasped and drove her hands into his hair, harder, using his tongue and his teeth to tease and torment, until she cried out some incoherent words, which he obviously took as encouragement, because he popped her nipple out of his mouth and lavished the same attention on her left one.
Her nails scraped over his scalp. ‘Dio... Nico...’
Something broke loose inside her. Something wild. Demanding. She thrust her chest upwards, urging him on until she was conscious of nothing else besides the heat of his mouth and his tongue and the tight, coiling sensation inside her. Time stopped, ceased to exist, and she didn’t know if seconds or minutes had passed when she registered the faint metallic slide of a zipper—realised Nico’s hand was at the front of her shorts.
She froze. Only for a moment, but he felt it. His mouth slipped off her nipple, and she wanted to groan.
‘I’m not changing my mind,’ she said hurriedly, cursing the insecurity that had struck her out of the blue.
She tried pulling his head back down, but he resisted.
He cupped her jaw. ‘You froze. Why?’
Inexplicably, her hands trembled. She let go of him and curled them against her stomach, closed her eyes.
‘Marietta—’
‘My legs,’ she whispered. ‘They’re not...’ Not beautiful. Her face heated.
‘Open your eyes.’
She did, and they prickled dangerously. Madre di Dio. What was wrong with her? She wanted this. He wanted her. Why was she suddenly afraid of revealing her body to him?
‘You are beautiful, Marietta,’ he said. ‘And I want all of you.’ His hand tightened on her jaw when she would have looked away. ‘Do you understand me?’
She stared at him, and then she swallowed and nodded. He dropped a scorching kiss on her mouth. Then he pushed to his feet, removed his shorts and briefs and stood before her fully naked.
The moisture evaporated inside her mouth. Her imagination had not done him justice. He was glorious, every part of him lean and muscled. Her gaze trailed from his broad chest down over the ridges of his abdomen and lower, to where his arousal jutted proudly from the nest of dark hair at the juncture of his thighs. Her belly turned molten. He was so hard. So big.
He dropped to his knees, slid the zipper the rest of the way down and removed her shorts and bikini bottoms. Heart pounding, she shrugged off the straps of her bikini top. And then he scooped her into his arms, stood, and carried her across the hot sand into the water.
* * *
Kissing, touching, exploring Marietta while immersed in the tepid sea water was the most erotic build-up to sex Nico had ever experienced.
He’d fooled around in water before—taken a woman against the side of a pool more than once—but this...
This was different.
Or maybe it was simply that he was wound so impossibly tight with need for her that he felt as if he might explode at any moment?
God help him.
He hadn’t even buried himself inside her yet.
He gave a low, tortured groan, reached between their bodies and pried her fingers from his hard, engorged length before he embarrassed himself and came in the water.
The action earned him a small, petulant frown, but when she reached under the surface, he again seized her wrist.
‘Chérie,’ he growled, ‘it will be over before it starts if you keep doing that.’
Her smile was playful, naughty, dialling up the heat in his blood and at the same time reinforcing his sense of relief.
This was the Marietta he knew.
Confident. Spirited. Pushy.
The way she’d challenged him on the beach—her boldness, the things she’d said, even her scars—had made him want her even more, until resisting his desire, resisting hers, had been impossible. And yet the woman who had frozen beneath him had been vulnerable, insecure—a version of Marietta he hadn’t seen before—and his chest had ached with a fierce need to reassure her. To chase the uncertainty from her eyes and bring this woman—the one who fired his blood, who challenged him at every turn—back to him.
She wound her arms around his neck now, clinging to him like a silken-skinned mermaid, pressing her lush, caramel-tipped breasts against his chest. He had sucked on those responsive nipples at every opportunity, enjoying her gasps of pleasure as he’d coaxed them into tight, sensitive nubs.
They were ten metres or so from the shore, the water chest-deep, and his feet on the seabed prevented them from drifting.
He kissed her, savouring the warm, salty taste of her mouth and the erotic playfulness of her tongue as it dived between his lips and then retreated, duelling with his.
After a minute he pulled back. Despite his previous claim about the point of no return, he needed to make certain she understood what this was—and wasn’t. To offer her one last chance to change her mind. Even though it would kill him if she did.
‘This is all I can give you,’ he said. ‘These few days—’
Her fingers landed across his lips. ‘I’m not looking for anything more,’ she said. ‘Here and now—this is all I want...’
And with that the final barrier fell. He dropped an open-mouthed kiss onto the wet, satiny skin between her neck and shoulder and slid his hand under the water, seeking out the silky curls and the velvety V of flesh he’d briefly explored once already—and planned to do so more thoroughly now.
‘Tell me where it feels good,’ he urged, eager to learn her pleasure points. To understand where she had sensation and where she didn’t. He slid his fingers along the seam of delicate flesh, parting, probing, locating the precise spot that made her throw her head back and arch those magnificent breasts against him.
‘Oh, Dio... There, Nico... There...’
He hoisted her higher in the water and clamped his mouth over her nipple, sucking hard while increasing the pressure and movement of his fingers. Her nails sank into his back and the sound she made as she came—something between a purr and a little feminine roar—was the sexiest damn thing he’d ever heard. His body throbbed urgently, almost painfully in response. She dropped her head onto his shoulder, her body going limp in his arms, and cursed in Italian.
Satisfaction rocked through him. ‘Was that on your wish list, chérie?’
‘No...’ she mumbled into his neck. ‘But I think I’ll add it, just so that we can do it again and cross it off.’
‘I have some other ideas for your list.’
She lifted her head, her dark eyes slumberous. ‘Tell me.’
Nico shook his head, shifted her onto his back and started towards the shore. ‘I’m going to show you instead.’