Desires Captive

He was wearing ragged denim shorts, and a gold medallion on a fine chain glinted in the sun before disappearing into the dark tangle of body hair.

‘Nico!’

His name left her lips on a startled whisper, her eyes widening in unconscious appreciation of the male litheness of his body. The shorts were well worn and faded. They looked as though they had once been jeans and had been cut down—the genuine article, not some expensively fashioned beachwear, and the frayed cuffs drew her eyes to the solid muscle of his thighs. The sight of his near-naked body had a powerful effect upon her senses, heightened by the fact that he had been in her thoughts almost constantly since their meeting.

‘They told me up at the villa that I’d find you down here,’ he told her with a smile.

‘You came to see me?’ She hardly dared believe it.

His eyes were mocking. ‘Of course not! I can think of at least a dozen other reasons why I should drive hell for leather down here during the middle of a particularly hectic working week. But they’d all be lies,’ he added softly, devastating her by the way he looked at her, his glance encompassing the feminine curves of her body.

‘You surprise me,’ he said at last, shifting his inspection to her flushed face and tremulously parted mouth. ‘On a secluded beach like this I’d hardly have thought that—–’ he nodded towards her bikini and the skirt she had tied loosely round her waist, ‘charming though it is—necessary.’

It was several seconds before the full implication of his words sank in, and when they did Saffron reached nervously for her sunglasses and slid them quickly on to her nose to conceal her expression. Had he genuinely expected to find her sunbathing in the nude when he made his way down those steps?

Suddenly awkward, she stepped away from him, appalled to discover how difficult she found it to think logically while he was there.

‘Have you… will you be staying long?’ The question was disjointed, and she regretted the gaucheness of it the moment it was asked, but Nico seemed unconcerned.

‘One day, perhaps two; I have booked into a hotel—if you can call it that in San Lorenzo, just down the coast. You know it?’

‘Yes… but you could have stayed here, at the villa.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘Would your father approve of such intimacy?’

Again Saffron was shocked by her body’s response to the picture he was painting; the two of them alone in the villa when Maria and her husband had returned to their own home in the evening. They could dine on the terrace that overlooked the sea, only the brilliance of the stars illuminating the scene, and afterwards…

Her mouth had gone dry, her whole body responding with a sensuality that rocked the ground beneath her feet. She had never felt like this before. She glanced downwards distractedly, absently noticing her towel and suntan lotion still lying on the sand, acutely aware of the aroused firming of her nipples beneath the emerald cotton. And Nico was aware of it too. She could see his glance focusing briefly on the hollow between her breasts where the cotton twisted in a provocative bow, and for one delirious moment she almost willed him to untie the green fabric and replace it with the hard warmth of his hands. She shuddered deeply, perspiration breaking out on her upper lip. What Was happening to her? Had Nico seen what she was thinking?

‘Come, your Maria asked me to tell you that she is preparing dinner early tonight because she wishes to leave early. She mentioned that tomorrow is her day off and she intends to spend it with her daughter. I would suggest that we dine together, but,’ his smile deepened the cleft in his chin, ‘but it has been a long drive from Rome, and I am very much afraid I might disgrace myself and fall asleep. However, if I might be permitted to have breakfast with you, and then later, perhaps, we could go for a drive?’

Swallowing her disappointment, Saffron clung to the fact that he had driven all this way to see her, that he wanted to see her tomorrow, and managed an answering smile, bending to collect the rest of her belongings; a sharp exclamation leaving her lips as she stepped back on the jagged edge of a shell.

Pain lanced through her tender skin. She overbalanced, falling awkwardly, and was deftly caught by Nico.

His hands seemed to burn through the flesh of her back, spread palm to fingertip against her skin as he steadied her.

‘What happened?’ He frowned and she shook her head.

‘I stood on a shell—nothing much.’

‘Let me see.’

He dropped on his haunches beside her, lifting her injured foot, so that she was forced to balance herself by gripping his shoulders. His skin had the taut sensuality of raw silk; the muscles it cloaked were supple. Saffron had to quell her desire to run her fingers over his shoulders and back. It would be like stroking the pelt of a jungle cat, she thought hazily, and just as dangerous. She glanced down, observing the dark head, and the deftness of the fingers exploring her injured foot.

‘It looks okay,’ Nico pronounced. ‘It’s bleeding quite freely, and as long as you wash and cleanse it thoroughly when you get back to the villa there shouldn’t be any complications. I can’t see any pieces of shell in it. Still, best to be sure.’

Before she realised what was happening Saffron felt the warmth of his mouth against her foot. Lean fingers curled round her ankle, and the feeling uncoiling inside her as Nico used his tongue to cleanse the small cut was like nothing she had ever experienced before. Who would have thought that the steady brush of his tongue against her skin could be so erotic?

‘Saffron?’

Nico raised his head, his hand stroking upwards from her ankle, an expression in his eyes that sent her pulses hammering with answering desire. And then he was on his feet and she was in his arms, her lips parting eagerly for the hot possession of his kiss. His hand found the curve of her spine and caressed it, tracing its length, his mouth making hungry demands on her own. She was weightless, pure plastic to be moulded and re-formed as he wished, conscious of the fierce body heat he was generating, the need to press closer to the male hardness of his thighs.

When he released her it was like losing part of herself, and incredibly Saffron knew that if he had suggested there and then that they make love she wouldn’t have made the slightest protest. She wanted him to make love to her, had wanted it, she now acknowledged, from the first moment she saw him. Nico wasn’t like a stranger. In some compulsive way it was as though she had known him before; as though she had been searching through a millenium of time to find him; her senses recognised and welcomed him in a way her mind couldn’t come to terms with. She wanted to tell him about it to ask him if he felt the same, but she was too shy.

He released her, steadying her and gravely handing her her things.

‘Ciao,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t forget, breakfast tomorrow. Something tells me you always look extremely attractive dispensing orange juice and coffee.’

There was a hint of mockery in his voice and Saffron wondered if he thought she was in the habit of breakfasting with men—with lovers, but surely if that was the case he would not have demurred about staying at the villa. Saffron knew he wanted her; and she also knew Italian men—very male, aggressively macho, and yet Nico was treating her with all the delicacy he might afford a piece of exquisite china; and she was enjoying it. She loved his reticence almost as much as she loved the sleek masculinity of him; the passion she suspected slumbered beneath the outward control. She obviously meant more to him than a mere one-night stand.

She longed to be able to communicate to him her joy that this should be so; the dizzying pleasure of knowing that he saw her as a person, not simply her father’s daughter. But then he already knew how she felt, she thought on a soft sigh; how could he fail to do so? She had seen it in the quizzical smile he had given her, had felt it in the pressure of his mouth against hers.

Her heart full of dreams, she turned towards the villa, already looking forward to the morning.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN she woke up, for the first time since her arrival at the villa Saffron felt a brief tingle of excitement; of anticipation for the coming day.

She showered swiftly, donning a white tee-shirt and a pair of khaki jeans, finding a clean bikini and matching towelling cover-up which she rolled into a towel and placed in the canvas rollbag that matched her jeans.

She had no idea what Nico’s plans for the day might include, but she was not going to be caught out if he suggested stopping somewhere for a swim. She was aware that a less inhibited girl would probably not have worried about a bikini—certainly she couldn’t think of anyone among her old crowd who would have been anything other than delighted to display their bodies in front of Nico Doranti.

With impeccable timing he arrived just as Maria was carrying breakfast out on to the terrace. Saffron heard the car and walked through the villa to the front door. As she opened it Nico was emerging from the driver’s seat of a scarlet Mercedes convertible. In those moments before he saw her he looked almost withdrawn, the black knit shirt he was wearing stretching to mould his body as he bent to retrieve the car keys. Black jeans moulded the contours of his thighs—a casual outfit, not specifically designed to attract, and yet she was intensely aware of him; of the bronzed vee of flesh in the opening of his shirt, the gold medallion nestling against his chest, the rugged power of the indolently lean male body as he came towards her, checking suddenly as he became aware of her presence. His expression was immediately transformed, the grimness banished and purely male appreciation taking its place.

‘If I’d known you look so good in the morning, nothing would have persuaded me to return to my hotel last night,’ he drawled as he caught up with her, curving an arm round her shoulders and bending his head to obliterate the morning sun as he kissed her lightly. Saffron wondered if he was as intensely aware of the scent of her perfume as she was of his cologne. He smelled clean and masculine, and she had an overwhelming desire to place her lips against the tanned column of his throat.

‘Breakfast is ready,’ she told him huskily, her lips still tingling from the brief contact with his. ‘You timed it just right.’

‘That depends.’ He gave her a stunningly comprehensive oblique glance that sent her pulses racing. ‘Personally, I wouldn’t have minded at all arriving a little too early, and discovering you like Sleeping Beauty still slumbering, awaiting the Prince’s kiss.’

It was ridiculous to be so affected by his verbal lovemaking. She had experienced it often enough in the past without response, why should Nico be so different? She didn’t know. All she did know was that the thought of him in her bedroom was creating the most erotic pictures in her mind, and she hurriedly tried to dispel them as she led him through the villa and out on to the terrace.

She was glad she had taken such trouble with the breakfast table when she saw him glance at it. The newly warmed rolls lay in a golden heap in the basket; the small dish of apricot jam in the pretty green dish she had bought to match the pale green cabbage rose pottery they used in the villa making an attractive splash of colour against the buttercup yellow tablecloth.

They might almost have been a placidly married couple of longstanding, Saffron reflected half an hour later as she poured Nico a second cup of coffee. He was leaning back, relaxing in his chair as he studied the view from the terrace.

‘What exactly are your plans for the day?’ Saffron questioned, colouring faintly as she saw the way he studied her. ‘I mean, should I make up some lunch for us or…’

‘By all means, if it isn’t too much trouble, although I must confess that right now, food is the last thing on my mind.’

Excusing herself to clear away their breakfast things and stack them in the dishwasher, Saffron left him alone in the main sala.

‘Saffron.’

She hadn’t heard him come into the kitchen and she nearly dropped the knife she was using to slice through rolls before she buttered them.

When she glanced up the expression in his eyes puzzled her. He looked preoccupied, as though he had far more on his mind than a day out.

‘Perhaps this isn’t such a good idea.’

He had his back to her, for which she was grateful, because it meant that he couldn’t see the humiliated pain in her eyes. What did he mean? Was he having second thoughts about wanting to spend the day with her? Had he discovered that she wasn’t after all the girl he had thought her in Rome?

‘If you say so.’ She managed to make her voice sound calm and indifferent. ‘Although somehow I wouldn’t have thought last-minute doubts were your style.’

Suddenly they were strangers and her last few words were designed to taunt and hurt. She saw his face change and knew with a shock that they were on the verge of a quarrel; a sudden black cloud in a hitherto blue sky.

‘Obviously they aren’t yours.’ There was a hardness about the words that chilled her. ‘Do you always make up your mind so impulsively about people—or is it only men?’

He had hit to hurt and had succeeded. How could she tell him now that she had never responded to anyone as instinctively as she had to him?

He walked back into the sala and Saffron followed him, knowing that the day was spoiled.

‘I think we’d better call today off,’ Nico began, suddenly pausing in front of a framed photograph on one of the tables. It depicted Saffron with her father, and one of her father’s oldest friends. Nico was staring at it with a fixity that puzzled her, his eyes and mouth tautly bleak.

‘An old friend of my father’s,’ Saffron told him. ‘He… he died last year.’ Her voice faltered and she bit hard on her lip. She hadn’t known John Hunter all that well, although he and her father had been friends for many years, but she still found it painful to talk about his death. He had been a kidnap victim, and his subsequent death at the hands of his kidnappers had made headline news. Even now Saffron found it hard to shake off the sick horror that crawled through her veins as she dwelt on his ordeal. She had never even told her father about her own almost pathological fear of being kidnapped. Some people were terrified by spiders, she told herself flippantly; her phobia was kidnappers.

She suspected it stemmed from her mother’s death. She had been at boarding school when it had happened and had known nothing. The arrival of two strangers, who she later discovered were her father’s secretary and personal assistant, who whisked her away from school without explanation and then proceeded to tell her of her mother’s death, had left a scar that had never completely healed.

‘He was kidnapped by terrorists,’ she forced herself to say, as though by speaking the dread word she could overcome her fear.

‘Tragic.’ Nico sounded as though he meant it, and for a split second Saffron found herself reliving her father’s grief and the sharp resurrection of her own phobia, but she quelled it swiftly with a flippant, ‘Oh, I don’t know—isn’t it everyone’s private sexual fantasy?’

It was the sort of flip statement expected among her crowd and Saffron had often used them defensively in the past, not caring about the conclusions her companions would draw, but now she did care, and she bitterly wished the seemingly callous statement unuttered when she saw the look in Nico’s eyes.

‘Nico?’ Her voice and eyes pleaded with her to understand, begged for the forgiveness her pride would not allow her to ask for, and miraculously his expression changed, a smile soothing away the frown and with it the harsh bitterness that had seemed so alien to his character.

‘I think I must have got out of my bed on the wrong side this morning.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘Or perhaps the problem is that it wasn’t the right bed.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘How long will it take you to finish getting ready?’

No reference to the fact that ten minutes ago he had been on the point of cancelling their outing, but Saffron was too delirious with joy to mention it.

‘Ten minutes,’ she promised, and was as good as her word, watching with steadily escalating excitement as Nico stowed the picnic basket away in the boot of the Mercedes, and opened the passenger door for her to climb in.

They had the road almost entirely to themselves. Saffron relaxed back into her seat, enjoying the teasing caress of the breeze as it tangled her curls, breathing the hot, sensual scent of the countryside drowsing in the midsummer heat. They passed olive groves with trees so gnarled and ancient it wasn’t hard to believe that they had probably been old when the Roman legions tramped these roads.

They were high up in the hills behind the villa. Below them the sea shone deep azure blue, merging into the distant skyline in misty lilac. Saffron sat with her knees hunched under her chin, aware of the heat of the sun as it beat down on to her shoulders. Half an hour ago Nico had pulled off the road in this beautiful, strangely desolate spot. Now he was lying at her side on the thin grass watching the sky. A pleasant breeze stirred the heated air. She ought to have been feeling pleasurably relaxed after the meal they had just shared, but she wasn’t. Tension coiled her stomach like an over-wound spring, her body so intensely aware of the man beside her that she could sense his every movement without even looking at him. He had removed the jeans and shirt he had worn for driving and lay on his back, and Saffron berated herself for not having followed his example and donned her swimwear beneath her tee-shirt and jeans. But Nico’s brief trunks did little to conceal his masculinity, and she forced herself not to give in to the impulse to let her glance wander at will over his body. She could always go and change. There was no one to see except Nico. As though he read her thoughts he suggested lazily,

‘Why don’t you go and change?’

She wanted to, so why was she holding back? What was this strange selfconsciousness that made her reluctant to expose herself to Nico in the brief triangles of her bikini?

‘You are looking as though you were a Christian maiden who preferred being thrown to the lions to exchanging her virtue for the embrace of her Roman captor. It is a novel experience,’ he continued lightly, levering himself up on one elbow to study her. Dark eyelashes swept protectively across her eyes, anxious to conceal her expression from his probing glance, fearful that he would read in her eyes the secret of her virginity. Why, when she had never felt burdened by it before, did she suddenly long for the experience and expediency of her peers? If only she had some practical sexual knowledge to fall back on, to tell her how to react.

‘Why is innocence always such a lure to the men who witness it? When I look at you now, I find it hard to imagine any man other than myself has so much as touched your lips.’ Nico’s expression changed, hardening, his muttered, ‘God, I must be losing my grip!’ lost as he leaned over her imprisoning her with his body, his voice thick and unsteady as he said against her lips, ‘Something tells me I’m going to regret this, but right now I can’t think past the aching in my gut, that reminds me I’m a male animal first, and a thinking human being a very poor second. What is it those soft eyes are begging for when they look at me so? Reprieve? Or this?’

Saffron had known the first time she saw him that he was a man who knew all there was to know about the female sex, but he seemed to have misjudged her badly, because the ferocious pressure of his mouth, the desire he made no attempt to temper, frightened rather than aroused her. Deep down inside him she sensed a bitter anger, an inner rage that drowned out seduction and sensitivity and left only a raw need that even she, inexperienced though she was, knew he had not meant to betray. Why? she asked herself numbly, frozen beneath his body, terrified by the emotions she sensed churning through him. She struggled to break free, panic tensing her muscles, her mind and body crying out to her that she had been a fool to allow herself to be alone with him. What did she know of him after all? What if she had merely imagined that rapport which had seemed to make conventional preliminaries between them unnecessary?

As though he sensed the direction of her thoughts the harsh pressure of Nico’s mouth suddenly relaxed. He murmured an apology against her ear, stilling her frantic movements with the sensual caress of his hand stroking over her body.

‘Forgive me, cara. I was too impulsive, my desire for you too intense…’

Despite his words and the look in his eyes, Saffron had the momentary impression that he was playing a part, mouthing words he did not feel, but it died almost the instant it was born as his hand pushed aside the thin barrier of her tee-shirt, cupping the rounded softness of her breast, his lips brushing tantalising over hers, with none of the angry pressure of before.

Perhaps she had imagined his anger, she thought hazily, perhaps it had just been fostered by desire. She knew so little of the emotions which drove men, and he was obviously not a man used to denying his sexuality.

Her body’s responsiveness to him frightened her, and she tried to wriggle away. ‘We ought to be going,’ she murmured shakily. ‘I…’

Nico glanced at his watch and then seemed to search the scenery; the deserted sky and equally deserted road.

‘Not yet,’ he said softly. And when Saffron continued to protest he ignored her, simply bending his head and touching his lips to the warm valley he had exposed between her breasts, his touch making her toes curl in mute protest, her breath catching on a wave of shocked pleasure.

His fingers pushed aside the flimsy lace cups of her bra, savouring breasts which Saffron knew were surprisingly voluptuous in view of the slenderness of her body, and now they seemed more voluptuous than ever, her nipples hardening against his palms as pleasure shuddered through her.

‘Nico…’ His name left her lips on a tortured breath.

‘I know,’ he agreed huskily. ‘Not here… but you make it very hard for me—very hard,’ he reiterated throatily as his lips moved provocatively against the aroused peak of her breast, stroking it lightly and then stopping as he felt the shudder she was powerless to control. Her face had gone paper-white with the strength of her emotions; the shock of experiencing such a stomach clenching intensity of pleasure. She wanted to tangle her fingers in his hair and hold him captive against her body, but shyness and inexperience held her aloof, and then Nico was on his feet, pulling her with him, straightening her tee-shirt and motioning her towards the car.

She hadn’t time to protest, and then, as she waited for him in the Mercedes, she realised that his hearing, more acute than hers, must have caught the approach of the battered Land Rover that came lumbering down the hill towards them.

It rolled to a halt and three people jumped out; two men and a girl, all dressed casually in a uniform of grubby jeans and sweat-shirts, and all of them carrying shoulder-hung machine-guns which were pointed in her direction.

Feeling as though she had suddenly strayed into a nightmare, Saffron watched helplessly as they advanced towards her. Behind her she heard Nico move, and a wave of relief swamped her to know that she wasn’t alone. She turned towards him, sobbing his name.

‘Get out of the car!’

It was the female member of the gang who issued the curt instructions, the heavily accented words just about penetrating the fog of terror engulfing Saffron.

‘Nico…’ She murmured his name as though it were an incantation against evil, helplessly appealing to him, her eyes widening in stunned disbelief as she saw his stony expression, and heard him say bleakly, ‘Do as she says, Saffron.’