Bound By His Vow: His Final Bargain / The Rings That Bind / Marriage Made of Secrets

He picked her up in his arms, carrying her effortlessly to the sofa inside his study. She felt the soft press of the cushions as he laid her down, those dark eyes holding hers with the unmistakable message of their sensual purpose, thrilling her from her tingling scalp to her curling toes.

He came back over her, but only to shove her dress above her hips. One of his hands peeled off her knickers, the slow but deliberate trail of lace as he pulled them down over her thigh to her ankles, another masterstroke of seduction in his considerable arsenal. She kicked off the lace along with her shoes, snatching in a quick breath as he bent his head to the swollen heart of her.

The intimacy of it should have appalled her given the current context of their relationship, but somehow it didn’t. It felt completely natural for him to be touching her like this. To be touching and stroking her body as if it were the most fascinating and delicately fragrant flower he had ever seen.

‘You are so beautiful.’

Oh, those words were like a symphony written only for her! She didn’t feel beautiful with anyone else. No one else could make her body sing with such perfect harmony the way he did.

He took his time, ramping up her arousal to the point where she was sure she was going to scream if he didn’t give her that final stroke that would send her careening into oblivion.

‘Please…oh, please…’ The words came out part groan, part gasp.

‘Say you want me.’

‘I want you. I want you.’ She was panting as if she had just run up a steep incline. ‘I want you.’

‘Tell me you want me like no other man.’

She dug her fingers like claws into the cushioned sofa, her hips bucking as he continued his sensual torture. ‘I want you more than anyone else…Oh, God. Oh, God…’ Her orgasm splintered her senses into a starburst of feeling. It rattled and shook her body like a ragdoll in a madman’s hands. It went on and on until she finally came out the other side, limbless and spent and breathless.

Leo moved up her body and set to work on removing her dress and bra. Eliza lifted her arms up like a child as he uncovered her flesh. She sighed with bone-deep pleasure as he took her breasts in his hands.

How had she gone so long without this exquisite worship of her body? Her flesh was alive with intense feeling. Shivers were still cascading down her spine like a waterfall of champagne bubbles. The very hairs on her head were still dancing on tiptoe. Her inner core was still pulsating with the aftershocks of the cataclysmic eruption of ecstasy that had rippled through it.

His hands gripped her hips once more as his body reared over hers. Somehow he’d had the foresight to apply a condom. She vaguely recalled him retrieving one from his wallet in his back pocket before he had shucked his trousers off.

He kissed her again, his mouth hard and yet soft in turn. It was a devastatingly seductive technique, yet another one he had mastered to perfection. She felt his erection poised for entry against her. She opened her legs for him, welcoming him with one of her hands pressed to the taut and carved curve of his buttocks, the other behind his head, pulling his mouth back down to hers as her ankles hooked around his legs.

He surged into her with a groan that came from deep at the back of his throat. It bordered on a rougher than normal entry but she welcomed it with a groan of pleasure. He seemed to check himself and then started to move a little more slowly, but she pushed him to increase his pace with little encouraging gasps and whimpers and further pressure from her hands pressing down on his buttocks.

She felt the rocking motion of his body within hers. She heard the intervals of his breathing gradually increase. She felt the tension in his muscles as they bunched up under the caress of her hands. The friction of his body within hers sent off her senses into another tailspin of anticipatory delight.

But still he wasn’t intent on his own pleasure.

He was still focused on bringing about another delicious wave of hers and brought his fingers down to touch her. The way he seemed to know how much pressure and friction she needed to maximise her pleasure was the final undoing of her. The continued thrusting of his body and the delicate but magical ministration of his fingers were an earth-shattering combination. She was catapulted into another crazily spinning vortex of feeling that robbed her of all sense of time and place.

It was all feeling—feeling that was centred solely in her body.

But as she was coming down from the heights of human pleasure her mind resumed enough focus to register his powerful release. It sent another shockwave of pleasure through her body. She had felt every moment of that powerful pumping surge as he lost himself. There was something about that total loss of control that moved her deeply. It had always been this way between them. A mind-blowing combustion of lust and longing, and yet something else that was less easily definable…

As she moved her hands to the front of his body she noticed the pale circle on her bare left ring finger. It was a stark reminder of her commitment elsewhere.

Her stomach sank in despair.

She wasn’t free.

She wasn’t free.

She pushed against his chest without meeting his gaze. ‘I want to get up.’

He held her down with a gentle but firm press of his hand on her left shoulder. ‘Not so fast, cara. What’s wrong?’

Eliza couldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t look at him. She stared at the peppery stubble on the bulge of his Adam’s apple instead. ‘This should never have happened.’

He took her chin between his finger and thumb and forced her to meet his gaze. ‘Why is that?’

Her eyes smarted with the tears she resolved she would not shed in front of him. ‘How can you ask that?’

His gaze quietly assessed hers. ‘You still feel guilty about the natural impulses you have always felt around me?’

She lowered her lashes, chewing at her lip until she tasted the metallic sourness of blood. ‘They might be natural but they’re not appropriate.’

‘Because you’re still intent on tying yourself to a man who can’t give you what you want or need?’

She continued to valiantly squeeze back the tears, still not looking at him. ‘Please, let’s not go over this again. I’m here with you now. I’m doing what you asked and paid me to do. Please don’t ask me to do any more than that.’

He released a gusty sigh and got up, dressing again with an economy of movement Eliza privately envied. She felt exposed, not just physically—even though she had somehow managed to drag her discarded dress over her nakedness—but emotionally, and that was far more terrifying.

‘Contrary to what you might think, I didn’t pay you to sleep with me.’ His voice was deep and rough, the words sounding as if they had been dragged along a gravel pathway. ‘That is entirely separate from your position here as nanny to my daughter.’

She gave him a pointed look. ‘Both are temporary appointments, are they not?’

His eyes were deep and dark and unfathomable. ‘That depends.’

‘Is Kathleen coming back?’

‘She hasn’t yet decided.’

‘I thought you said my month-long contract was not up for negotiation,’ Eliza said with a little frown. ‘If she decides not to return, does that mean you’ll offer me the post?’

‘That also depends.’

She arched her brow. ‘On what?’

‘On whether you want to stay longer.’

Eliza chewed at her lip. If things had been different, of course she would stay. She would live with him as his lover, as his mistress, his daughter’s nanny—whatever he wanted, she would do it because she wanted him so much.

But things weren’t different.

They were exactly the same as they had been four years ago. It didn’t matter what she wanted. It was the shackles of her guilt that would always make her forfeit what she wanted. How could she stay here with Leo and leave her other life behind? It was a fanciful dream she had to erase from her mind, just as she’d had to do in the past.

Eliza thought of little Alessandra, of how attached the child had become to her in such a short time. It wasn’t just that the little girl was looking for a mother substitute. Eliza had latched onto her with equal measure. She looked forward to their time together. She felt excited about the ways in which Alessandra was growing and developing in confidence and independence. It wasn’t just the teacher in her that was being validated, either. It was the deep-seated maternal instinct in her that longed to be expressed. Alessandra was responding to that strong instinct in her to love and protect and nurture.

If things were different, she would have been Alessandra’s mother.

There was still a fiendish pain inside her chest at the thought of another woman sharing that deeply bonding experience with Leo. She so desperately wanted to be a mother. Each birthday that passed was a painful, gut-twisting reminder of her dream slipping even further out of her grasp.

Eliza brought her gaze back to his once she was sure she had her emotions hidden behind a mask of composure. ‘Staying longer isn’t an option…’

‘Driving up the price, are we, Eliza?’ A ripple of tension appeared along his jaw, his dark eyes flashing at her with disgust. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You want me to pay you a little extra to stay on as my mistress. How much do you want? Have you got a figure in mind?’

She took a steadying breath against the blast of his anger and turned away. ‘There’s no point talking to you in this mood.’

A hard hand came down on her forearm and turned her back to face him. His eyes blazed with heated purpose. She felt it ignite a fire in her blood where his fingers were wrapped around her wrist like a convict iron.

The tension in the air crackled like sheet lightning over a wide open plain.

‘Don’t turn away from me when I’m speaking to you,’ he rasped.

Her chin went up and her eyes shot him their own fiery glare. ‘Don’t order me about like a child.’

His dark eyes glinted menacingly as they warred with hers. ‘I’m paying you to obey my orders, damn it.’

Eliza felt a trail of molten heat roll down her spine but still her chin went even higher. ‘You’re not paying me enough to bow and scrape to you like a simpering servant.’

Those fingers burned her flesh like a brand. That hard-muscled body tempted her like an irresistible lure. Those dark eyes wrestled with hers until every nerve in her body was jangling and tingling with sensual hunger.

Heat exploded between her legs.

She could almost feel him there, that pounding surge of his body that triggered something raw and earthy and deeply primitive inside her.

‘How much?’ His eyes smouldered darkly. ‘How much to have you in my bed for the rest of the month? How much to have you bowing and scraping and simpering to my every need?’

A reckless demon made her goad him. ‘You can’t afford me.’

‘Try me. I have my limit. If you go over it I’ll soon tell you.’

Eliza thought of the small house where Ewan and his mother lived in Suffolk. She thought of how much the bathroom needed renovating to make showering him easier for Samantha. She thought of the heating that needed improving because Ewan, as a quadriplegic, had no way of controlling his own body temperature. And then there were the lifting and toileting and feeding aids that always seemed to need an upgrade.

It all cost an astonishing amount of money.

Money Leo Valente was willing to pay her to be his mistress for the rest of the month.

Her heart tapped out an erratic tattoo. Maybe if she took the money it would make her feel less guilty about sleeping with him while she was engaged to Ewan. It would make it impossible to treat their relationship as anything but a business deal.

Well, perhaps not impossible…but unlikely.

He would have her body but she wouldn’t sell him her heart.

Eliza met his hardened gaze with her outwardly composed one even as her stomach nosedived at the extraordinary step she was taking. ‘I want two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’

His brows lifted a fraction but, apart from that, his expression gave nothing away. ‘I’ll see that you get it within the next hour or two.’

‘So—’ she hastily disguised a tight little swallow ‘—it’s not…too much?’

He brought her up against the trajectory of his arousal, the shock of the contact sending a wave of heat like a furnace blast right through her body. ‘I’ll let you know,’ he said and sealed her mouth with the blistering heat of his.

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN ELIZA WOKE the following morning her body tingled from head to foot. She turned her head but the only sign of Leo having shared the bed with her was the indentation on his pillow beside her.

And his smell…

She breathed in the musk and citrusy scent of him that clung to the sheets as well as her skin. His lovemaking last night had been as spine-tingling as ever, maybe even more so. For some reason the fact that he was paying her to sleep with him had made her stretch her boundaries with him. It had been heart-stopping and exciting, edgy and wonderfully, mind-blowingly satisfying.

The door of the bedroom opened and he came in carrying a cup of tea and toast on a tray. He was naked except for a pair of track pants that were slung low on his lean hips. ‘I’ve already checked on Alessandra. Marella’s giving her breakfast downstairs.’

‘I’m sorry…’ Eliza frowned as she pulled the sheet up to cover her naked breasts. ‘I overslept…I didn’t hear her on the monitor.’

‘It didn’t go off.’ He put the tray down on her side of the bed. ‘I took it with me. She woke up while I was down making the tea.’

She pushed a matted tangle of hair off her face with a sweep of her hand. This cosy little domestic scene was not what she was expecting from him. It caught her off guard. It made her feel as if she was acting in a play but she had been given the wrong script. She didn’t know what was expected of her. ‘You seem to be having some problems with your human resources department,’ she commented dryly.

His dark glinting eyes met hers as he sat on the edge of the bed beside her. ‘How so?’

She gave him an ironic look. ‘Your housekeeper is acting as the nanny and your nanny is acting like the lady of the manor—or should I say lady of the villa?’

He trailed the tip of his index finger down the length of her bare arm in a lazy, barely touching stroke that set off a shower of sparks beneath her skin. ‘Marella enjoys helping with Alessandra. And I quite enjoy having you playing lady of the villa.’

Eliza shivered as that bottomless dark gaze smouldered as it held hers. ‘Wouldn’t lady of the night be more appropriate?’ she asked with a pert hitch of her chin.

A line of steel travelled from his mouth and lodged itself in his eyes. ‘What do you want the money for?’

She gave a careless shrug and shifted her gaze to the left of his. ‘The usual things—clothes, jewellery, shoes, salon treatments, a holiday or two.’

He captured her chin and made her look at him. ‘You do realise I would have paid you much more?’

Her stomach quivered as his thumb grazed the fullness of her bottom lip. ‘Yes…I know.’

He measured her gaze with his for endless, heart-chugging seconds. ‘But you didn’t ask for it.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She gave another careless little shrug. ‘Maybe I don’t think I’m worth it.’

His thumb caressed her cheek as he cupped her face in his hand, his gaze still rock-steady on hers. ‘Why would you think that?’

Eliza felt the danger of getting too close to him, of allowing him to see behind the paper-thin armour she had pinned around herself. She had to stay streetwise and smart-mouthed. She couldn’t allow him to see any other version of herself.

The real version.

‘You get what you pay for in life, wouldn’t you agree?’ She didn’t pause for him to answer. ‘Say my price was a million pounds. I figure this way you only got a quarter of me.’

His gaze continued to hold hers unwaveringly. ‘What if I wanted all of you?’

Eliza felt a momentary flare of alarm in her chest. She had experienced his ruthless intent before. It was dangerous to be inciting it into action again. What he wanted he got. He wouldn’t let anything or anyone stand in his way. Hadn’t he already achieved what he’d set out to achieve? She was back in his bed, wasn’t she? And it didn’t look as if he was going to let her out of it any time soon. She held his look with a steady determination she wasn’t even close to feeling. ‘The rest of me is not for sale.’

His thumb moved back and forth over her cheek, slowly, mesmerizingly, that all-seeing, all-knowing gaze stripping away the layers of her defences like pages being torn from a cheap notepad. ‘So which part have I bought?’ he asked.

‘The part you wanted.’

‘How do you know which part I wanted?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ She brazenly stroked a hand down his naked chest to the elastic waistband of his track pants, giving him her best sultry look. ‘It’s the same part I want of you.’

She heard him suck in a breath as her hand dipped below the fabric. She felt his abdomen tense. She felt the satin of his skin, the hot, hard heat of him scorching her fingers as they wrapped around him. Her body primed itself for his possession and she didn’t care how sweet or savage it was going to be.

She yanked his track pants down further and bent her head to him, teasing him mercilessly with her tongue. He groaned and dug his fingers into her scalp but he didn’t pull away, or, at least, not at first. She drew on him, tasting the essence of him, swirling her tongue over and around him, making little flicking movements and little cat-like licks until finally he could stand no more.

‘Wait,’ he gasped, trying to pull back. ‘I’m going to—’ He let out a short, sharp expletive as she went for broke. She had him by the hips and dug her fingers in hard. Her mouth sucked harder and harder, wanting his final capitulation the same way he went for hers—ruthlessly.

He came explosively but she didn’t shy away from receiving him. He shuddered and quaked, finally sagging over her like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly severed.

Eliza caressed her hands over his back and shoulders, a slow exploratory massage of each of his carved and toned muscles. He had loved her massaging him in the past. And she had loved doing it. He had carried a lot of tension in his body even back then. There was something almost worshipful about touching him this way, with long and smooth strokes of her palms and fingers, rediscovering him like a precious memory she thought she had lost for ever. ‘You’ve got knots in your shoulders. You need to relax more.’

‘Can’t get more relaxed than this right now.’

‘I’m just saying…’

He lifted himself up on his elbows and locked gazes with her. ‘We’re doing this the wrong way around. It’s not the way I usually do things.’

She tiptoed her fingers over his pectoral muscles. ‘You’re paying me to pleasure you. That changes the dynamic, surely?’

He pulled her hand away from his chest and sat upright, his expression contorted with a brooding frown, his gaze dark and disapproving. ‘I know what you’re doing.’

‘What am I doing?’

‘You’re playing the hooker card.’

She gave a little up and down movement of one shoulder. ‘If the shoe fits I usually wear it. I find it’s more comfortable that way.’

‘Is that really how you want to play things?’

Her brow arched haughtily. ‘Do I have a choice?’

He held her gaze for a long pause before he let out a breath and got to his feet. He scraped a hand through his hair before he dropped it back down by his side. ‘The money is in your account. I deposited it an hour ago.’

‘Thank you.’ She gave him a look. ‘Sir.’

There was another tight pause before he spoke. ‘I have to go to Paris on business. Marella has agreed to be here to help you with Alessandra. I don’t expect you to be on duty twenty-four hours a day.’

‘How long will you be away?’

‘A day or two.’

‘Why don’t you take us with you?’ she asked. ‘It’s a shortish trip. It shouldn’t be too hard to organise. It would be a little adventure for Alessandra. It will build her confidence to travel and mix with other people other than just you and Marella and me.’

His jaw tightened like a clamp. ‘Maybe some other time.’

Eliza suspected his ‘maybe some other time’ meant no other time. What did he think was going to happen to Alessandra if she stepped outside the villa for once? How was his little girl supposed to live a normal life if he kept her away from everything that was normal? ‘You can’t keep her hidden away for ever, you know.’

‘Is that what you think I’m doing?’

‘No one even knows you have a child, much less that she’s blind.’

‘I don’t want my daughter to be ridiculed or pitied in the press.’ His gaze nailed hers. ‘Can you imagine how terrifying it would be for her to be hounded by paparazzi? She’s too young to cope with all of that. I won’t allow her to be treated like a freak show every time she goes out in public.’

‘I understand how you feel, but she needs to—’

He stabbed a finger in the air towards her, his eyes blazing with vitriolic anger. ‘You do not understand. You don’t have any idea of what it’s like to have a child with a disability. She can’t see. Do you hear me? She can’t see and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.’

Eliza swallowed unevenly, her heart contracting at the raw emotion he was displaying. He was angry and bitter but beneath all that was a loving father who was truly heartbroken that he could do nothing to help his little daughter. Tears burned in the back of her throat for what he was going through. No wonder he was always so tense and on edge. ‘I’m sorry…’

He drew in a tight breath and released it in a slow, uneven stream. ‘I’m sorry for shouting at you.’

‘You don’t have to apologise…’

He came back to where she was still sitting amongst the pillows, a rueful look on his face as he brushed a flyaway strand of her hair off her face. ‘I know you’re only trying to help but this is a lot for me to handle right now.’

She lowered her gaze again and bit at her lip. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything…’

He stroked the pad of his thumb over her savaged lip. ‘Of course you should. You’re an expert on handling children. I appreciate your opinion although I might not always agree with it.’

‘I just thought it would be good for Alessandra to stretch her wings a bit.’ She met his gaze again. ‘But the press thing is difficult. I can see why you want to protect her from all of that. But sooner or later she’ll have to deal with it. She can’t stay here at the villa for the rest of her life. She needs to mix with other children, to make friends and do normal kid stuff like go to birthday parties and on picnics and play dates.’

He studied her features for a measured pause. ‘I might have to go back to London some time next week. If you think Alessandra would cope with it then maybe we could make a little holiday out of it. Maybe take her to Kew Gardens or something. Smell a few roses. That sort of thing.’

Eliza gave him a soft smile and touched his hand where it was resting on the bed beside her. ‘She’s a very lucky little girl to have such a wonderful father like you. There are a lot of little girls out there who would give anything to be loved by their fathers the way you love her.’

His fingers ensnared hers, holding them in the warmth of his hand. ‘You’ve never told me anything about your father. I remember you told me when we first met that your mother died when you were young. Is he still alive?’

She shifted her gaze to their joined hands. ‘Yes, but I’ve only met him the once.’