That fast the moment to stand her ground was lost and her body took over, her hips angling up to accept more of him … and then more and then, heavens, the pulsing, driving fullness of him was pushing her closer and closer to the edge she had never thought to visit again with him.
In the aftermath, his heart still thundering over hers, she held him close, adoring the weight and intimacy of him that close, wanting and barely resisting the urge to cover him in kisses. But while her body was satisfied, her brain was not and with every minute that passed she was seeing deeper into herself. She wanted to run away because she was scared
of getting hurt. Why was she likely to get hurt? Solely because she felt too much for him. She was hopelessly, deeply and irretrievably attached to Vito Barbieri, indeed as much in love as a woman could be with a man. For too long she had denied her true feelings, suppressed them and refused out of fear to examine them.
‘And now you’re thinking too much … for a sensible adult,’ Vito reproved, noting her evasively lowered lashes and mutinously closed lips before he lowered his handsome head to rub a stubbled cheek against the soft slope of her breast and drink in the familiar scent of her with a sense of bone-deep satisfaction. ‘This isn’t complex. We’re in a good place right now … don’t spoil it, gioia mia.’
‘I need a shower,’ she said stubbornly, whipping her clinging arms off him again.
‘You are so obstinate,’ Vito grated, rolling off her with sudden alacrity and viewing her with forbidding cool from the other side of the bed.
‘Whatever turns you on,’ Ava replied glibly.
And she did, any time of day, every time, all the time, Vito mused grudgingly, watching the lithe swing of her slim curvy hips and spotting the tattoo of his name inked onto her pale skin as she vanished into the bathroom. Ava had taught him what a weekend was, how to walk away from work, daydream in important meetings. She was like an express train to a side of life he had never known before and sometimes it spooked him. He should have let her leave, a little voice intoned deep in the back of his mind, get his work focus back on track, return to … normal? Yet being with Ava felt astonishingly normal even when her backchat was ricocheting off the walls around him. The phone by the bed buzzed and he flipped over to answer it.
In the shower, Ava was scrubbing the wanton evidence of her weakness from her skin when Vito appeared in the doorway, a towering bronzed figure with a physique to die for.
She rammed the shower door back. ‘Don’t I get peace anywhere?’ she sniped.
‘That was Eleanor on the phone. Your sisters have arrived for a visit—she put them in the drawing room.’
Ava froze in stark shock and equally sudden pleasure. ‘Gina and Bella have come here to see me?’
‘Obviously they read that newspaper article … or your ex-father figure talked. Dress up,’ Vito advised. ‘You don’t want them feeling sorry for you.’
‘Or thinking that you would consort with a poorly dressed woman,’ Ava completed cheekily.
‘I’d consort with you no matter what you wore,’ Vito imparted with a lazy sardonic smile.
‘But you probably prefer me in nothing,’ Ava pointed out drily.
Her mind awash with speculation, Ava dug in haste through her extensive collection of new clothes. Gina and Bella, both in their thirties, were always well groomed. Vito’s comment had struck a raw nerve. Ava didn’t want to look like an object of pity, particularly after the humble letters she had sent in hope of renewed contact with her siblings had been ignored. So, why on earth were they coming to see her now? Her generous mouth down curved as she wondered if her sisters were planning to ask her to leave the neighbourhood to protect them from embarrassment. Gina, married to an engineer, and Bella, married to a solicitor, had always seemed very conscious of what their friends and neighbours might think of their mother and her drink problems. Elegant in a soft dove-grey dress teamed with a pale lavender cardigan, her revealingly tumbled hair carefully secured to the back of her head, Ava slid her feet into heels and went downstairs.
Nerves were eating her alive by the time she opened the drawing-room door. Vito was not there. Gina and Bella were small, blonde and curvy like their late mother and both women swiftly stood up to look at her. Recognising the pronounced lack of physical similarity between her sisters and herself, Ava marvelled that it had not previously occurred to her to wonder if they had had different parentage.
‘I hope you don’t mind us calling in for a chat,’ Gina said awkwardly. ‘We came on impulse after seeing that photo of you in the paper with Vito Barbieri. Dad didn’t realise that you were staying here at the castle when you visited him and Janet yesterday.’
‘I don’t think he would have cared had I come down on a rocket from the moon,’ Ava declared wryly as she sat down opposite the other two women. ‘I was only in their home for about five minutes and once he’d said his piece there didn’t seem to be anything more to say.’
‘Well, actually there is more,’ Bella spoke up tensely. ‘Dad might still feel that he has an axe to grind over the fact that he chose to pretend that you were his child all those years but, no matter what Mum did, you’re still our sister, Ava.’
‘Half-sister,’ Ava qualified stiffly, unable to forget her unanswered letters. ‘And let’s face it, we’ve never been close.’
‘We may have grown up in a very dysfunctional family,’ Gina acknowledged, compressing her lips. ‘But we don’t agree with the way Dad is behaving now. He’s made everything more difficult for the three of us. He demanded that we keep you out of our lives. He prefers to act like you don’t exist.’
‘And for too long we played along with Dad for the sake of family peace,’ Bella admitted unhappily.
‘And sometimes we used his attitude to you as an excuse as well,’ Gina added guiltily. ‘Like us not coming to see you while you were in prison. To be frank, I didn’t want to go into a prison and be vetted and then searched like a criminal just for the privilege of visiting you.’
‘We did once get as close as the prison gates,’ Bella volunteered with a wince of embarrassed uneasiness.
‘Prison-visiting … it just seemed so sordid,’ Gina confided more frankly. ‘And the gates and the guards were intimidating.’
‘I can understand that,’ Ava said and she did.
Eleanor Dobbs entered with a laden tray of coffee and cakes, providing a welcome distraction from the tension stretching between the three women.
‘Mum wrote a letter to you just before she died,’ Gina volunteered once the door had closed behind the housekeeper again.