Unexpected Pleasures (22 page)

Watching her, Gabriel shook his head and reached for the hem of her nightshirt. Sasha’s eyes widened, the breath locking in her throat. And then she nodded and lifted her arms, so that he could pull the nightshirt free of her body.

Before she could drop her arms his mouth was on her naked breasts, tasting their familiar scented warmth, his teeth tugging erotically at the dark thrust of one nipple in the way she remembered whilst his hand cupped and caressed her other breast.

It was more pleasure than she could bear. It made her cry out aloud and rake her nails down his back as she moaned his name. Already she could feel the once familiar rhythmic force building up inside her body.

There was no need for her to say anything, or for Gabriel to ask. They seemed to move together as though their movements were pre-orchestrated.

Gabriel leaned down and lifted her bodily against himself. As she wrapped her legs around him he could feel the sharp grittiness of the sand from her feet rubbing abrasively against his skin, a reminder that intense pleasure needed to be edged with the sting of pain.

Maybe that was why he felt this overpowering need for her now. Because without her his life had been bland and dull. Maybe he needed the pain to really feel. Unconnected thoughts flashed through his head and were dismissed as Sasha wrapped her arms tightly around his neck. Bracing himself against the smooth wall of rock behind him, Gabriel thrust hotly into her.

Immediately her head dropped back, a low moan of pleasure dragging from her throat as he thrust deeper into the tight heat of the muscles holding him skin to skin so perfectly that they might have been his own.

It had always been like this with her, always, and that knowledge had haunted his dreams and savaged his pride. No other woman had ever made him feel like this. No other woman had made him want like this, driving him to break through the barrier that separated them into two different human beings. But it was only now, in the sexual extremis of his desire, that he was allowing himself to admit that to himself.

He had forgotten just how intense the pleasure of being with Sasha like this was. How could he have lived so long without it, without her?

Sasha wrapped herself as tightly around Gabriel as she could, savouring each wonderfully familiar thrust of his body. Her muscles clung to him, drawing him deeper, and she strained against him, wanting to possess all of him and be possessed by all of him. Her senses were flooded with an erotic stimulation and need that brought emotional tears to her eyes. She matched the movements of his body, taking and returning every rhythmic pulse. She pressed her lips to the base of his throat, caressing his sweat-slick skin, its taste sharp, salty and familiar.

She heard him cry out her name, and then she was gasping and shuddering wildly as she felt the first fierce spasm of her own orgasm.

* * *

W
ORDLESSLY
G
ABRIEL
RELEASED
Sasha, drawing great gulps of air into his straining chest. It must be lack of oxygen that was causing him to tremble from head to foot like a boy who had just had his first woman, he told himself dizzily.

Sasha couldn’t believe what she had done. Her whole body was trembling so much she could hardly stand. She felt oddly weak, and yet at the same time filled with a heady sense of triumph and satisfaction.

She looked up at Gabriel.

‘You owed me that,’ he told her grimly, breathing hard. ‘That and more.’

The rising sun dazzled her, making her turn away from its glittering light. She could see her nightshirt lying on the sand. She picked it up and pulled it on. She felt as though she was existing in some kind of void—something akin to the emotional equivalent of the golden hour after a major accident, when the victim was so traumatised that the body failed to recognise the severity of its injuries.

Without saying a word to Gabriel she started to walk back to the house.

CHAPTER NINE

F
ORTUNATELY
it was still too early for anyone else to be up, because by the time Sasha had finally reached the sanctuary of her bedroom she was trembling with shock.

She sank down onto her bed, tears pricking her eyes. What on earth had come over her? She had behaved like...like a woman who hadn’t had sex for ten years. Or like a woman who had yearned for ten years to be with the only man she could ever love.

* * *

G
ABRIEL
STOOD
BENEATH
the hot spray of the shower, washing Sasha’s scent from his skin. Something had happened to him out there on the beach, something so precious and so illuminating that deep inside himself he wanted to reach out and hold the memory of it safe for ever. It made him want to reach out to Sasha with tenderness; it made him want to hold her for ever. But it also made him afraid. It had the potential to threaten everything he believed, everything he had built his life on.

He made himself focus on the reality of the situation: while he might not have planned what had happened on the beach, it proved that he was right about Sasha. It proved that she was no more loyal to Carlo than she had been to him. So where was the moral euphoria he should be feeling? The sense of righteousness and triumph? Why was he feeling more like an ex-addict who had suddenly and fatally been exposed to his favourite drug of choice and discovered that its pleasure was even more potent than he had remembered?

Just once, just one more time, so that this time he would be the one to walk away from her and leave her aching. That was what he had told himself, but already he knew it wasn’t going to be like that. Already he was thinking about the next time...and the next. Already he was thinking about waking up in the night and reaching out to find her there next to him. Already he was filled with emotions that—

Emotions?
But he didn’t have emotions—especially not for Sasha. The huge discrepancy between what he had told himself to think and what was actually happening to him held him still as unwanted self-knowledge trickled through the gaps in the barriers he had thrown up, slowly but inexorably gathering force. The pain he had always denied he could feel was already squeezing his heart. On the beach, holding Sasha, completing the circle of human intimacy with her in that small, quiet moment of supreme peace after the intensity of his climax, a thought as soft as a drifting feather had brushed against his heart, telling him that here, in this private moment of time with Sasha, lay the greatest happiness he could ever know.

* * *

T
HERE
WERE
UNFAMILIAR
aches in her body that weren’t caused by having spent the last three hours keeping her muscles under rigid control while she walked round the house with Gabriel and his architect as he inspected it with a view to returning it to a private home.

Now the three of them were standing outside, and the architect was delivering his opinion.

‘I don’t see any major problems,’ he was telling Gabriel enthusiastically. ‘I must say,’ he added approvingly to Sasha, ‘that when you originally converted the house into a hotel your architect did an excellent job of retaining its original features.’

Sasha had to force herself to at least appear to be giving her attention to what he was saying. Not because she wasn’t interested. Architecture and interior décor and design were her passions, but right now she was still feeling the fall-out from this morning’s very different passion. While her body might be aching with sensual lassitude, her head could hardly contain the thumping force of her mental self-flagellation. It was no use to keep on saying to herself, How could you? She had, and now she had to live with the consequences of what she had done. And right now, she acknowledged, the most unbearable of all those consequences was the way that standing anywhere within a five-yard radius of Gabriel was causing her body to go into a frenzy of sexual lust.

She would have given anything to refuse his suggestion that she join him and the architect on their inspection of the house, but her pride wouldn’t let her. So now she was suffering the outcome of that pride as every nerve-ending bombarded her body with messages that were dangerously and explicitly erotic. Gabriel might be dressed now, in buff-coloured chinos and a soft white linen shirt, but all she could see in her mind’s eye was his naked body, and it produced a sheeny dew of perspiration on her she was mortally afraid must carry the female scent of her desire for him.

She had kept as much distance between them as she could, standing to one side of him to keep him out of her line of vision, making sure she walked next to the architect and not Gabriel, but she was still acutely aware of him.

‘One thing I would like incorporated into the grounds is a hard surface circuit for the boys.’

‘For your sons’ bikes and skateboards, you mean?’ the architect asked. ‘A good idea.’

Sasha sucked in her breath, waiting for Gabriel to correct him and tell him that Sam and Nico were not his sons but his wards, but the architect was already speaking again, telling them ruefully, ‘My own sons complain that there is nowhere for them to enjoy those things since my wife says that the city traffic makes it too dangerous for them to use the roads. I must say I envy you this wonderful location you have here. You are close enough to Port Cervo to be able to enjoy its facilities without being too close, plus you have this magnificent stretch of private beach.’

‘The land has been in the Calbrini family for many generations,’ Gabriel told him, while Sasha writhed in inner torment as she remembered what use they had put the privacy of that beach to only this morning.

The architect was looking towards his hire car, obviously ready to leave. Sasha exhaled in relief and said a quick goodbye to him before making her escape, unaware of the way Gabriel turned to watch her walk away from them.

She found the boys on the terrace, talking excitedly to Professor Fennini about the afternoon trip they were going to make exploring some of the island’s historical sites. Even without turning around she knew that Gabriel had followed her onto the terrace.

Her hands were shaking so hard as she poured herself a glass of water from the jug that some of it spilled onto the table. In her desperation to put as much distance between Gabriel and herself she tried to step past him too quickly and missed her step. She would have collided with one of the wrought-iron chairs if Gabriel hadn’t reached out and covered the metal with his hand, so that she bumped into his fingers instead.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything. Her body greedily soaked up the forbidden pleasure of physical contact with his. Her hand was trembling so badly she could hardly hold her glass of water, and she could see the boys looking at her. What must they be thinking? They were too young to understand what was happening to her, of course. But her face started to burn with maternal guilt.

‘Mum, why don’t you wear your rings any more?’ Nico asked her curiously.

Her initial relief was quickly followed by fresh tension. She looked down at her left hand, bare of everything apart from her thin wedding band.

‘The car is here, boys, it is time for us to leave,’ the Professor announced jovially.

Sasha went with them to the front of the house, where the driver was waiting with the air-conditioned Mercedes Gabriel had hired to take them to the places the Professor wanted them to see, and gave each of the boys a quick hug and a brief kiss.

Gabriel was saying something to the Professor, and Sasha took advantage of their conversation to go back into the house. Her head was aching with the pressure of her distracted thoughts. She was still in shock from this morning, unable to truly reconcile what she had done with the reality of her true relationship with Gabriel. Gabriel despised her. He was hostile towards her, he had a grudge against her, and yet even knowing that she had still allowed him...

Allowed
him? What had happened that morning hadn’t happened as the result of any kind of conscious decision. Like a furious storm coming out nowhere, it had been beyond human control.

‘Sasha.’

She stiffened, tempted to turn and run from him, as she had done this morning. It wasn’t just her face but her whole body that was burning now.

She forced herself to turn around and look at him.

‘You never answered Nico,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you wearing your rings?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Because I’ve sold them,’ she told him evenly. ‘My jewellery was the only asset that was mine, so I took it into Port Cervo and sold it. When the boys go back to school I intend to use the money to buy a home for the three of us in London. Contrary to what you may think, Gabriel, I do not want to live at your expense.’

‘You sold your jewellery?’ An icy shock of angry fear sheeted through Gabriel. If she had money then she would not need him. And he needed her to need him, Gabriel suddenly recognised.

‘Yes.’ Sasha gave him a steady look. ‘The boys need a proper settled home. They are my sons, and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to give them that, Gabriel.’

‘You could have—’

‘What?’ she challenged him. ‘Asked you for help?’ As she had once asked him for his love? ‘I think we both know what your reaction to that would have been, don’t we? I’ve got rather a bad headache, and I’m not in the mood for this conversation, Gabriel. What I choose to do with my jewellery is my own affair and no one else’s.’ She turned on her heel and headed for the stairs.

* * *

F
OR
SOME
UNFATHOMABLE
reason Gabriel felt as though someone had just dropped a leaden weight into his chest cavity.

Sasha was walking upstairs, and for a second he was tempted to go after her and demand to know how she could reconcile her love for her sons with what she had done to him. She had, after all, told him that she loved him. She had begged him to return that love. He could still remember the intensity of the confusion and anger she had aroused in him, the strength of his desire to reject what she was saying. Yet at the same time her words had pierced him with an unfamiliar sensation—pain, even if at the time he had refused to acknowledge it. Now that long-buried memory surfaced.

His throat felt tight and his heart was hammering painfully against his ribs—because of Sasha? Because she was a mother who loved her sons? Was he
jealous
of that love?

It was like receiving a sickening sledgehammer blow out of nowhere, against which he had no defences.

One of the first things his grandfather had done when he had taken Gabriel to live with him had been to show him the diamond and ruby necklace he had given to Gabriel’s mother when she had returned home.

‘This is what she sold you for,’ he had taunted Gabriel, before complaining bitterly, ‘She should have married the husband I chose for her in the first place, then maybe I would have the grandson the Calbrini name deserves, instead of a misbegotten nothing like you.’

After his grandfather’s death Gabriel had destroyed the portrait of his mother wearing the rubies she had valued so much more than him, and he had locked the necklace itself away in the Calbrini family bank vault.

This time spent here with Sasha should have reinforced everything he thought and believed about her and her sex. It should have given him the satisfaction of a due debt paid. But instead it had thrown up such huge inconsistencies in the logic of his own thinking that he couldn’t ignore them any more.

There was one thing that he could do, though. He walked out of the house and got into his car. He knew Port Cervo well enough to guess which jeweller Sasha would have visited.

The owner of the shop was reluctant to tell him at first how much he had given Sasha, but in the end Gabriel got his way. Gabriel wrote him a cheque, to which he added a substantial extra sum for ‘inconvenience’ and, having recovered Sasha’s jewellery, made his way back to his car.

* * *

S
ASHA
HADN
’
T
BEEN
lying about her headache. The soft roar of the Mercedes telling her that Gabriel had gone out and that she had the house to herself made her sigh shakily with relief. No need to pretend now. No need to protect herself or worry about what she might reveal for a few precious hours.

She stripped off her clothes and stepped under the shower, welcoming the cool mist of water on her tense, hot skin.

This morning on the beach...

Stop it, she warned herself. Don’t think about that. But she wanted to. She wanted to think about it and relive it and relish every second of it, secretly hoarding it away...

She switched off the shower and reached for a towel, wrapping it around herself before padding into her bedroom. This hunger possessing her didn’t mean anything, she tried to reassure herself. It was just a physical appetite, that was all... The needy girl who had been so desperate for Gabriel’s love had gone. And the woman who had taken her place didn’t need his love.

She had her sons, her self respect, a new life in front of her. What she did not need was to be dragged back into the past, to be reclaimed by a damaging relationship. Gabriel hadn’t changed; he had made that obvious. He didn’t want to change. He had built his whole life on the foundation stone of his mother’s desertion, and without that foundation.... The reality was that he wanted to despise her, Sasha acknowledged. As powerful as the sexual attraction between them was, it was built on darkness and bitterness, and that made it destructive and damaging for both of them.

She took two painkillers, and closed the shutters to block out the sunlight before crawling into her bed. Tears filled her eyes and slid down her face. They weren’t just caused by the pain of her headache, she admitted, although why on earth she should cry for Gabriel, as well as herself, she couldn’t understand.

* * *

T
HE
HOUSE
WAS
empty and silent. A sensation like a huge fist gripping and crushing his heart filled Gabriel’s chest. Like an image on a screen, he saw himself striding through the darkness of the main cabin of his yacht, calling out irritably to Sasha, wanting to know why she wasn’t in his bed.