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Her own words echoed inside Alyse’s head, but she hardly recognised them for what they were. In that moment she had felt as if her mind was suddenly assailed by a multitude of sensations, buzzing and fizzing through her thoughts.
She hadn’t just wanted to dance. She had been overwhelmed by an uncontrollable hunger to dance with this man. To feel his hand in hers, his arms around her. And it had nothing to do with the idea that had been in her mind when she had first seen him. The wild plan to find someone who would help her put Marcus off. Who would—hopefully—stop his intent pursuit of her when nothing else had worked.
But this had nothing to do with that. It had only and everything to do with Dario Olivero and the man he was. The man who had knocked her off balance from the moment she had first seen him and from then it felt as if her mind was not her own.
‘Dario...’ She tried out his name, feeling it as strange on her tongue, catching on her lips. But it was swallowed up in the melody they were dancing to. ‘Dario...’ she tried again, louder this time.
The dark head bent, blue eyes connecting with hers, searing off a protective layer of skin so that she felt everything—every touch, every movement, the warmth of his breath as it stirred her hair with a new and shocking intensity. She didn’t know how she moved her feet, only managing to keep to the steps of the dance by pure instinct as her gaze locked with his.
‘You dance very well...’ she managed, a tumble of words over a tongue that was thickened with tension and awareness. ‘More than well,’ she added and felt rather than heard the rumble of laughter in his chest so close to her ear.
‘It’s a bit late to realise that,’ he teased softly. ‘What if I had two left feet and trampled you underfoot from the moment we started?’
I wouldn’t have minded. She had to clamp her lips shut fast to stop the words escaping from her unguarded mouth. She didn’t feel as if her feet belonged to her anyway. She could almost have been hovering six inches above the floor, her steps so light and beyond her control.
‘Then relax.’
‘I am relaxed.’
He didn’t respond—at least not verbally but the slow lifting of one dark brow to question her comment made her heart kick in stunned reaction. Her mind might be whirling in sensation, but her body was holding itself straight and upright as she had been taught in the dance classes her mother had insisted on at the exclusive school she’d attended. The distance between their bodies was tiny—barely there.
But then she looked up into those stunning blue eyes and her heart skipped a beat. There was so much less of that blue there now, the enlarged black of his pupils swallowing up all the colour until his gaze was like a lake of black glass in which she could see herself reflected, small and so very vulnerable. She lost time for a moment, and almost stumbled. She might have tripped if it hadn’t been for the strength of the arms supporting her, the width and power of the broad shoulder under her hand.
But it wasn’t vulnerability that made her heart kick so hard under the blue silk of her dress that she had to catch her breath on a hasty gasp. It was a realisation that made her head spin, her pulse race.
He felt it too.
She could hardly believe it but there could be little doubt it was true. Dario Olivero, the dark, dangerous-looking pirate who just minutes before had been a total stranger, was now in the grip of the same heated response that was burning her up like a bush fire. He was as aroused as she was, and she was close to swooning with need, weakened by the sort of sensual hunger that she had never known before.
‘Dario...’
This time his name was just a croak, the dryness of her mouth, her throat making it almost impossible to speak. But he caught it and a strange flicker of a smile curled the corners of his sensual mouth before he bent his head again and let his cheek rest against the side of her head, his lips brushing her hair as he whispered one word again.
‘Relax...’
Gently but irresistibly he drew her towards him, the pressure of one powerful hand tight against her back, the heat of his palm burning the exposed skin over her spine.
‘Relax...’ he repeated, the softly accented voice entrancing her.
She melted against him, her body curving against his, loose and pliant. Her head was against his chest so that she could hear the heavy, strong beat of his heart under her ear. The scent of him enclosed her, the sway of her body matching his, and she gave herself up to sensation, to an awareness and sensitivity that swept aside the possibility of any other feeling. The heavy pressure of his arousal against her stomach awoke an answering hunger deep inside, an ache of need that was both pleasure and a yearning that demanded to be assuaged.
But not yet. Not until she had enjoyed this sensation of closeness, this connection for a while longer, and taken from it all she could get.
* * *
He had a nerve, Dario told himself, telling her to relax, when all the time his whole body felt as if it was in the grip of a raging fever that threatened to burn him up, reducing any chance of control into a pile of ashes blowing round his head. The fact that she had obeyed him only added to the tautness of every nerve that stung with tension every time she moved.
The whisper of her soft soles on the floor, the swirl of the bright blue dress around her slender legs all worked on his senses with hypnotic effect. Every sense, every part of him, his whole concentration was on the woman he held in his arms—the feel of her, the scent, the touch of her against his hands, skin against skin. But it was not enough. He wanted more and yet he was not prepared to stop this, to have it end. Not yet, even if it was to move on to something more viscerally satisfying. Something that every cell in his body was starting to demand with hungry determination.
This wasn’t what he had planned on, what he had expected to happen. But right now he was more than prepared to let it go its own way. Any thought of thwarting Marcus’s plans had been relegated to the hazy part of his mind. He would let this play out as it was for now...
He drew in a sharp, controlling breath just as one song came to an end and the band began another one. A slow dance. The sort of dance that encouraged a man to take a woman in his arms and hold her close.
So had he made the move or had Alyse stepped closer, moving into his arms without hesitation? She was so close, curved against him, the arch of her body pressed against his at breast and waist and hip so that it was impossible that she couldn’t feel the heat and hardness of the hunger he was unable to disguise. She must feel it and yet she showed no sign at all of objecting. If anything, she slid a little closer, making him curse silently at the pleasure that was so close to pain that burned through him as a result.
‘Alyse...’
It was just a groan, a note of warning. A public gathering, an elegant ballroom, was not the place for a response like this—so hard, so hot, so strong. This was a sensation that belonged in the bedroom, with his clothes flung wildly aside, the blue silk ripped from her body. It was all he could do to rein his raging senses in, hold himself upright...
‘Oh, hell...’
It was impossible. Couldn’t be done.
With an acknowledgement of defeat, he dropped his head down low, brushing his lips against the golden silk of her hair, feeling the delicate strands slide under his mouth. She murmured something softly and moved just a little closer, angling her head against the support of his chest so that the fine skin of her cheek, her neck, were exposed, offered to him for the kiss, the caress he knew he could not hold back from taking.
The taste of her flesh was like a drug, intoxicating, seducing him. He couldn’t wait any longer.
‘Alyse...’ His voice was rough and thickened with passion against the delicate curve of her ear. ‘I want... Let’s...’
‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ Her voice blended with his, the words exactly the same. The same note of hungry need blurring the sound so that they swirled and spun inside his head. ‘Somewhere more private.’
When she disengaged herself from his grasp and her hand slid into his, curving soft and warm around his fingers, Dario had no idea whether he was the one who took them from the dance floor or if in fact it was Alyse who led the way.
He only knew that this had been inevitable from the moment their eyes had first met. It was written into their fates, and no one and nothing was going to stop this now.
CHAPTER TWO
THE HALL BEYOND the ballroom was silent, strangely unoccupied after the crowds that had packed the other room. A buffet supper was being served as part of the event, and many people were already queuing there, waiting to be served. As a result, the almost empty hallway seemed unexpectedly cold and uncomfortable, making Alyse shiver in shock at the sudden change of temperature.
‘I need my coat...’
She fumbled in her clutch bag, looking for the cloakroom ticket. She had just found it when Dario reached over and took the slip of paper from her hand with a sharp tug.
‘Wait here.’
A gesture of courtesy—or taking control? Alyse couldn’t help wondering as she watched him stride across the marble floor to where the cloakroom attendant stood on duty. She didn’t know and she didn’t want to stop and consider the question. Control was a word she associated with her father—or with the sort of behaviour Marcus had been trying to force onto her—and she didn’t want to think of either of them right now.
Just two minutes out of the ballroom—two minutes away from the warm and intimate closeness of their dance—and already the heat and sensation had started to evaporate, leaving her with an uncomfortable shivery feeling inside. She wrapped her arms around herself in a vain attempt to bring some warmth back to uncomfortably chilled skin.
She hadn’t wanted to move apart from him; hadn’t wanted to break out of that cocoon that had formed around them. From the moment they had moved, Dario turning away from her, a cold, creeping sense of reality had started to invade the little bubble of delight she had been living in.
‘What am I doing?’
She actually muttered the words out loud as she kept her eyes fixed on the back of Dario’s dark head, the width of his powerful shoulders.
Was she really planning on heading out of here with him? With a man she had only met...her eyes slid to a clock above the cloakroom door...less than an hour before.
The main door opened with a heavy swish, someone who had gone outside for a sneaky cigarette coming in and leaving it partially open. Alyse balanced on her toes like an athlete readying for the gun to sound the starting point. She could go now...
But even as she took a step forward she caught the wave of cold and damp that came into the hall from behind the new arrival. His jacket was splashed with water too, warning of a change in weather outside. She would need her coat...and her coat...
Was in Dario’s hands, the fine black velvet looking impossibly soft and delicate in the grip of those long, tanned fingers.
She couldn’t get her feet to move, freezing where she stood, her eyes locking with his over the heads of the people around them. He knew what she had had on her mind; she could tell it from the faint fast frown that drew those dark brows together, the narrowing of the blue eyes.
‘Helena!’
Behind her, just beyond the doorway into the ballroom, Alyse heard an uncomfortably familiar male voice raised in greeting and just the sound of it brought a rush of a whole new set of feelings. In the space of an uneven heartbeat she was brought back to the moment she had arrived at the ball, the desperate plan, only half formed, to make sure that Marcus saw her with someone else so that then perhaps he would take no for an answer.
A swift sidelong glance over her shoulder brought confirmation of the slow creep of unease down her neck. Marcus was here. Suddenly, from wanting him to see her with someone else it had become the last thing she wanted. She wanted to get out of here now and let this evening that had suddenly turned magical in contrast to weeks of tension and strain continue. Pushing herself into action, she turned her feet towards Dario.
‘Thank you.’
It sounded as if she had run up a flight of steps rather than across the smooth marble tiling.
‘I’m going to need this...’ She was already pushing one arm into a sleeve of her coat as she spoke, manoeuvring herself so that she could hitch it up over her shoulder. ‘Have you seen the weather outside? It’s pouring with rain.’
The shiver she affected was meant to be in response to the conditions outside but it was given an added edge by the worrying sense of unease as she saw the way his gaze went over her head, skimming the entrance hall as if looking for someone.
Automatically, his hands came out to help her pull the other sleeve over her arm, lifting the fall of blonde hair from her shoulders and smoothing it down over the black velvet.
Hurry—hurry! Alyse urged him in the silence of her thoughts. Please, let’s get out of here before Marcus intervenes.
‘We’ll have to get a taxi...’ she said, pushing her arm under his and curling her hand around the strength of bone and muscle under the fine silk of his jacket. ‘Or we’ll get soaked.’
She was almost tugging him on his way, urging him towards the door.
‘No need,’ Dario muttered, nodding towards the uniformed man who held a large black umbrella that he had fetched from a nearby stand above their heads, protecting them from the lashing rain.
‘Your car, sir...’
The sleek black vehicle had come to a growling halt at the kerb, the back door opened for Alyse to make her way under the protection of the umbrella. She had only just slid into place on the soft leather seat when the door was slammed after her, and Dario made his way swiftly to the other side. An instant after that, the chauffeur, obviously needing no instructions as to their destination, put the car into motion as he pulled away from the kerb.
Alyse’s mood seesawed again, taking her from a need to escape to another, even more unsettling feeling. One that left her breathless and suddenly cold, in spite of the warmth inside the car. Dario’s fixed determination had disturbed her so that she could almost believe that she had been kidnapped, taken against her will.
And yet she knew she had been a party to it. More than that, she had been so swamped by the response of her senses that she wasn’t thinking straight. She had been burning up with hunger, the sensual need that had uncoiled in the pit of her stomach and radiated out along every nerve. If they could have moved then, been instantly transported from the ballroom to wherever they were going, then she wouldn’t have had a moment to think, to allow any hint of second thoughts to slide into her mind.
But now, when it seemed that the cold of the evening was seeping into her bones, a slow sneaking sense of apprehension destroyed that wonderful heated knowledge that this was right. That it was what she had been looking for all her life. The restrictions she’d had to put up with in order to help care for her ailing mother had limited her chances for the sort of fun and spontaneity her friends enjoyed. Tonight was going to be so very different.
Twisting in her seat, she glanced back the way they’d come, the brilliantly lit doorway to the hotel shielded from the rain by the canopy that flapped furiously in the wind. The weather had driven almost everyone indoors so there was only the doorman on duty. But as she watched a single figure emerged from the hotel doorway and stood, feet planted firmly apart on the red carpet, his whole body turned in their direction, his gaze obviously following the progress of the car as it sped away. The lamplight gleamed on the bright red-gold of his head, making it plain just who he was. He couldn’t be anyone else.
Marcus Kavanaugh. The man whose single-minded campaign to bully her into marrying him had blighted her life for the past few weeks. She had done everything she could to make it plain that he meant nothing to her, but it hadn’t worked. Of course she’d had to be polite. He was her father’s boss’s son after all. But politeness hadn’t worked. And now that her father had joined in the campaign to see them married, insisting it was the match of the century, she’d felt hounded, trapped, driven into a corner.
It was the memory of how the other man had behaved this morning that made her shudder faintly. She could still hear Marcus’s voice telling her that she would regret it if she gave him the runaround any more, and some dark edge to it had made her blood run cold. It was that that had pushed her into the plan she’d had for tonight.
Hastily, Alyse turned back, huddling into her coat.
‘Cold?’
Dario’s enquiry sounded innocuous but there was an edge to it that brought her eyes up to his in a rush, wary green meeting assessing blue.
‘You shivered,’ he pointed out.
‘Did I?’ The inanity of the conversation brought home to her the strangeness of the situation she was in. It was the sort of overly polite small talk you made with a complete stranger when you had just met for the first time.
But that was what Dario was. A stranger. A tall, dark, devastating stranger, and yet a man she had connected with from the start. One whose touch had lit a fire inside her when he’d held her on the dance floor. A man who had driven all thoughts of common sense or self-protection from her head when he had whispered, ‘Let’s go somewhere else...’ in the same moment she had used the exact same words.
Could this be real? She couldn’t have this sort of connection in so short a time. And yet this was what she had planned on happening all along. This was supposed to be her get-out-of-jail-free card, wasn’t it?
Once more, she made herself look back over her shoulder, seeing the blond man raise his hand to hail a taxi as the car turned a corner and he disappeared from sight. She couldn’t hold back a smile at the thought that, no matter what else happened, at this moment Marcus was very definitely out of the picture. The rush of the sense of freedom to her head was like the effect of strong alcohol.
‘Feeling better?’
He’d caught the smile—that much was obvious—and wanted an explanation for it. She was never going to tell him the real truth—but then that truth had nothing to do with him. Just as what happened from now on had nothing to do with Marcus. The result was the same, but the one thing she hadn’t expected when she’d come up with the whole crazy plan was how much she had wanted to do this.
‘I could feel even better,’ she murmured, sliding over the seat and moving closer to the big, lean body of Dario Olivero. Wanting, needing his arms around her again. ‘Yes,’ she sighed as the heat from his closeness thawed some of the chill of apprehension inside her. ‘Like that.’
* * *
He couldn’t see her face, Dario reflected as she rested her head against his chest. But the faint purr in her words told him it would still be there on her lips. She felt like a small cat, curled up close, the blonde silk of her hair brushing his chin, the aroma of her perfume swirling around him, making him inhale deeply to draw in more of it. Held as close as she was, she couldn’t be unaware of the heat and hardness of his body, the way his heart kicked up at every move she made so that it was almost impossible to keep his breathing steady and controlled. When her head tilted slightly upwards towards his, he knew that she wanted him to kiss her. But not now, not yet.
‘We’ll soon be there,’ he told her, the swift sidelong glance towards the chauffeur meant to imply that they needed to wait until they were alone. And that was definitely true. But there was more to it than that.
He wanted to know what that smile had meant. And why it had appeared on her lips, warming her expression, just after she had looked back through the car window. There had been nothing there to make her smile. Only that one glimpse of Marcus.
And Marcus was nothing to smile about.
Dario’s own smile, reflected in the black glass of the window, was grimly triumphant, the flash of lights as they passed showing up the cold curve of his lips, the determined set of his jaw. Marcus had lost this round—and, with any luck, the rest of the contest.
‘Just round this corner.’
And, as he spoke, the car swung round the bend, sending a spray of dark rainwater up over the kerb from a puddle that had gathered as a result of the storm. A short way down the road, they pulled up outside the building where his newly bought apartment took up the whole of the top floor.
‘We’re here,’ Dario urged Alyse, his tone suddenly rough with the knowledge that if he didn’t get her out of here and up to that penthouse fast then what little was left of the control that had been fraying mercilessly with every sway and pitch of the vehicle that brought her slender warmth even closer to him would snap completely. He would have to have her under him, his hands plundering her soft curves, her silken skin, and to hell with the audience of José the driver or anyone else.
‘Time to get inside...’
The image of being inside her that the words flung into his brain was almost his undoing. He grabbed at Alyse’s shoulders, wrenching her up from the half lying, half leaning position before he claimed her hands. Folding his around both of hers and pulling her along with him, he exited the car backwards, not even flinching as his broad shoulders met the force of the wind, the slash of the icy rain that was splattering down over his head.
‘Come on.’
He pulled his jacket up high to cover her head like an improvised umbrella, protecting that silky hair from the onslaught of the downpour.
‘José, I won’t need you any more tonight...’
He tossed the command at his driver as he slammed the car door shut behind them, not needing the man’s nod of agreement—or the knowing smile that said his employee had already recognised that fact before they’d arrived.
* * *
It was like travelling blind, Alyse reflected, her eyes not quite focusing in the glare of the brilliantly lit building after the darkness of the night. She knew that she was crossing a highly polished floor, heard Dario speak some greeting to the man at the desk as they passed, and then they were at the polished steel entry of a lift, the doors sliding open immediately in response to his long bronzed finger pressed on the call button.
So she had to be grateful for the curve of his arm around her. It felt safe and supportive there, the heat and scent of his body enclosing her, and it was as if that warmth was melting away the worries, the apprehension she had felt at first in the car. Now she felt her limbs soften, leaning towards him, resting her head, her weight against the power of his body. The clean scent of his skin surrounded her, blended with some sort of lime cologne, and she gave herself up to the delight of the physical sensations she was experiencing.
‘Alyse...’
His tone was soft, slightly roughened at the edges. She lifted her face, her eyes connecting with his, seeing the intense darkness of his pupils, the tiniest edge of blue around their rim. For a moment she was held, mesmerised, unable to look away, and instinctively her lips parted, a faint sigh escaping to blend with his hot breath as his mouth descended towards hers.
His kiss was warm, slow, infinitely seductive. It took her mouth in a wave of languorous delight, lifting her up onto her toes to wrap her arms around his neck, tangle her fingers in the black silk of his hair. The arm that was curled around her shoulder tightened sharply, drawing her closer, bringing her up against the hardness of his body. Lean, strong fingers stroked down the delicate skin of her neck, slipping under the collar of her coat, making her shiver in need. Her heart rate kicked up sharply, sending her blood pulsing through her body, so that she wriggled even closer in burning awareness.