Free Convenient Brides by Lindsay Armstrong, Catherine Spencer, Melanie Milburne Page B

fire.

Chapter Five
    S HE’D felt faint stirrings of desire with other men since he’d initiated her into the art of love, nine years before. Kinder, less dangerous men. More sympathetic and deserving men. But always, Callie had withheld herself, even if her current love interest hadn’t known it. When it came right down to that moment of ultimate surrender, she hadn’t been able to let go. Not once, since the night she’d conceived Paolo’s children, had she permitted herself the freedom to respond without reservation or inhibition.
    But if she’d spent the intervening years suppressing her sexual urges, Paolo had clearly spent the same amount of time fine-tuning his. The once-reckless womanizer had matured into a virtuoso seducer whose finesse laid instant waste to her resistance.
    The very second his mouth touched hers, all thought of selfpreservation fled her mind. With just a kiss, he turned her world on its ear, and nothing mattered but to prolong the pleasure of being in his arms again; of awakening after a long and arid sleep, and feeling, with every cell in her body, every beat of her heart, the sweet, sharp trickle of desire permeating her blood. Without a moment’s pause, she was ready to sell her soul all over again, if that’s what it took to satisfy the raging hunger he inspired.
    Her lips softened, parted. How else could she drink in the essence of him? When his tongue trespassed beyond the bounds of friendship and entered the forbidden territory of lovers, she held it prisoner, drawing it ever deeper into her mouth.
    She cradled his cheek. Let her fingers steal up to knot fiercely in his thick, black hair. She swayed against him, arousing both him and herself by brushing her nipples lightly against his chest.
    His hand skated from her throat to her ribs, and settled urgently, possessively, at her hip. For the first time in what seemed like eternity, she again experienced that scalding rush of heat between her legs. Sensed the distant tremors gathering strength within her, forerunners of a starving passion that would be satisfied with nothing less than complete fulfillment.
    How disastrously it all might have ended, had he not exercised some restraint, was anybody’s guess. But again, with a discipline his younger self had never shown, he pulled them both back from the brink. “Forgive me, Caroline,” he said hoarsely, shoving her almost roughly into the far corner of the passenger seat. “I should not have done that.”
    Dazed, disappointed, she swiped her hand across her mouth and injected a hard-won note of outrage into her reply. “Why did you then?”
    “I couldn’t help myself.” He hesitated, and if she hadn’t known him to be the most confident man she’d ever met, she’d have thought him unsure he should utter his next words.
    At length, though, he went on, “I find myself drawn to you. You touch me—against my will, I might add—with your selfcontained grief. I see the way you swallow when the pain almost gets the better of you, and I wish I could comfort you. But I forfeited that right a long time ago, and of the many things I regret having done, it’s that I’ve given you no reason to trust me now.”
    Another silence, this one full of brooding frustration, beforehe burst out savagely, “ Dio, if it were within my power, I would have us meeting here for the first time, with no painful history to sour your view of me!”
    “We were both young and foolish, Paolo,” she said, an unsettling stab of guilt attacking without warning. She was the injured party, the one who’d given up everything—or so she’d told herself these many long years. Yet in line with other recent self-insights, as she watched him, listened to him, she suddenly wasn’t quite so sure.
    “But I was the greater transgressor.” Fleetingly his hand ghosted over her hair and down her face. “You were little more than a child, Caroline, and so anxious to please that it disgusts me to remember how I took