Free Enemies at the Altar by Melanie Milburne Page B

He wanted to drive himself deep within her honeyed warmth, to feel the tight grip of her body contracting around him as she came.
    He started to lift up the skirt of her dress but she suddenly stepped back, turning away from him with her arms going across her body as if she were suffering a chill. ‘I’m sorry, Andreas,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to continue with this.’
    ‘Is this part of your technique?’ Andreas asked. ‘To tempt and to tease?’
    Her cheeks flushed with delicate colour. ‘It was unfair of me to give you the wrong impression,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to mislead you.’
    ‘The impression you gave me is that you want me just as much as I want you,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, well, I’m sorry about that but I had no idea that was going to happen every time you kiss me,’ she said with a return to her haughty air. ‘Maybe you should keep your mouth to yourself for the rest of the time we have together.’
    ‘Ah, but that would not be half as much fun, would it,
ma belle
?’ he asked. ‘I quite like kissing you. I am developing rather a hunger for it, actually.’
    She challenged him with those incredible grey-blue eyes and that stubborn little uptilted chin. ‘Then you’ll have to satisfy your appetite elsewhere. I’m not going to be a rich man’s mistress.’
    ‘You’re not my mistress,’ he said. ‘You’re my wife.’
    ‘Same difference, as far as I can see,’ she threw back.
    Andreas fought down his frustration and anger. She had been toying with him all along and he had been fool enough to fall for it. She knew how much he wanted her. It wasn’t as if he could hide it. She had sensed it. Damn it, she had
felt
it.
    And she wanted him. He’d have to be blind not to see it. He felt it in her kiss, in her touch and in the way she had pressed herself closer as if she had wanted to climb into his skin.
    He would not rest until he had her where he wanted her.
    Where he had always wanted her
.
    Sienna was the one woman who could make him lose all sense of control. He had sensed it all those years ago and had fought it determinedly.
    But now was different.
    Now there was nothing to stop them exploring theheat and passion that was flaring between them every time they were in the same room.
    He could hardly wait
.
    Sienna closed her bedroom door and leant back against it, her heart thumping like a jackhammer. Her breathing was still out of control and her insides quivered with a longing so intense she could barely stand up. They had been married only a matter of a couple of hours and already things were spinning dangerously out of control. She didn’t want to feel this level of attraction, not to Andreas Ferrante, not to a man who hated her as much as he desired her. But what was she to do? Her mind said
no
but her body kept saying a resounding
yes
. It completely disregarded her common sense. Instead, it was set on a pathway to sensual hedonism that she could not control. She didn’t want to end up like her mother, madly in love with a man who only saw her as a convenient outlet for his lust. Unrequited love for Andreas’s father had destroyed her mother. After Guido Ferrante had rejected her so publicly, Nell had sunk into an alcohol and prescriptions drugs binge that had eventually killed her.
    Sienna wasn’t prepared to go down the same path of destruction. She was determined to keep her heart well guarded. Andreas was by far the most attractive man she had ever met and his kisses were a temptation she couldn’t seem to resist, but that didn’t mean she had to fall in love with him. She had thought herself in love with him as a teenager, but that had just been a youthful crush, an infatuation that had got totally out ofhand. She was no longer that foolish star-struck teenager caught up in the fantasy of thinking a well-born rich and powerful man was the answer to all of her problems.
    Things would be different this time.
    She would do what other young women her age did and what