Before he could answer, excited voices cut through the sea breeze Luisa had barely noticed dancing around them, and they simultaneously broke the lock of their eyes to find a handful of Siena’s excitable, glamorous friends bounding towards them.
The giggling women, all younger than Luisa, threw themselves onto the surrounding loungers and stripped to their teeny bikinis. With nearly as much flesh on display as the day they’d been born, they introduced themselves. Every one of them, Luisa noted, addressed their introductions to Gennaro. All were openly making eyes at him, and she experienced a sudden strong urge to shove them all into the pool.
Swallowing back the acrid taste that had formed on her tongue, she glanced at Gennaro to see how he was reacting to their flirtations. He looked bored.
She expelled the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.
Maybe he’d spoken the truth, and his indifference to Luisa wasn’t personal… not that he’d said that in so many words, but it had been implied. Maybe he was one of those asexual people she’d read about… She dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed. Gennaro was practically wrapped in masculine sexuality, but for whatever reason, he kept the wrapping tight around him. Before she could stop herself, she wondered what it would be like if he were to loosen the wrapping and cloakherin it, and as she imagined this, imaginedGennaro lowering himself on top of her, his face turned to hers.
Their eyes clashed and held, and suddenly she had the strongest sensation that he was reaching into her mind, the sensation so strong it felt like a touch to her skin. A flush of heat pulsed deep between her thighs, a pulse so intensely powerful that she automatically pressed the top of her thighs together and sucked in a breath.
For one long moment, the breath stuck.
Her pulses, already erratic, went haywire, and she wrenched her stare away and gripped even tighter to her eReader.
Heart pounding, she pretended to be engrossed in her book; came within a fraction of jumping out of her heated skin when his clipped yet smooth voice murmured, “Let’s go inside and find some less excitable company.”
She didn’t respond for the longest time. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even look at him.
The only time she’d experienced anything like that pulse of heat had been when watching a particularly erotic love scene in a film when she’d been at art school. That had been the night she’d first brought herself to orgasm, and her horror grew to remember the man in the love scene that had turned her on so much had looked like Gennaro.
She’d never made that connection before and she wished to hell that she hadn’t made it now.
He was looking at her. She could feel it. He was waiting for her to acquiesce like she always did to his commands, and she drew in a ragged breath and jerked a nod.
Turning away from him, she put her eReader in her bag, pulled her sundress on and slipped her feet into her flat sandals.
Still not ready to face him, shegroped in her bag for her butterfly clip, then gathered her hair together and pinned it back.
There was something so graceful and yet so sensual in the way Luisa gathered that long, glossy hair into her hands that Gennaro found himself mesmerised, the annoying, chattering women surrounding them nothing but a distant buzzing noise in his ears. When she lifted the hair and exposed the slender neck he must have seen multiple times, the buzzing chatter disappeared completely, the pumping of his blood the only sound.
He’d been wrong, he realised. He might have looked at that neck multiple times, but he’d never truly seen it before. He’d never allowed himself to. He’d blurred his eyes and refused to see it, just as he’d metaphorically blurred his eyes to stop himself from truly seeing any of her because to see Luisa was to want her; want her with a need that was close to primitive in its strength.
She rose to her feet and slung her bag over her shoulder. The sun beaming down on them cast her in a shimmering golden light.
He blinked to clear the effect. She still shimmered. And then she turned her face to him. The moment their eyes met, he knew with a hard punch to his guts that he would never be able to blur his eyes to her again.
Something had changed. Luisa didn’t know what that something was but she could feel it in the very fibre of her being, an effect magnified every time Gennaro looked at her. She sensed him studying her in a way he’d never done before, a sensation that vibrated through her skin even when they joined some of his cousins and their families in the yacht’s games room. It was unsettling. Frightening. Thrilling…
The quailing sickness intensified, and when they returned to their suite she had to exert all her self-control not to run straight into the bathroom so she could gather herself together in private.
“Do you mind if I shower first again?” she asked as she put her bag, which she’d hugged to her chest the entire walk back from the harbour, on the table.
“Go ahead. Can I get you anything for when you’re finished? A glass of champagne? Wine? Coffee?”
She was so stunned at an offer Gennaro had never once made before unless in relation to getting something for himself that she couldn’t stop her shocked gaze from darting to him. He’d propped himself against the wall, arms folded loosely across his chest, that unsettling frightening and thrilling expression in his eyes.
“I’m good, thanks,” she murmured, edging herself to the bathroom.
Hastily locking the bathroom door, Luisa closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her racing heart with a long, slow exhalation.
She swore she could still feel Gennaro’s black stare penetrating her flesh. It felt like she had electricity running through her veins, and when she stripped her clothes off, she stood in front of the full-length mirror half-expecting to see glimmers bouncing off her skin. Her breasts felt heavy. Taut. Without thinking, she cupped one and imagined Gennaro taking it into his mouth…
What was she doing?
Horrified at the direction her imagination was trying to take her, she dived into the shower.
Bad enough being so intensely aware of him never mind feeding her sick attraction with her imagination.