Master Of Pleasure. PENNY JORDAN

sound of her voice, but not her words, carried to him by the breeze.

      Sasha! By the time Gabriel was twenty-five he had become a billionaire. A billionaire who trusted no one and who kept the women he chose to warm his bed as exactly that—bedmates and nothing else. The rules he laid down for his relationships with them were simple and non-negotiable. No talk of love, or a future, or commitment; absolute fidelity to him while they were partners; absolute and total adherence to his safe sex and no babies policy. And, just to make sure that this latter rule wasn’t broken ‘accidentally on purpose’, Gabriel always took care of that side of things himself.

      Over the years he had endured his share of angry, bitter scenes, with weeping women who had thought they could change those rules and then learned their mistake. Magically those tears had quickly dried once they were offered a generous goodbye gift. His mouth twisted cynically. Was it any wonder that he had become a man who trusted no one, and most of all a man who despised women? So far as Gabriel was concerned there wasn’t a woman in existence who could not be bought. His mother had shown him what women were, and all the other women he had come into contact with since had confirmed what she had taught him when she had abandoned him for money.

      Not that he didn’t enjoy the company of women, or rather the pleasure of their bodies. He did. He had inherited his father’s good looks, and finding a willing female partner to satisfy his sexual needs had never been a problem.

      ‘Sam, don’t go too far. Stay here, where I can see you.’ Sasha’s words reached him this time, as she raised her voice so that her son could hear it. A caring mother? Sasha?

      Like his bitterness, the past wouldn’t let go of him. It was here around him now, gripping him so tightly that he could feel its pain.

      After his grandfather’s death he had had closed up his grandfather’s remote and uncomfortable house in Sardinia and bought himself a yacht. With financial interests in property, it had made sense for him to travel, looking for fresh acquisitions both material and sexual. And if a woman invited him to use her for his sexual pleasure then why should he not do so? Just so long as she understood that once his appetite was sated there would not be a place in his life for her.

      By the time he was twenty-five he had also already made the decision that when the time came he would pay a woman to provide him with an heir—a child to which he would make sure he had exclusive rights.

      Gabriel watched Sasha with cold-eyed contempt. Six weeks ago, just after his thirty-fifth birthday, he had stood beside the hospital bed of his dying second cousin—the Calbrini family was extensive, and had many different branches—listening to Carlo pleading for his help for the two sons Carlo loved more than anything else in the world.

      The same warm breeze that was playing sensually with Sasha’s long hair was flattening the thick darkness of his own to reveal the harsh purity of a bone structure that bore the open stamp of Sardinia’s human history—the straight line of his Roman nose a classic delineation of masculine features that echoed the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, coupled with the musculature of a man in his prime. Centuries ago the Saracens had invaded Sardinia, leaving their mark on its history and its inhabitants through the women they had taken and impregnated. It had been Carlo who had told him that legend had it that boy children born to such women were said to possess the physical stamina and legendary merciless cruelty of the men who had fathered them. Gabriel knew that there was Saracen blood in his own family’s past, and he knew too that it showed in his attitude to life. He had no mercy for those who double-crossed him.

      Eyes as golden and as deathly watchful as those of an eagle studied the two boys. Privileged, and loved by a doting elderly father. Their childhood was so very different from his own. The sunlight gilded his skin, warmly gold rather than deeply olive. He looked on the promise Carlo had begged from him as an almost sacred trust, an admission from his cousin without words being spoken that he was entrusting his sons to Gabriel’s care because he did not trust their mother—because on his deathbed he had finally been prepared to admit that she could not be trusted.

      But still Carlo’s last words to him had been of her.

      ‘Sasha,’he had told Gabriel. ‘You must understand…’

      He had been too weak to say any more, but there had been no need. Gabriel knew all there was to know about Sasha. Just like his mother, she had walked out on him. The memory of that was like a constant piece of grit rubbing against his pride, exacerbating the darkness within him. She was unfinished business, the cause of a blow to his pride against which it had banked a debt of compounded interest—which he was now here to claim in full.

      A roar of protest from one of the twins caused Sasha to turn to look in maternal anxiety, and then to call out, ‘Stop fighting, you two.’

      Something—no, someone had moved between her and the sun. Immediately she shielded her gaze to see who it was.

      There were moments in life that happened both so quickly and yet so slowly that they could never be ignored or forgotten. Sasha felt the abrupt cessation of her heartbeat, then a suffocating sense of shocked disbelief, streaked with fear and panic—and something else so painful that she refused to give it either life or a name. She listened to the slow heavy thud of her heart as though it belonged to another woman, distantly aware of it propelling the blood into her veins, keeping her physically functioning while, emotionally, every nerve felt as though it had been tortured and then severed. Just one word was torn from her throat.

      ‘Gabriel!’

      CHAPTER TWO

      JUST one word, but it was so filled with anger, shock and fear that it seemed to reverberate between them.

      Sasha had to tilt her head back to look up at Gabriel, and she could feel the panicky beat of the pulse at the base of her throat. She resisted an urge to place a covering hand over it.

      ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ It was a mistake to ask him that. He would be able to hear the panic in her voice and see how she was having to fight to control her fear. The way his mouth was twisting into that cruelly unkind and satisfied smile she remembered so well told her that.

      ‘What do you think I want?’

      His voice was so soft and gentle that it could almost have been the tender stroke of a lover’s touch against her skin, or the brush of an angel’s wings. Just for a second her body reacted to the memories it evoked. She was seventeen again, a desperate bundle of aching, emotional need she had kept hidden beneath a shield of bravado. Her body was bereft of its sexually challenging armour of short skirt and minuscule vest top, and her long hair, with its amateur blonde streaks, was still damp from the shower Gabriel had insisted she have. She was watching him watching her, overwhelmed by the feeling, the longing suddenly shooting through her; knowing for the first time in her life what it felt like to experience physical sexual desire. And she wanted him, desired him so very badly.

      A door had swung open on her past. She didn’t want to see what lay behind it, but it was already too late. She remembered how she had been too impatient to wait for him to come to her, running to him instead. He had caught hold of her, holding her at arm’s length whilst he studied her naked body. Even her flesh had signalled its eager readiness to him, her breasts firming and lifting as she imagined him touching her there. But when he did she had realised that her imagination had not had the power to tell her just how his touch would feel, or what it would do to her. The flesh of his fingertips had been hard and slightly rough, the flesh of a man who worked and lived physically, not just cerebrally. She had shivered, and then shuddered with uncontained delight when he had slowly explored the shape of her breasts. The erotic roughness of his touch had increased her arousal so much that she had suddenly become aware of not just how much she wanted him, and how excited she was, but how ready her body was for him, how hot and wet and achingly sensitive that most intimate part of her had felt. As though he had sensed that, too, Gabriel had trailed his hand down over her body, smoothly and determinedly. When he had allowed it to rest on her hip, cupping the gently protruding bone, she had been seized with impatient urgency and the need to feel him caressing her more intimately.