Christmas With A Tycoon: The Italian's Christmas Child / The Greek's Christmas Bride. LYNNE GRAHAM

husked, up close, his breath fanning her cheek and his luxuriant black hair brushing her chin as he bent his head to press his mouth to the pulse point below her ear.

      And her whole body went into free fall as though he had hit a button. Breath fled her parted lips as she sank back into the pillows and gazed up at him with luminous blue eyes. ‘Vito—’

      He closed her mouth with the onslaught of his own. ‘No, we don’t talk,’ he told her after kissing her breathless. ‘We already know all we need to know about each other.’

      ‘I don’t even know what you do,’ she began.

      ‘I’m in business...and you?’

      ‘Waitress...well, waitress with aspirations,’ she adjusted jerkily when he tensed against her. ‘I want to be an interior designer but it’s more a dream than reality.’

      ‘It takes work to turn dreams into reality.’

      Holly smiled up at him. ‘Vito...I’ve had to work hard for everything in life but sometimes getting a break relates more to resources and luck than slaving away.’

      ‘This is getting way too serious,’ Vito objected when he found himself on the brink of offering her advice.

      Holly let her fingers drift up to brush his black hair off his brow, her attention locked to his lean, darkly handsome features even as her heart had sunk because she was scarily well attuned to his body language. ‘Agreed. Let’s stay away from the real world.’

      His long, lean body relaxed against hers again and tears stung her eyes as she blinked against his shoulder. The news that she was a waitress had been too sharp a stab of reality for Vito, highlighting as it did the difference in their statuses. His clothing, even the variety and expense of the food in the refrigerator, not to mention the stylish opulence of her surroundings all told Holly that Vito inhabited a rather more privileged place in society than she did. And while here at the cottage without other people around, that difference didn’t really matter. She knew it would matter very much outside these walls.

      ‘I still want you,’ Vito confided thickly, running the tip of his tongue along her collarbone.

      Her tummy flipped, her feminine core clenched and she stiffened. Reality was intruding whether she wanted it to or not because she was too tender to engage again in the kind of intimacy he was probably envisaging. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered tightly, a small hand smoothing down a denim-clad thigh, feeling the ripple of his muscles tightening in response.

      ‘Maybe later,’ Vito murmured sibilantly, fingers spearing into her hair to lift her mouth to his. ‘But in the short term there are other things we can do, gioia mia.’

      Holly laughed and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘You’re so shameless.’

      ‘Why wouldn’t I be? You’ve been brilliant. I can’t understand why you were still untouched.’

      ‘It was a promise I made to myself when I was very young...to wait. It just seemed sensible to wait until I was an adult and then...’ Holly sighed. ‘Somewhere along the line it became a burden, a tripwire in relationships that held me back from who I could be.’

      Vito gazed down at her with a frown of incomprehension. ‘But why me? Why did you choose me?’

      ‘Maybe it was because you let me put my Christmas tree up,’ she teased, because there were all too many reasons why she had chosen him and very few she was prepared to share. There was no safe way to tell a man that he had been her fantasy without him getting the wrong idea and assuming that she was feeling more than she was supposed to feel in terms of attachment.

      Her fingers slid up caressingly to the firm bulge at his crotch and exerted gentle pressure and he groaned, dark head falling back, wide sensual mouth tightening, his broad chest vibrating against her. Holly leant over him, staring down into lustrous eyes that glittered like precious gold. ‘Maybe it’s because you act as though I’m the most ravishing female you’ve ever met, even though I’m perfectly ordinary. But perhaps that’s your true talent. Maybe you treat all women the same way.’

      ‘No. I’ve never been with any woman the way I’ve been with you...’ Vito surveyed her with frowning force, probing that statement, worrying about it because it was true. He had never felt so comfortable with a woman or so relaxed. He hadn’t once thought about work or about the shocking scandal he had left behind him in Italy. Furthermore Holly was completely unique on his terms because for the first time ever he was with a woman who didn’t know who he was, cherished no financial expectations and in truth attached no undue importance to him. He was Mr Anonymous with Holly and he liked the freedom of that one hell of a lot.

      Holly unzipped his jeans with a sense of adventure. Her most driving need was to give him pleasure and she didn’t understand it. Shouldn’t she be more selfish? The catch in his breathing was followed by a long, unrestrained sound of rising hunger. She had distracted him with sex, she thought guiltily. She didn’t want to talk about being a waitress, about any of the things that separated them as people in the outside world, and his unashamed sexual response to her gave her a shocking sense of power.

      Heaven for Vito was the gentle friction of her mouth and the teasing, erotic stroke of her tiny fingers. His hand knotted in her hair and he trembled on the edge of release, gruffly warning her, but she didn’t pull away. Then the sheer liberating wash of pleasure engulfed him and wiped him out.

      Holly watched Vito sleep with a rueful grin. She went for another shower, donned the dress she had packed and dried her hair. Downstairs, she switched on the television and tuned it to a channel playing Christmas carols before going into the kitchen and beginning to organise the lunch she had prepared with such care. It shook her to acknowledge that she hadn’t even known Vito Sorrentino existed the day before.

      The shame and embarrassment she had fought off at dawn began to creep up again through the cracks in her composure. She had broken all her rules and for what? A one-night stand with a male she would probably never hear from or see again? How could she be proud of that? But would it have been any better to lose her virginity with a sleazy, cheating liar like Ritchie, who had pretended that she meant much more to him than she did?

      She thought not. Anyway, it was too late for regrets, she reminded herself unhappily. What was done was done and it made more sense to move on from that point than to torture herself over what could not be changed. How much, though, had all the wine she had imbibed contributed to her recklessness? Her loss of inhibition? Stop it, stop it, she urged herself fiercely, stop dwelling on it.

      Vito came down the stairs when she was setting the table. ‘You should have wakened me.’

      ‘You were up much earlier than I was,’ she pointed out as she retrieved the starters from the kitchen. ‘Hungry?’

      Vito reached for her instead of a chair. ‘Only for you.’

      Her bright blue eyes danced with merriment. ‘Now, where did you get that old chestnut from?’

      In answer Vito bent his tousled dark head and kissed her and it was like an arrow of fire shooting through her body to the heart of her. She quivered, taken aback all over again by the explosive effect he had on her. His sensual mouth played with hers and tiny ripples of arousal coursed through her. Her breasts swelled, their buds tightening while heat and dampness gathered between her legs. It took enormous willpower but she made herself step back from him, almost careening into the table in her haste to break their connection. Suddenly feeling out of control with him seemed dangerous and it was dangerous, she told herself, if it made her act out of character. And whether she liked it or not, everything she had done with Vito was out of character for her.

      ‘We should eat before the food gets cold,’ she said prosaically.

      ‘I’ll open a bottle of wine.’

      ‘This is an incredibly well-equipped house,’ Holly remarked as he poured the wine he had fetched from the temperature-controlled cabinet in the kitchen.

      ‘The owner enjoys his comforts.’