The Mills & Boon Stars Collection. Cathy Williams

body.

      Luciano pushed her back another few degrees to get a better angle and thrust home.

      A searing flash of pain flared through Jemima and she cried out, eyes flying open filled with tears and surprise. ‘That hurts!’

      Luciano stilled, staring down at her with brooding, dark disbelief. He knew what his brain was telling him. He knew that his body had met with a resistance that he could not credit existed. While he had known she was not the mother of his son, he had certainly assumed she would be almost as practised with men as her sister had been. The awareness that he had got that badly wrong shook him back to full awareness, clearing his shrewd brain of the fog of alcohol and aggression that had clouded it.

      ‘Are you OK?’ he asked rawly.

      ‘Yes, of course I am,’ Jemima assured him and she shifted under him, washing wild sensation through Luciano’s screamingly taut body while need continued to grip him like a hammer blow to the head. He eased out of the wonderfully tight grip of her and sank back into her with a groan of helpless satisfaction.

      The pain diminished to a stinging discomfort closely followed by a jolt of exquisite pleasure. As Luciano moved the pleasure kicked in again and again and Jemima clutched at his arms, her knees rising as she arched to meet his next potent thrust. A wild singing impatience shot with primal need held her firmly in its grip and she lifted her hips in time to his fluid movements. He drove deeper and ground down on her and a helpless moan was torn from her lips as he picked up the pace. He slammed into her and her body clenched round him in excitement, her heartbeat thundering. Glorious sensation shimmied through her pelvis and set up a chain reaction that sent her out of control when she convulsed beneath him. She plunged over the crest into a climax of intolerable excitement that sent spasms of delight rippling through her satiated body.

      Weak as a kitten, Jemima wrapped her arms round Luciano only to stiffen as he literally shook her off. In a fluid movement he withdrew from her and sprang off the bed to stride into the bathroom. There was blood on him, Luciano acknowledged incredulously as he stepped into the shower. She had actually been a virgin. Where did that unexpected little attribute fit into the lying and gold-digging and plotting he had ascribed to her? What the hell had he been thinking? What the hell had he done?

      Luciano pulled on jeans. Incredibly the mere thought of her lush, shapely body aroused him afresh and he wanted to punch something in frustration. A virgin? He was in deep shock and feeling ridiculously guilty. He had been so convinced that Jemima was a lying, gold-digging cheat like his son’s true mother, like... No, he refused to go there, believing that the past was better left buried. But that past had made Luciano a cruel, distrustful cynic with women.

      Jemima should have warned him. But how could she have without telling him the truth? Hadn’t she appreciated that the first time might hurt? He had never had to think of that possibility before because he had never even come close to being any woman’s first lover. He had been the first with Jemima, though, and he found himself savouring that knowledge in the weirdest way. It shouldn’t make any difference to his attitude to her...but somehow it did. He could no longer confuse her with Julie the escort or with his late wife, Gigi. Jemima had been considerably more sexually innocent than either.

      Hearing Luciano’s movements in the bathroom, Jemima emerged from her own reverie and hurriedly yanked the sheet up over her bare breasts even if the gesture did strike her as too little too late. Luciano appeared in the doorway. What did he think of her now? she wondered for a split second before reality finally came crashing back down on her again. In the storm of her personal doubts and insecurities she had miraculously contrived to forget the lies she had told and they were about to catch up with her, she reckoned wretchedly. Luciano knew now, he had to know that a virgin couldn’t possibly be Nicky’s mum.

      Where had her wits been when she’d let him sweep her off to bed? How had she managed to overlook the need to protect the one intimate fact that could prove she was a liar? Of course it hadn’t once occurred to her that she would have sex with Luciano. Fantasy was one thing, actually acting on fantasy something else entirely. Nor had she calculated the very real danger of tempting a male as aggressively dominant as Luciano. He was passionate and oversexed. Knowing she wanted him, he had targeted her and she had been an easy challenge, she reflected shamefacedly.

      ‘So...’ Luciano breathed silkily, leaning back against the door frame barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only well-worn jeans. With that much unclad masculine flesh on view she found it impossible not to stare. ‘What price do you put on your virginity?’

      Jemima blinked. ‘Price?’ she parroted in stricken disbelief.

      Luciano raised a well-defined black brow. ‘Well, obviously there has to be a price for me to pay because you put a price on absolutely everything else. You put a price on my son’s worth, didn’t you? Giving away something for free isn’t your style.’

      Her face had flamed hot as a fire. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

      Luciano shifted an impatient hand and studied her fixedly. ‘Quit with the lies, Jemima. Lies only make me angry and you don’t want me angry,’ he warned her.

      Lean muscles flexed below bronzed skin as he changed position. The deep chill in his assurance crept through her like the sudden touch of icicles on too-hot skin. He was scaring her but he didn’t need to scare her because Jemima was already fully aware of the wrong she had done. ‘All right, I won’t tell you any more lies,’ she muttered heavily. ‘You know I’m not Nicky’s birth mother now, don’t you?’

      ‘Obviously. So what’s the going rate for a virgin these days?’ Luciano asked with scorching derision. ‘Presumably you gave it up for a good reason and with you the reason will always relate to profit.’

      ‘I’m not like that, Luciano!’ Jemima exclaimed in consternation.

      His beautiful sensual mouth twisted. ‘If you can try to sell a baby, I assume you can put a price tag on virginity.’

      ‘I wouldn’t ever have tried to sell a baby!’ Jemima argued fiercely. ‘I know how wrong that would be!’

      ‘But it wasn’t wrong to keep his father from him when his mother was already dead?’ he shot at her smoothly.

      Jemima flinched at that direct question, sudden tears springing to her eyes and stinging like mad. She could not even blame her late twin for her predicament. Indeed she was all too well aware that she had buried herself in the hole she had dug. After all, she had lied to Luciano from the moment she’d met him and compounded her errors by having sex with him. She had done worse than blur the boundaries between right and wrong, she had stepped right over those boundaries.

      ‘My first question should be...who are you?’ Luciano drawled. ‘But then that would make me a liar too because I already knew that you weren’t who you were pretending to be before we hit the bed.’

      Jemima stared at him in dismay. ‘You already knew?’ she exclaimed, disconcerted yet again. ‘And yet you still...’ Her voice drained away as she glanced involuntarily at the disordered bedding.

      Angry tension pulled Luciano’s muscles taut. ‘I wasn’t expecting a virgin...’

      Jemima was still struggling to accept his earlier statement. ‘You knew I wasn’t Nicky’s mother and yet you were still willing—’

      ‘Sex is sex, Jemima, and I had had a lot to drink. When the urge controlled me, I didn’t really care who you were,’ Luciano told her with derision.

      Her tightly controlled face washed pink and then ran pale. She knew she was being punished for not being more careful about who she became intimate with. He was telling her that he had just used her to scratch an itch and that the shock of her true identity hadn’t been enough to repel him. ‘How long have you known?’ she whispered sickly.

      ‘Since we landed in Sicily.’

      Her pale eyes widened because she was recalling his change of mood at the airport. ‘I know what you must think of me—’

      ‘You