Sins of the Past (19 page)

‘It grows here and only here,’ he answered her, with both arms coming around her now, ‘which is why legend has it that this place is the original site of the Garden of Eden.’

‘How can they know?’ She laughed, her breathing tremulous, because he had bent his head to allow his teeth to graze the soft skin at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

She was wearing a pure white diaphanous dress, virginal and flimsy, which was making his mind work overtime as he imagined her with nothing under it—nothing but the outline of her beautiful body—tantalising him, inviting him to rip it off and take her hard and spontaneously—as nature intended—here on the forest floor.

Voices coming through the trees splintered his overwrought imagination.

‘Let’s leave this place to the tourists,’ he said huskily, releasing her.

They flew home with the sun streaking gold across the sea.

As Damiano drove them from the airfield the whole island was ablaze with the sunset. Flame-tipped trees touching the roadside burned amber as they climbed the forested hills, and a huge fruit bat, flying with a lazy movement of its long wings, made a dark silhouette against the fiery sky.

Ben was already in bed when they got back.

Tiptoeing into his room, Riva bent and kissed his sleepy
cheek. He stirred slightly as she stroked his hair, murmured softly, and then drifted back into a contented sleep.

‘Buona notte, piccolo.’

A shaft of emotion pierced her as she saw Damiano do the same, that soft endearment sending such a gush of love for him washing over her that she was willing to do anything he wanted when he turned her towards him just outside Ben’s door.

There was so much emotion in her eyes, Damiano noticed, but was it just for Benito? Was he fooling himself in thinking that a little of whatever was softening her lovely features and sending his defences into meltdown might possibly be for him?

When his lips brushed her cheek, and her face automatically tilted upwards to his, he felt his control being stretched to the limit in denying himself the pleasure of plundering that lovely mouth and then carrying her off to bed and keeping her there until she begged him to let her go. But his control won.

‘Goodnight, Riva,’ he murmured, breathing heavily as he dragged himself away.

Racked with frustration, Riva tossed and turned in bed. Damiano had taken her to paradise and back when he had made love to her that day in his bedroom and then literally—geographically—today, according to legend.

‘The original site of the Garden of Eden', he’d called that forest, where the fruit of the coco de mer tree had mystical and sensual powers. But even that hadn’t induced him to make love to her again, because when they had returned he had simply claimed work to do and had taken himself off to his study.

Turning over again onto her side, with her short strappy nightie riding up over her thighs, her gaze fell on the bedside cabinet and the small wooden replica of the ‘seed’ she had purchased to take back to England with her. Its provocative outline was clearly defined beneath the light of a rising moon.

Was it surprising, she thought, that it was believed to have the powers people claimed, when just seeing that sinful-looking seed made a woman so vibrantly aware of her own body?

She thought of Damiano, lying alone and most certainly naked in that massive bed. He was putting her through hell, and he knew it. They could have been together if it wasn’t for her, their minds and bodies uniting, pleasuring each other; making love.

‘Grab the passion,’ Eloise had said. ‘It is so beautiful while it lasts.’

She meant by marrying him, Riva realised, not sneaking off to his room in the middle of the night like a guilty mistress. But couples didn’t marry nowadays because it was expected of them—simply the right thing to do. She couldn’t—wouldn’t!—put herself in the same position that Eloise Duval had found herself in. She wouldn’t marry a man who didn’t love her just because he’d decided it was his duty.

His room on the opposite side of the house was dimly lit. Only the external lights concealed amongst the shrubbery below windows that were flung open to the night showed the contours of his magnificent body—stretched out naked, as she had imagined, beneath the grey silk sheet he had pushed aside, leaving him exposed to the hip.

Dry-mouthed, heart racing, Riva hesitated in the doorway. Just a few short steps was all it would take to end this torture that she was putting them both through. But she had never instigated sex with a man before. Did she have the courage? All she had to do was drag back the sheet and climb in …

But then something brushed past her, a silent moth on velvet wings that had her hand coming up to brush at it with a startled cry.

The man in the bed moved, turning restlessly onto his back, but those few seconds were all it took, because like a mouse that had ventured too far into a lion’s den suddenly

Riva lost her nerve, and before she had time to think she was pivoting away.

The beach as she came down onto it was bathed in moonlight, which was casting a bright silvery path across the restless sea.

Why was she afraid? she chided herself above the chirruping of crickets, wishing she had the courage to do what she knew would have come as second nature to most of the young women she mixed with. And the answer came back as though on the breeze that was teasing the loose ends of the short robe she had slipped on over her nightie:
because you love him so much you’re just too terrified of getting hurt.

And because of that she was out here alone, still aching for him now, knowing what it was like to be crushed beneath him in mindless passion, to feel the burning heat of his body as he lowered himself onto her, the thrill of his sliding into her, which made this hunger for him so much worse.

‘Can anyone join in, or is this a private party?’

It was as though her desires had conjured him up out of the night.

‘Wh-what are you doing here?’ He too was wearing a robe—dark silk, knee-length. The gaping neck was exposing a good deal of very virile chest.

‘I could ask the same thing of you.’

Quickly she uttered, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Couldn’t you?’ His mouth twisted in a way that even in the shadows she could see was overtly sensual. ‘I wonder why?’

‘I was too hot.’

‘Evidently. And I think not just because of the tropical humidity.’

Riva’s breath caught in her lungs. ‘Wh-what do you mean?’ Did he know she had crept into his room? Had he been awake all along? Heard her muffled cry before she’d darted out of his room like a startled rabbit?

‘Do you want me to spell it out?’

Her heart hammered against her ribs. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she bluffed, dropping her gaze to his very masculine feet, thrust into leather-strapped sandals, spellbound in a world where even the moths conspired to betray her to him.

She ducked even as she thought it, as some night insect skimmed out of the shadows just over her head, attracted by the softly lit shrubbery above the beach.

‘They won’t hurt you, you know. These things probably fear you far more than you fear them.’

Riva pulled a wry face. ‘That’s what Mum always used to say.’

Although she wasn’t looking at him she could sense his sympathetic smile. ‘She sounds as though she was a very wise woman.’

‘She was,’ she responded. ‘In most things. She was also a wonderful person, despite what you’ve always believed. Most of those things you were told—like that time she left the lodgings without paying—it wasn’t like that at all. She was pretty, and men couldn’t stop themselves from trying it on with her. That was what happened with that crumby landlord who owned the bedsit where we were living. He said he’d put up the rent to some extortionate rate and we’d have to get out if she didn’t give in to what he was demanding of her. She refused to oblige and dragged me off out of there that night because he came on to her anyway. She was only trying to protect herself and me. She was dependable most of the time, but deep down she was so lonely and so insecure. That’s why I was so happy when she found your uncle. She really loved him,’ she stressed fervently, even though she knew it was like trying to convince a brick wall. ‘They would have been happy together—I’m sure they would.’

The silence was impregnated only by the waves and the whistling of the lizards and the crickets and then, closer to hand, Damiano’s heavily drawn breath. ‘Don’t you think I haven’t realised that by now?’

Had he? The face upturned to his was scored with hurt and disbelief.

‘Riva …’

As he touched her arm she flinched, her hands coming up, palms outwards. She couldn’t deal with this now. ‘No, don’t say anything!’

She swung away from him, trekking down the beach, refusing to let him see the emotion that was falling as silent tears down her cheeks.

Without heed for anything else she was kicking off her sandals, pulling off her robe and then her nightdress, discarding them as she went, leaving them like a trail of shed skin behind her in the moonlight as she waded, naked, into the warm sea.

The elemental power and strength of the ocean invigorated and rejuvenated her, washing away her pain in the pounding surf.

When she turned towards the beach she heard Damiano coming purposefully towards her, his arms slicing powerfully through the dark water.

‘Don’t ever do that to me again!
Santo cielo!
I thought that you were going to—’

‘Going to what? Try to swim back to England?’ She laughed now, making out concern on his handsome, darkly shadowed face, knowing that that wasn’t what he’d thought at all.

‘It isn’t anything to laugh about,’ he reprimanded. ‘These currents are dangerous. It was a very foolish thing to do, and if it wasn’t considered so politically incorrect I think I’d turn you over my knee and spank you.’

‘You’d have a job on.’ She was giggling now because, like her, he was treading water, and because she was buoyant with a heady breathless excitement. Did his obvious concern for her mean that he
cared?
‘So what are you going to do to me instead?’

Why was she behaving like this? Like some provocative nymph hell-bent on her own destruction? Because it
would
be destruction—emotionally, at any rate, she warned herself. But at that moment she was riding too high to care.

‘Do you really want to know?’ His voice, losing some of its anger, was infused with sensual promise, and all the more exciting because she knew that whatever that promise was, it was about to be delivered.

As he lunged for her she let out a shriek, her excitement heightening as all her squealing and struggling to get away from him proved futile when he brought her with lifeguard strength and determination into shallower water.

Her feet touched down—but only just—and as she made a grab for him to stop herself going under, for the first time she realised with a frisson shooting through her that he was every bit as naked as she was.

‘Get the general idea?’ he crooned, as both her arms went around his neck, and in the moonlight she could see the satisfaction in his wickedly crooked grin.

Yes, she got the general idea, because with his hands supporting her buttocks her legs automatically went around him too, leaving her wide open to whatever he had in mind.

Between her splayed thighs she felt the tepid water bathe the entrance to her womb, a soft and soothing sensation, arousing in itself, because it showed her just how exposed and accessible she was to him.

With her cheek against his unshaven jaw, her hands glorying in the wet warmth of his powerful shoulders, she gave a deep guttural groan as the fluid in the yearning space between her legs was suddenly being displaced, giving way to his hard, hot, rampant penetration.

It was the most incredible sensation she had ever known. Never had she been so aware of her own body. Her proud nipples grazed by the rasping friction of that masculine chest, she flung her head back, inviting his mouth to taste and nip and suck, while those secret lips of her own contracted around him, drawing him in, accommodating his shaft as it sank more and more deeply inside of her.

She moaned softly against the flexing strength of his shoulder, tasting the salty wetness of his sun-bronzed skin.

She had loved him then and she loved him now, she acknowledged. Totally and unconditionally. Joined to him, with his body filling hers, the past and the future didn’t seem to matter—only the present, these glorious moments stolen from eternity, where only pleasure and sublime happiness reigned.

Here in paradise they were just one man and one woman—like Adam with his Eve—where it was so easy to believe that everything was perfect, and everyday life and the things that could so easily come between them were far away.

Here, there was only sea and sound and sensation, the sound of the air rushing through their urgent lungs above the dark caressing ocean, and the sensation, as if she was part of it—in tune with its pounding rhythm—as Damiano started to move.

Thighs gripping his hard, warm flanks, she was moving with him, opening herself wide as he pushed harder and deeper, crying out because the pleasure was so unbearably intense. He was reaching some part of her, some secret inner chamber of her body that was suddenly sending her senses into free-fall, tipping her over the precipice of pleasure into an Eden of throbbing ecstasy.

With the contractions of her body still pulsing, she was aware of his own orgasm building, but a second before the moment of expulsion he uttered a groan from deep in his throat and pulled himself swiftly out of her.

She had been anticipating the spurt of his seed with almost delirious expectation, and instead he had allowed it to spill out into the surging ocean—become part of it—which made her feel ridiculously bereft.

Held close against his body, as their breathing returned to normal, she tried to wriggle out of his arms, but he wouldn’t let her go.

‘Marry me, Riva.’ Those deeply uttered words, which sounded more like a command than a request, had her eyelids closing tight against the longing to accept.