Twice Upon Time. Nina Beaumont

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СКАЧАТЬ someone given to visions and imaginings.

      Alessio scowled down at her. He wanted to shake her again for her willful recklessness, but for a moment she, whom he had never seen other than vibrant and proud, looked so lost, so pale that his hands gentled.

      Bianca pushed away the odd feeling that still wound through her. The feeling she could not have described if her life had depended on it. But then, it had never been her habit to indulge in introspection.

      “It was probably just the mussels I ate giving me indigestion.” She purposely said the prosaic words, needing something ordinary to balance out this—this bizarre apparition.

      Alessio looked behind him at the spot Bianca’s gaze had gone to. He saw nothing but the sand, which stretched for miles up the coast. But she had seen something. She was not a woman to pale at some phantom of the mind. He turned back to her.

      “What did you see?”

      She met Alessio’s eyes. They were the same color as the sunlit sea, which stretched out behind him. The remains of his anger were there. And the desire she recognized because she had seen it often enough in other men’s eyes. But there was something else there that she had never seen before. Was it tenderness? Concern? She was not a woman easily disquieted, but whatever this was, it disquieted her now and made her want to look away. She was not a woman easily touched, but this touched her now and made her want to hold his gaze.

      “Nothing.” She shrugged, the gesture meant as much for herself as for him. “Now I suggest you let me go, Messere Alessio.” Her mouth curved in a smile that both mocked and invited. “Or do you wish to mark my skin?”

      The look of a little girl lost had faded. Instead the temptress was back. The temptress who had tantalized him months ago and then allowed herself to be betrothed to his brother like a mare sold to the highest bidder. And yet he still wanted her. Despite the rage that churned within him, he wanted her with a desire so hot, so strong that every woman he made love to was but an instrument for his release. A release that brought a slaking of a physical need but no true pleasure.

      “If you keep playing your role of Circe, I will do more than mark your skin.” But even as he said the words, his hands eased and began to stroke where they had gripped before.

      The linen of her shirt, the velvet of her gown lay between Alessio’s hands and her skin, and yet Bianca could feel his touch as if she were naked beneath it.

      The heat his hands generated spread over her skin and spiraled down to her belly. Her young, ripe body grew hungry. So hungry that for a mad, heady moment she could imagine giving in to its demands. Now. Here.

      Because a voice she had never heard before seemed to call to her, because the voice spoke of shame and dishonor, she tried to shift away from Alessio’s touch.

      “Strega. You are a witch, Bianca.” His hands slid up from her shoulders and into her hair. As they fisted in the wind-tossed strands to hold her, he lowered his mouth to hers.

      “No.” She turned her face aside.

      Alessio stared down at her. Did she think he was a plaything to bat around like a tennis ball? Did she think she could treat him as if he were a fawning Venetian cicisbeo, content to worship from afar?

      Impatience and anger mixed with desire and his hands tightened in her hair.

      “No, let me go.” She began to fight him in earnest, not quite understanding why she felt compelled to do so when she wanted to give in to him so badly.

      “Why so coy today, madonna?” he demanded. “There have been days when you were more than eager to feel my mouth on yours.”

      Bianca said nothing because she did not have an answer to his accusation. His accusation that was nothing less than the truth.

      “Let me go, Alessio, I command you.” His grip on her hair was just short of painful—and yet she found that it aroused her. Because she needed distance from him and needed it quickly, she fired off her most powerful weapon. “Do you forget that I belong to your brother?”

      “No.” His eyes flashed with blue flames. “You are betrothed to my brother. But you belong to me.”

      Alessio felt his fury, which she seemed to provoke so effortlessly, rise another notch. Yes, it troubled him that he so desperately wanted this woman, who would, in a few months’ time, be his older brother’s wife. It troubled him far more than he cared to admit. There was no love lost between Ugo and him. But did a man dishonor his own flesh and blood for a woman?

      Perhaps not for any woman, he thought as his gaze traveled over Bianca’s face with its perfect features. The eyes so dark that they were almost black, with their tiny flecks of gold, which made them look like live coals. The lush mouth the color of raspberries, which promised all the pleasures of paradise. Perhaps not for any woman, he repeated, but for this woman he would sell his immortal soul to the devil. Perhaps he already had. An ache wound through him. An ache that had nothing to do with the ache in his loins.

      “You know as well as I do that you belonged to me long before I touched you for the first time. Do you remember?”

      Her mouth sullen, Bianca remained silent. Because her pride demanded it, she kept her gaze steady on his.

      Her silence goaded him, and Alessio’s grip tightened and remained so, even when her barely perceptible wince told him that he was hurting her.

      “Do you remember how you looked down from the tribunal as I was awarded the victor’s wreath after the tournament?” His body sprang to life at the memory. “You looked at me and we both knew that you were mine, as if you had already spread your legs for my body.”

      In counterpoint to his crude words, his hands released her hair and cupped her head, his fingers rubbing her scalp lightly, as if to soothe the discomfort that he himself had caused. He lowered his head, and instead of taking her mouth as his body demanded, he brushed his lips over hers once and then again. For some reason it seemed important that she give him what he could so easily take.

      “Open your mouth for me now, Bianca,” he murmured. “Open for me and let me kiss you.”

      His hands were gentle where they had been rough before. His lips coaxed where they had demanded. Drawing in a deep breath, she inhaled his scent with it — horseflesh and leather and aroused male. Her senses began to swim. Surely there would be no harm in one kiss. Just one kiss. She could feel her lips slackening, parting of their own volition. No, she thought. If she gave her mouth to him, she would give it.

      She opened her mouth and slid the tip of her tongue between Alessio’s lips.

      Alessio felt her warm, wet tongue slip into his mouth, and for a moment he remained as motionless as if he had been struck by lightning.

      She watched him as she moved her tongue against his in erotic invitation. Then she retreated and, in a final siren’s call, brushed her open mouth against his. When she let her head fall back in ostensible surrender, triumph was in her eyes.

      Because his needs were coursing through him with an urgency that was just short of uncontrollable, Alessio lowered his mouth to hers slowly, half inch by half inch. His lips hovered over hers, then descended until they were separated by no more than a breath.

      Her mouth, as sweet and lush as a ripe peach, beckoned. And still he did not take. Instead СКАЧАТЬ