‘No, it was a beautiful idea, but I guess I have no courage any more.’

‘My Becky had courage enough for anything.’

‘Long, long ago.’

He looked down, and suddenly she couldn’t bear for him to look at her face with the glow of youth gone from it. She pulled his head down to her, so that his lips covered hers.

She knew at once that her body had slept all this time. It wasn’t sleeping any more, because he was summoning it to vibrant new life, urgent in its need, carrying her with it despite her sensible self.

His mouth had the same power to coax and demand, but now there was an extra excitement. The boy had gone. The man had a hard edge that coloured all his actions, making her crave to know more of him. She found herself doing what she had sworn not to do, kissing him in a way that urged him on.

He needed no more encouragement to make him extend the kiss into an exploration of her jaw-line, down the length of her neck to the soft place at the base of her throat. Her heart was beating wildly with anticipation, excitement scurrying down from her throat, between her breasts-

‘Luca,’ she whispered, ‘Luca-don’t…’

Something in her voice pierced the cloud of desire that pervaded him, and he looked at her intently. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Don’t cry,’ he begged.

‘I’m not really. I’m glad it happened. I’ll never, never be sorry we met again, and put things right. But I can’t go on.’

‘Don’t give up so soon,’ he urged. ‘I’m here. You can hold on to me. Becky, take what we have. I don’t believe in “too late”.’

‘I wish I didn’t. Let me go, let me go.’

He didn’t try to restrain her as she slipped out of his arms, but he watched her all the way to the door.

‘You’ll come back to me, Becky.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, please believe me.’

She slipped out before he could speak again, and she knew that she was fleeing danger. She called herself a coward, but she couldn’t help it.

She reached her apartment like a refuge and secured the door behind her, leaning against it, as though fearing an invasion.

She tried to pull herself together. A heavy day faced her, and now she should be sensible and go to bed. But her body was too full of tension and excitement to relax.

She closed her eyes, trying to banish the feel of being held against his hard body, but the more she fought it the more she became aware of it. She’d started something that she had to finish.

All she had to do was go to him now. He might be asleep, but she knew he wasn’t. Her heart told her that he was waiting, listening for the ring of the telephone or the knock on the door. Because he knew, just as she did, that they had not reached the end.

She seized the phone and dialled the penthouse suite. He answered at once, just the one word. ‘Yes?’ spoken in a voice that was tense and urgent. He knew who it was.

She hung up. She was trembling.

Half an hour passed. He did not ring back.

She slipped quietly out of her apartment, and to the elevator, which drifted up almost soundlessly through the darkened building. At his door she paused only briefly before knocking, and it was opened immediately. He had been waiting for her.

He looked at her for a moment before pulling her fiercely inside and clasping her in his arms so that she was lifted clear off her feet. She could feel the relief that shook him as she put her own arms about him and laid her lips on his.

This was her kiss, with nothing held back. She was too honest to play coy. This had been inevitable from the moment she touched him, because after that she had to touch him again and again. She had to find out if his body was as strong and thrilling as she remembered.

‘What do you want?’ he whispered.

‘I want you,’ she murmured back against his mouth. Her hands were at work, pulling open the rest of his buttons, feeling the light sprinkling of hair beneath.

He took over, ripping off the rest of his clothes before ripping off hers. They fell on the bed together, both equally lost in a delirious need to be satiated with each other’s bodies.

Rebecca was awake now, every inch of her, vibrant, passionate and hungry, giving him everything she had or was, making feverish demands from the one man who had it in his power to fulfil her.

Luca had always had vigour, but time and experience had added subtlety. He explored her with hands and lips, using both with consummate skill to inflame her senses until she was drawing long, heated, half-moaning breaths.

How could so many years vanish without a trace? How could they still know each other so intimately? She was ready for every move he made, answering with caresses that were skilled in the ways he had always loved, caresses she had offered to no other man, because in her heart she had known they belonged only to him.

As he moved over her she had one last wild moment of doubt. This man was essentially a stranger. But it was no stranger who entered her with the slow, relentless power that had once thrilled her and now thrilled her a thousandfold. Her flesh had slept too long. The awakening was fierce, devastating and total.

She was in his rhythm at once, claiming and releasing him, demanding while she gave, until the mounting pleasure seemed to explode deep within her. Now there was light everywhere, blinding, dazzling, breathtaking. It filled the world, the universe, and it was what she’d been waiting for during all the dead, meaningless years.

CHAPTER SIX

SHE came down from the heights to find herself held tightly in Luca’s arms. Perhaps a little too tightly, but she missed the threat of possessiveness because the shattering feeling of sexual release was so powerful, so welcome.

She knew now what she had always suspected, that the reason she was so unresponsive to any other man was that there had always been one man for her. And this was the man.

Luca, blunt, harsh, vengeful, unforgiving: everything she found hard to like. Yet he was the one, because he always had been, and part of her had never changed.

Then he said the wrong thing.

‘That was good.’

The hint of calculation chilled her.

‘Wasn’t it?’ he demanded.

Inwardly she withdrew a little, feeling bullied.

‘Yes,’ she said politely.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, just clever enough to know that he’d lost ground, not subtle enough to know why.

‘Nothing. I’d like to get up, please.’

‘Tell me, first.’

‘I want to get up.’

‘Tell me!’

‘Luca, if you don’t release me right now you’ll never see me again.’

He released her at once. She was surprised. She hadn’t expected the threat to work on this hard man, let alone instantly.

‘What is it?’ he demanded as she rose and quickly covered her nakedness with a robe. ‘What changed?’

‘I guess we shouldn’t expect too much all at once. Let it go for now.’

Her tone contained a warning and, again to her surprise, he heeded it. After a few moments the silence made her look at him and what she saw melted her heart.

His face showed confusion, and the hurt bewilderment of a child who didn’t know what he’d done wrong. It sent her back into his arms.

‘Yes, it was good,’ she reassured him.

‘I still know how to please you?’

‘Yes, like nobody else.’

It was the wrong thing to say. His face darkened.

‘I don’t want to hear about other men.’

‘And I’m not going to tell you, but my husband existed. I haven’t lived on the shelf all these years, any more than you have. I’ve been married, so have you.’

‘That’s enough!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Fine, you don’t have to. You don’t have to hear anything you don’t want to.’ She pulled away from him, looking around for her clothes. Instantly he was beside her.

‘Don’t go, Becky. I don’t want you to go.’

‘I think I should,’ she said, starting to pull on garments.

‘No, you mustn’t.’ He put his hands out to restrain her, then snatched them back again.

‘Don’t tell me what I must and mustn’t do,’ she told him.

‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Look, I’m not touching you, but please don’t go. Please, Becky. I’ll make it right, just tell me what to do, but stay, I beg you.’

His words softened her again. Suddenly they were back in the old days, when this fierce man was putty in her hands, but only hers.

She stopped what she was doing, went over and put her arms around him in consolation. He hugged her back, but gingerly, as though afraid of offending again.

‘If you go away, I’m afraid you won’t come back,’ he said gruffly.

‘I will come back. I want to see you again. But take it slowly.’

‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘I want all of you at once. Stay with me. Come back to bed.’

‘No, the hotel will be getting up soon and I don’t want to risk being seen.’

‘Spend today with me.’

She mentally reviewed the day she’d planned. There were important appointments that she simply couldn’t cancel.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to make a few calls but-I can do it.’

‘We’ll go somewhere that we won’t be seen by anyone who knows either of us. But you’ll have to say where that is. I don’t know London.’

‘Have you never been here before?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, brief visits, business deals, hotel rooms, travelling in the back of a car to conferences, never seeing anything through the car windows because I was always on the phone. I couldn’t tell you how London is different from New York or Milan. If it is different.’

‘That sounds really dreadful.’

‘It’s your world too, Becky.’

‘Yes, but I get away sometimes.’

‘On long country weekends with Jordan?’