Page 18 of Bound By The Italian’s 'I Do'

‘Okay?’ he asked.

Her lips pulled in before she nodded.

‘Good.’ Treading water for them both, he kissed her lightly. ‘Can you swim to the inflatable?’

Still holding tightly to him, she turned her head to gauge the distance. It was only ten metres or so from where they were but he guessed from the look in her eyes that it could be ten miles as far as she was concerned.

‘Hold on to my back,’ he said. ‘I’ll swim us to it.’

Without losing her touch on his body, she twisted around him until she was gripping on to his back like a baby orangutan clinging to its mother.

‘As great as it feels to have your legs wrapped around me like this, you need to loosen up a bit if I’m going to be able to swim,’ he told her drily. ‘Trust the water’s buoyancy and trust me. I’ve got you.’

Issy’s definition of loosening up differed greatly to Gianni’s, but at least she relaxed her hold enough for him to move his arms semi-freely.

Life took the strangest of turns he thought as he made his way steadily to the inflatable. Issy Seymore was here to destroy him and now she was holding on to him as if he were her personal life raft. If this had occurred two hours ago when he’d first learned her real identity, he’d have been tempted to let her suffer and flail her own way there. He almost grunted aloud to know this thought was a lie. He planned to make Issy Seymore suffer for the hell she intended to unleash on him but that didn’t extend to physical harm.

Once they reached the giant inflatable, he helped her crawl onto it then hauled himself up beside her.

She’d laid herself on her back, her gaze fixed to the sky, breathing heavily.

Stretching himself out on his side beside her, he traced a finger along a high cheekbone. ‘Better now?’

Her eyes closed before she turned onto her side to face him and locked on to his stare. ‘Thank you for rescuing me.’

‘My pleasure,’ he murmured.

‘Your pleasure? I almost drowned you.’

‘Bella, you’re half my size. You couldn’t have drowned me if you’d tried.’ Except maybe with her eyes. Gazing into them was like gazing into a deep, hypnotising pool.Dio, even half drowned, and with most of her make-up washed away apart from where her mascara had smeared beneath her eyes, she was ravishing. Desire stirred within him and he inched his face closer to hers and splayed a hand on her hip. Her drying skin felt impossibly smooth and soft to his touch.

But he could have drowned her, Issy realised, shivering at the thought even as tendrils of awareness unfurled inside her at his touch and the closeness of their bodies. It would have taken no effort on Gianni’s part at all. He could have simply watched her splash around until exhaustion got the better of her. If he knew who she really was he’d probably have helped her drown.

Oh, what a plonker she’d made of herself, and it made her cheeks burn to think of how she’d banged on about ‘her’ yacht’s slide, and then how, at the first go on it, she’d panicked at the speed she’d hurtled down it and flailed like a madwoman when she landed.

The burn deepened to recall how her fear had left her the moment Gianni had taken hold of her. She hadn’t clung so tightly to him out of fear of drowning but because her body had instinctively equated Gianni, the man who’d destroyed her life, with safety. The irony was enough to make her splutter a laugh even as an ache deep inside her grew at the wish to wind her arms around him again.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked, nudging close enough for the tips of their noses to touch.

She plucked a plausible answer out of her scrambling brain; scrambling because it wasn’t just their noses touching. The tips of her breasts had brushed against his chest and in an instant, the tendrils of awareness had turned into flames. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m just thinking how undignified I must have looked when I landed in the water.’

Amusement played on the lips that had given her so much heady pleasure. ‘It was one of those moments where you wish for a video camera.’

Her splutter turned into a giggle. As much as she despised him, there was a dry wit about Gianni that tickled her, and she hated him even more for it. She loathed everything about him. Most especially loathed that he was the sexiest man to roam the earth and that she was practically melting with anticipation for his hand to move from her hip and explore the contours of her body properly.

God help her, she was aching for his touch.

God help her, shedidfancy him. There was no other explanation for it. She desired the devil.

‘I can’t believe I panicked like that,’ she bluffed, scrambling even more valiantly for clarity in her thoughts. She couldn’t let her body’s treacherous responses get the better of her, not when so much was at stake. Having sold herself as a party girl and water sports lover, she couldn’t have Gianni think she’d panicked because she hated being out of her depth in water. That would contradict everything she’d purported to be.

His smile was lazy and totally belied the heat pulsing from his eyes. ‘These things happen. No harm done.’

But she feared harm had been done. To her. Because the warmth of his breath brushing over her mouth and his thumb gently making circles on her hip was filling her with even more of those thrilling flames. An ache had formed deep inside her, the urge to press her pelvis forwards so that her groin locked with his almost unbearable in its intensity.

‘Have you saved many hapless women’s lives before?’ she asked, striving for a form of nonchalant brightness in her tone but succeeding only in sounding breathless.

‘You’re the only one I’ve succeeded with,’ Gianni replied, and as his fingers tightened their grip on Issy’s delectable hip, his thoughts strayed to his mother. He’d wanted to save her and his aunt from their bastard husbands. Alessandro had too. When their fathers’ mother, the matriarch of their family, died, the buffer to their cruelty had gone. Neither Gianni nor his cousin had appreciated how much theirnonna’s presence at their farmhouse had kept a curb on her sons’ malice. Her death unleashed it to a terrifying degree. How he’d longed to have superhero powers—he’d believed back then, when he was eight, that it needed a superhero to stop his father using his fists against himself and his mother—and the money to whisk them off somewhere safe. Turned out his mama didn’t need saving. She’d saved herself. When Gianni was nine years old, he’d woken one morning to find her gone. He’d never seen her again.

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