‘Justina!’ he gasped.

‘Dante!’ she moaned in response as she felt the first shimmering tugs hovering at the edge of her consciousness—and then, as she began to go under, he flipped her onto her back, his powerful body dark and tense as he drove into her with increasing speed. Her body felt as if it was exploding with pleasure as the first of the spasms hit her, and then she heard him give his own ragged cry as his head sank down against her neck.

Justina kept her eyes tightly shut as their bodies gradually grew still and felt a brief pang of melancholy wash over her. But she was damned if she was going to let it show. She wasn’t going to start dwelling on how amazing it had been because that was nothing new. And she wasn’t going to start wishing that they could go back to what they’d had before. Because they couldn’t, could they? You could never go back.

Even if you could she wouldn’t want to—not with Dante. Especially not with Dante. Because he was bad news. Or had she forgotten that? Had the urgent greed of her body made her conveniently push away the bitter truth? He’d hurt her more than she’d thought it was possible to hurt and he had the power to do it still. And he would. She knew that. She knew all about the complex factors which motivated him. She knew that he’d seen some of her behaviour as humiliation to his macho pride, and perhaps this was his way of getting even. Taking her body with careless disregard for her feelings.

She wriggled a little, aware that they were still locked intimately together. He was sleeping—or at least he seemed to be doing a good impression of sleeping, with the dark arcs of his long lashes feathering his sculpted cheeks. Once there would have been love as she looked at him, but that emotion had been replaced by a mixture of anger and regret. How could she have done that? How could she? She’d brought him up here to her hotel room and just had sex with him—without any of the usual preliminaries. And why, of all the men in all the world, did it have to be him and only him who could make her feel like this? The only man she’d ever been intimate with was the man who had hurt her. Who had destroyed her trust completely.

She felt him stir inside her. She felt his burgeoning erection and remembered how deliciously insatiable he’d used to be. Once he would have lowered his head to kiss her and started to make love to her all over again. But she wasn’t going to let that happen. Please give me the strength to push him away, she prayed—but Dante got there first.

His silent withdrawal from her sticky body seemed fraught with symbolism—all of it dark. He hadn’t said a single word, and the silence in the room seemed to be growing bigger by the second. He was levering himself up onto one elbow and appeared to be viewing her as dispassionately as a scientist might look into a petrie dish, to see what rogue organisms had sprung up overnight.

‘That was some sex,’ he said, and Justina met the cold expression in his eyes.

She kept her own response deliberately light. Don’t let him know how you feel. Hide your hurt, your anger and your shame and be the kind of woman he usually ends up in bed with. Casual. No-strings. She even managed to curve her lips into the faintest of smiles. ‘You liked it?’

Dante’s face darkened. ‘I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how good you are.’ He paused and his voice took on an empty, hollow quality. ‘I’d forgotten quite how good.’

But he had never known her quite like that before, he realised. And, despite his own very comprehensive love life since they’d parted, he felt sick at the thought of her doing the same. He tried to tell himself that it was a good thing to realise that she’d changed. That she was no longer the sweet innocent he’d initiated into sex. He hadn’t expected her to be, had he? Had he?

‘I expect you’ve learnt a lot from all the other men you’ve known in the interim,’ he said.

Justina gave her naked shoulders a little wriggle. ‘I always make it a rule not to discuss other lovers when I’m in bed with a man. It strikes me as particularly bad manners.’

Her words made his mouth harden and he pushed back the rumpled bedclothes before getting out of bed. She watched as he headed for the bathroom, just as she’d watched him do so many times before. His naked olive body was magnificent, the perfect globes of his paler buttocks contrasting with the dark musculature of his powerful thighs.

He emerged minutes later and without another word reached for his clothes and began getting dressed.

‘Going?’ she questioned, still in that same studiedly casual voice.

He paused in the act of pulling on his shirt, his dark eyes flicking over her with a look which was half lust, half disgust. ‘I have a flight to the States in the morning. I told you that.’

‘Of course.’ She didn’t want him to think that she minded him leaving so she got out of bed herself, reaching for the silk robe which was lying neatly folded on the chair by the bed. ‘Would you like a drink before you go?’ she questioned. ‘I can ring down for coffee if you like. It’s a long drive back to London.’

A dark spear of jealousy lanced through him. Dante wondered if she knew how seasoned she sounded. As if she asked men that kind of question most days of the week. He saw her slide the slippery robe over her luscious nakedness and quickly averted his eyes. Maybe she did.

‘No, thanks.’

Justina began pulling the pins from her mussed-up hair and shaking it free. ‘Is there something particular in New York?’ she questioned. ‘Something which can’t wait?’

He curled his tie into a gleaming coil and slid it into his jacket pocket. ‘There’s a big party I don’t want to miss.’

‘Oh?’ He might as well have been talking about the stock market for all the emotion she put into her next question. ‘Something special?’

Dante looked at her. Her hair was now free of all the pins and had tumbled down around her shoulders and she was brushing it. It wasn’t as long as he remembered, but it was still thick and raven-dark. It made her look like some beautiful dark angel, he thought, and for a moment he wanted to kiss her again, to ravage her. To tumble her back down on the bed and thrust right into her all over again until he had emptied himself inside her. But he couldn’t. Or rather, he wouldn’t. Because while once had been a mistake, twice would be insanity. They were too different. They always had been.

He shrugged. ‘Just a party.’

‘Oh?’ Justina fought against the instinct which was telling her to leave it alone and instead let her finger hover over the self-destruct button. ‘Whose?’

‘A girl’s.’

Beneath her silk robe Justina felt her skin ice to goose bumps. Had he...had he done it again? Taken her to bed when he was in a relationship with someone else? Her heart felt as cold as her skin, but somehow she managed another of those light smiles—as if they’d just done nothing more daring than enjoy a cup of tea together, instead of romping wildly on the bed. Because she was not going to fall to pieces.

‘Well, drive carefully,’ she said. ‘And I hope you have a safe journey back to America.’

Dante’s mouth twisted. How dismissive she sounded. As if what they’d done had meant nothing. Because it had meant nothing, he reminded himself bitterly. They both knew that.

His mind began to play back an erotic tape of what had just happened. Justina straddling him. Justina riding him. The way he’d ridden her back until that sweet release had claimed them both. The forbidden ache of sex throbbed thickly through his veins and in that moment of renewed desire he despised himself almost as much as he despised her for what they had done.

But not enough to stop him from pulling her into his arms and lowering his lips to a mouth which was now closed and resisting. A couple of seconds was all it took for that resistance to vanish, for her lips to part again and allow his tongue to slip inside. A couple of seconds more and she was kissing him right back, her fingers tangling in his hair the way they always did when she was turned on. If he’d given it any longer he suspected that he could have taken her again—right there on the floor on which they stood. He suspected that if he slid one finger between her legs he could make her come in seconds, the way he’d always been able to do. And wasn’t he tempted to do just that? Wasn’t he?