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She would use his hated attraction to her advantage and aggravate him into making the ultimate mistake.

Mattia gritted his teeth tightly enough to feel the pressure on his roots.

As soon as she’d mentioned clean clothes, he’d known what was coming.

He’d already mentally prepared himself for the strong possibility of Elvira taking this line of attack, and he swallowed back the thrum of heat charging through his veins.

“You’ll be taking a huge risk. You know that, right?” he told her flatly.

She pulled a face. “My gun is waterproof, and I can clean myself one-handed.”

“The second you stop paying attention to me, I’ll shoot you.” He’d shoot her shoulder. That would make her drop that damn gun.

“Oh, my sweet, sweet love, I guarantee I’ll be paying you all the attention. Watch this.”

Keeping her gun firmly aimed at him, she tugged a spaghetti strap of her top down her arm, slipped her arm free of it, swapped the gun to her left hand and slipped the other strap off. Then, without breaking eye contact with him, she rose effortlessly to her feet, switched the gun between her hands again, and used her free hand to pull the sparkling black top down to her waist. A little more effort had her tug it over her hips, and then it was falling down her legs to the floor.

“What do you think?” she said, her face alive with animation. “Are you impressed?”

He would not look anywhere but her eyes. Bad enough that the top half of the dynamite body in the black skin-tight jeans was now wearing only a black bra he could tell was transparent without allowing his gaze to fall on it properly. Another perfectly timed crack of lightning confirmed this.

“I’m supposed to be impressed that you’re wearing an elasticated top?” he sneered.

“Oh come on! I’d like to see you try and remove a top without giving your opponent a chance to shoot you!”

Her feigned hurt was far more impressive than the removal of her top. That’s what he had to tell himself. Tell himself, too, that there was nothing sexy at all about a woman standing in front of him with only a transparent bra covering her breasts.

The fates had to be playing a trick on him.

Sex was something that had disgusted him for so long he could barely remember his early adolescence when he’d been so damned impatient to lose his virginity. When he had finally lost it, though, there had been none of the triumph his friends had revelled in when they’d first bedded a girl. It had been something that needed to be done rather than something he wanted to do. By that point, he’d have been happy to never have sex, but he had a father who would consider his son a homophobic slur if he didn’t prove himself a man.

Mattia wasn’t gay. It was just that accidentally walking in on his fat father screwing from behind a skinny young woman barely older than his fourteen-year-old self had turned his stomach so completely that his own interest in sex had died.

The only mercy had been that the act of sex itself had been far less unpleasant than the first task his father had set him to prove himself a man. He’d had to dissociate from his body to get through it, just as he’d had to do with that first task, but at least the release at the end of it had been pleasurable. More pleasurable, he’d had to admit, than when he brought himself off. Not pleasurable enough, though, for him to want to repeat it.

But he had repeated it. He was Lorenzo Esposito’s oldest son. It was expected of him. His two younger brothers had seemed to be in some kind of competition over how many women they could screw, and he’d forced himself to join in with the banter. He’d forced himself to take the occasional lover, knowing it would please his father when it got back to him. Everything got back to his father. Elvira had been right that his father had known everything.

She’d been right, too, that his father hadn’t trusted him.

His father had never confronted him about the apartment, but he’d had this way of letting you know when he knew about something without spelling it out. Little innocuous remarks that left you in no doubt that you’d been rumbled. Waiting to see if those innocuous remarks would lead to something more concrete had been torture. Sometimes so much time would pass that you’d kid yourself he’d forgotten about it… until he dropped another innocuous remark to remind you of his omnipresence.

And so Mattia had taken the occasional lover. He’d chosen them carefully, and only when he’d sensed his father observing him more closely than usual. It would have been easier if he’d been able to bring himself to sleep with hookers, but the mere thought had made him feel physically sick. Instead, he’d chosen the groupies of his world, the women who didn’t belong to it but got off on the danger. Being Mattia Esposito, he’d had the pick of them.

The one thing his lovers had had in common – had being the operative word as there had been no need to put himself through it since his father died – other than being groupies was beauty without substance. Their heads had been empty of knowledge. He’d found them attractive enough to perform, but only if he dissociated his mind like he’d done the first time and concentrated on the act itself. He’d never been aroused just by looking at them or by holding a conversation. Never felt his blood thicken in anticipation.

He only knew blood could thicken because it had thickened now.

His every reaction to Elvira was anathema to him, not just because she was a Ranieri but because they were reactions he’d rejected for over twenty years, and now she was standing there so provocatively in that damned transparent bra, and the burn in his loins was all the warning he needed that without complete control over his functions, the arousal he’d only just tamed would pulse back to life.

Chapter Eight

There was something more than a little frightening about the naked hatred burning from the green eyes glued to Elvira’s challenging stare. If it was only naked hatred, she would return it with relish, but she could see a whorl of other, equally dangerous, emotions burning with it.

She was playing with fire. This was the Ice Man Mattia Esposito looking at her like she imagined Emperor Nero had looked at Poppea, his wife, before he’d killed her.

If she didn’t have the gun in her hand, would he feel free to release his rage and kick her in the stomach as Nero was rumoured to have done to Poppea?

Maybe she would have to shoot him.