Her Forgotten Lover’s Heir by Annie West

Author:Annie West [West, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2018-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

HOURS LATER PIETRO woke in darkness, wondering what felt wrong. No, not wrong, but unfamiliar.

Even as he registered the sensation the answer came to him.

Molly. Sprawled across the bed and him. Her silky hair tickled his chest. Her breaths were tiny puffs of air that shouldn’t have been arousing yet somehow were. Or maybe it was because her limp hand rested so close to his groin.

Arousal was inevitable. He’d woken hard.

Hell, he’d woken hard ever since Molly had moved from the hospital into his apartment.

Languidly, deliberately eschewing the urgency burning in his bloodstream, he stroked her hair, then swept his hand down her shoulder to her hip. She arched like a cat, pressing her breasts into him, and mumbled in her sleep.

Pietro smiled. He could get used to this.

He hadn’t slept with any woman since Elizabetta. And that included Molly. Oh, he’d shared his bed for sex, but no lover was ever invited to spend the whole night.

His ex-wife’s duplicity cast a long shadow. He enjoyed sex but there was no way, before this, that he’d give any woman cause to believe he wanted more from her. He refused to tangle emotions with carnal pleasure.

That was what had gone wrong with Elizabetta. He’d let other emotions get mixed up with satisfaction at her robust passion. Enough that he’d taken her at face value. Or, no, if he was honest that had come when she’d told him she was pregnant. He recalled her charming enthusiasm tinged with uncertainty. His excitement. He hadn’t planned children with her but it was exactly what he wanted—a family of his own to care for and cherish. To grow old with.

To give meaning to his life.

Despite his aunt and uncle, who’d done their best for him when he’d been orphaned, Pietro had never stopped missing the family who’d been wrested from him. His mother with her wide smile and gentle touch. His father who’d always made time for him, despite the demands of the family business. Even his younger sister, who’d been a pest in the early years, but who’d begun to turn into someone he liked.

His aunt and uncle had struggled with a boy who’d abruptly changed from outgoing and well-behaved into surly and destructive. In the end they’d sent him away to boarding school, hoping the staff would have better success with him.

Pietro stared up at the dark ceiling. They’d been right. The regimen of school, and the kindness of a couple of the teachers, had turned him around. But that time away meant that, though he now had a good relationship with his aunt and uncle, there was no real intimacy between them. To his joy, he’d begun to develop something like that with his two younger cousins now they were adults.

Molly shifted against him and his groin tightened.

He shouldn’t wake her. She needed sleep, as she’d got little of it so far tonight.

Satisfaction stirred, an eddying heat in his belly. She was just as passionate as before. More so, if anything. As if any barrier that might once have existed between them had been torn away.

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