Bought by Her Italian Boss by Dani Collins

They walked from store to store and paparazzi swarmed around them, clicking and flashing and capturing every murmur and expression. One called something particularly disgusting and she flinched.
    “Ignore them,” Vito growled, drawing her closer to the shelter of his big body, brushing his lips against the tip of her ear as he spoke, then smoothed his fingers through the tails of her loose hair, caressing her waist, so attentive to her needs.
    She imagined she looked deeply smitten every time he touched her like this. That’s why she’d had to insult him and drive a wedge between them. Her response to his pretend seduction was dangerously real. Her nipples tightened when all he did was touch the small of her back. She flushed with desire when she inhaled the scent of his neck.
    How was she so comfortable under his touch? That’s what she wanted to know. Normally she was quite standoffish with men. If they so much as took her elbow while they walked her down the street, she found the presumptiveness of it annoying.
    Not Vito. Her skin called out for each light graze of contact. She was in a perpetual state of readiness, skin sensitized and aching with anticipation, eager for his merest caress. She wanted him to smother her with his big body. Absorb her.
    In some ways it was exhausting. She was incredibly relieved when he pointed to a car with a chauffeur in sunglasses leaning against it, reading his phone. “We’ll take a drive to some viewpoints, see if we can lose these cameras before we head back to the house.”
    Their last two boutique bags went into the trunk where the myriad of other purchases were now arranged along with dry cleaner bags holding the clothing they’d worn last night. The man really was a demigod, taking care of the dreary details of life with what seemed like a magical snap of his finger and thumb. Forget the other conquests who fell for this routine. She was becoming one of them. How could any woman not find this level of provision seductive?
    She settled with a sigh on the leather seat in the back, pretending she wasn’t aware of the scooters that kept buzzing up beside them for the next ten minutes as they drove into the hills. The windows were blacked out, however, so the followers soon fell away, accepting that their opportunity was over and they might as well go file the photos they had and collect their payments.
    The car climbed high above the lake, the twists in the road taking them into stretches of quiet thoroughfare, where she finally let out her breath in a sigh.
    Vito leaned forward to close the privacy window and poured both of them a water from the bottle in the door.
    “Was it so bad?” he asked. “Spending my money?”
    “No,” she said, adding a sarcastic, “How was it for you?”
    She heard how suggestive that sounded and made a noise into her glass.
    “Why does everything I say come out sounding dirty around you?” she muttered.
    “Freudian slip?” he suggested.
    She slid her thumb along the rim of her glass, blushing and saying nothing.
    “Your silence speaks volumes,” he taunted.
    “Am I the first woman to find you attractive? I doubt it,” she said caustically.
    “You’re the first to be so annoyed by it,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “Why? Because you’re so tempted?”
    “I’ve never been a drug user and that’s what it would be,” she muttered. “You’re sitting there like a giant painkiller promising to keep me from feeling the bus that’s crushing me. So, yes, I’m tempted.” She couldn’t believe how honest she was being. It wasn’t like her to be this blunt, but what shred of dignity was left to lose? “But I’ve never gone to bed with a man purely for physical release. It makes me feel cheap to consider it.”
    “You’re incredibly insulting when you want to be, aren’t you? The problem, I think, is that you don’t know how powerful this particular painkiller will be.” He leaned across and set her glass in