She raised her hand and let her fingertips trail in a caress beneath the taut line of his shapely mouth. ‘Yes…of course.’
With an air of intense relief Rafaello claimed another passionate kiss and slid his hands beneath her hips to tip her back. She felt the hot, urgent probe of his shaft against her most tender flesh and she was so driven by the tormenting ache for fulfilment he had roused in her, she urged him on in a movement as old as time itself by rising up to him and wrapping herself round him. He answered that invitation with a driving thrust. For the first instant, she was shocked by the sensation of invasion, and, for the second, overwhelmed by responsive pleasure to that incredible intimacy. Then came a sharp, stabbing pain that wrenched her from her sensual spell with a vengeance, and she cried out.
Rafaello stilled and gazed down at her with an expression of shattered disbelief. ‘You can’t be…’ he whispered half under his breath.
There was no mistaking the level of his shock at the discovery that she had not been lying about the precise extent of her experience. Stunned golden eyes gazed down into hers.
Something perilously akin to smugness eased the dying remnants of physical discomfort Glory was suffering. She liked the idea that she had shattered his image of her and proven it to be false.
‘I’ll stop…’ Rafaello gritted, taking her aback with that decision in turn.
Glory closed both arms round him, let her fingers delve through the thick silk of his black hair, scanning the lean, strong features so close to her own. ‘Might as well finish,’ she mumbled, hot-faced, telling herself that she didn’t want him thinking she was a tease by calling a halt at what could not be said to be a good moment for him.
‘Si…bella mia,’ he muttered with a flattering amount of appreciation. ‘Per meraviglia…stopping now would kill me!’
Generosity felt very good at that point. While she was resigning herself to enduring the rest of it for his sake while striving to explain to herself why she should feel so self-sacrificing all of a sudden, Rafaello took her even more by surprise. He surged into her with an immense gentleness that she found incredibly touching and then, to her astonishment, even more enjoyable. Her eyes opened very wide.
‘I’ll make it good,’ Rafaello swore with roughened tenderness.
Her heart started accelerating to a hammer-beat again and everything she had been feeling before that brief instant of pain returned to her tenfold. Suddenly she was with him again, losing the power of thought and then control, arching up to match his fluid thrusts, discovering a pagan rhythm all of her own. Her breath coming in shallow pants, she gave herself up to the powerful excitement building higher and higher within her. He drove her, gasping, to a dizzy peak and nothing could have surpassed the sheer wondrous sensation that gripped her writhing body with an ecstasy of pleasure.
Glory drifted back to the land of the living to find herself still plastered as close to Rafaello as an extra layer of skin. Finding no fault whatsoever with that discovery, she snuggled even closer and could not control the dreamy smile stretching her mouth. Paradise was being in his arms, she decided, breathing in the hot, damp, sexy scent of him as if he was a drug she needed to survive. She felt amazingly tender and affectionate towards him and only just resisted an urge to smother him in loving kisses.
Rafaello tensed. ‘Quit snuggling,’ he told her drily.
Glory froze as if the roof had come down on top of her. Before she could even react to that apparent rejection that just seized her up with pain, Rafaello rolled her flat onto her back against the pillows and leant over her. He brushed her tumbled honey-blonde hair back from her brow, dropped an unexpected kiss on her reddened mouth and smiled down at her.
It was that glorious smile that finally convinced her that she had misread his signals. When he had urged her to quit he had been teasing, and her heart went crazy when she recognised the easy humour curving the relaxed line of his sculpted mouth. ‘You have really shocked me,’ he confided huskily.
Glory kept on smiling. All was right within her immediate world. She was brimming full of happiness purely because he was happy. By no means did he look dissatisfied by his recent discovery that she was not the skilful partner he had expected. And in no way was she dissatisfied with him.
‘I’ve got no excuse. I can’t defend myself. I should have listened to you, bella mia,’ Rafaello conceded with an amount of regretful humility she would never have believed a male of his unquenchable assurance could display.
‘Yes, you should’ve,’ Glory agreed, but she was quick to snake her arms round him again lest he think she was withholding forgiveness.
‘I’m just amazed,’ Rafaello admitted, surveying her with frowning fascination. ‘You’ve been knee-deep in predatory men all these years and you didn’t succumb to one of them. Yet you’re not a cold woman.’
‘You’re more persuasive than the rest,’ Glory confided shyly.
‘Evidently…’ Rafaello rolled over and sat up. ‘You’ve just blown a great big hole in my image of you as calculating.’
‘I guess…’ Glory was now feeling so buoyant she was vaguely surprised that she wasn’t floating round the ceiling. Flipping onto her side, she surveyed him. Dear heaven, just looking at him made her feel dreamy and silly. She wanted to ease back into physical contact with him but was afraid of seeming too clingy. She wanted to hug him again. She wanted to tell him he was wonderful…she wanted to tell him she loved him. Odd how she had wanted to tell him that before she had even admitted it to herself, she acknowledged in a daze. It was pretty naff, her still being so keen on him after five years apart, she reflected ruefully. It didn’t say much for her ability to move on, did it? But then, it was not something she planned to share with him.
‘Although I confess to being very grateful that you were sufficiently calculating to accept that we were going to end up in bed sooner rather than later,’ Rafaello was saying while he toyed with a straying blonde strand of her wildly tousled mane of hair.
Glory’s brow furrowed. She wondered if she had missed a line of explanation somewhere. ‘Sorry…what do you mean?’
Rafaello released a rueful sigh and tugged at her hair as to reprove her for her evident lack of concentration. ‘When I realised that the only contraception I had was in another room I was very relieved to discover that you were better organised than I was, cara.’
Glory was now very still and when her voice emerged it was rather strained. ‘Better organised?’
‘On my last stay here, this room was being decorated and I used the one next door,’ he explained.
Glory remembered his opening the drawer in the bedside cabinet. Having only briefly wondered what he was looking for, she now felt unbelievably stupid. Rafaello had been reaching for protection.
‘A virgin who takes care of contraception in advance is a very sensible woman.’
To Glory, that statement seemed to hang there in the air between them like a giant rock about to fall on her. Her opinion of her own common sense dive-bombed. ‘But…but I didn’t take care of contraception,’ she admitted in a very small voice.