“Did you ever touch yourself and imagine it was me?” He dropped one hand and drew his fingertip through her swollen folds, looking down again as he languidly caressed her. “Did you want to feel my hand here?”
She was immediately disoriented, glad for the hard wall at her back as she rose into his touch and draped her arm across his shoulders, seeking balance.
“Tell me,” he commanded between kisses. “Tell me or I’ll stop.”
“Yes,” she gasped.
He rewarded her by bending to suck one nipple, then the other, drivi
ng further spikes of pleasure into that place he continued to tease. A keening noise sounded and she realized it was her, unable to express her agonizing climb of desire in any other way.
Now he was on his knees, licking at her. Splaying her and gently probing and circling and driving her to the brink of madness. She realized distantly that she had her hands fisted in his wet hair, that she had completely abandoned herself to him. To the exquisite pleasure he relentlessly inflicted upon her. Within moments, cries of ecstasy tore from her throat, filling the steamy, hollow chamber.
He ran his mouth all over her thighs and stomach, soft bites that claimed his right to do so as she stood there weakly, heart palpitating, breath still splintered.
He stood and snapped the water off, staring at her while she leaned helpless and overwhelmed. Outdone.
Meeting his gaze was like looking into the sun, painful in its intensity. Painful in how blind and exposed she felt, but she couldn’t look away. Couldn’t pretend he hadn’t peeled her down to her core until she was utterly at his mercy.
While he remained visibly aroused, but in complete control.
“The way we make each other feel is a hell of a lot more than many couples have. Recognize that. Be satisfied with it.”
She wasn’t and never would be.
But when he held out a hand, she let him balance her as she stepped out onto the mat. He dried her off and took her to his bed, where he satisfied her again and again and again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RICO WOKE IN the guest bed he’d been using all week and listened, thinking Lily must be stirring. He ought to be sleeping more heavily considering the quantity and quality of sex he was enjoying, but his radar remained alert to the other occupants of his penthouse.
He listened, thought he must be imagining things, started to drift off then heard the burble of a video chat being connected. The volume lowered.
He rose, already wearing boxers in case he had to go to Lily. His door was cracked and it swung open silently, allowing him to hear Poppy’s hushed voice reassuring her grandmother.
“No, everything’s fine. I couldn’t sleep and thought this would be a good chance to chat without a baby crawling all over me. How are you settling in?”
“Same as I told you yesterday,” her grandmother said wryly. “You’re the one with the gadabout life. What have you been up to?”
He stood and listened to Poppy relay that the nanny had taken Lily for a walk today while she had pored over properties with a real estate agent. He’d been going in to work each day, but taking her out at night. She mentioned this evening’s cocktail party where he had introduced her to some of his top executives and their wives.
She made it sound as though she had had the time of her life when she’d actually been petrified and miserable, not that she’d been obvious about it. He knew how she behaved when she was comfortable, though. She laughed with Lily and traded wry remarks with her grandmother.
That woman was making fewer and fewer appearances when she was with him, however, which was beginning to niggle at him. He glimpsed her when they made love. She held nothing back in bed, but tonight she had disappeared quickly after they had wrung untold pleasure from each other. She had rolled away and her voice had pulled him from his postcoital doze.
“Will you check on Lily as you go?”
“Of course.” He had told himself he was glad she’d kept him from falling asleep beside her. His will to leave her each night grew fainter and fainter, but staying seemed the even weaker action. He wasn’t Lily, needing his cuddle bear clutched in his arm in order to drift off.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected from this marriage. When contemplating his first to Faustina, he had anticipated following his parents’ example. Like his siblings, he had been raised to keep his emotions firmly within a four-point-five and a four-point-seven. Not a sociopath, but only a few scant notches above one. He had never been a man of grand passions anyway and had been comfortable with the idea of a businesslike partnership with his spouse.
That certainly hadn’t worked out. Given the betrayal and drama he’d suffered at Faustina’s hands, he had wanted this marriage to conform to that original ideal.
It didn’t. Poppy didn’t. He kept telling himself she would get used to this life, but seeing her natural exuberance dim by the day was eating at him. He didn’t know what to do about it, though. This was their reality.
“Dinner will be served soon. I have to start making my way or it will be cold by the time I arrive,” Eleanor said with a papery chuckle.
“Okay. I love you. I miss you.” She ended the call, but didn’t rise.