He tilted her chin up to look into her tear-washed blue eyes. ‘I am perhaps not as immune to you as I thought,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘My common sense says one thing but my body says another.’
She moistened the parched surface of her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘Mine too…’
‘So what do we do about it?’ he asked.
Keira held her breath, her eyes locked on his, her lower body throbbing against the surging heat of his. ‘I don’t know….’ she said. ‘Maybe ignore it and it will go away?’
He smiled lopsidedly. ‘That is just so typical of you, Keira,’ he said without any trace of malice in his tone. ‘You do not like to face facts. You prefer to hide under the bed covers, yes?’
She felt a tiny wry smile tugging at her mouth at his accurate assessment of her character. ‘I know, it’s pathetic, isn’t it? I should have well and truly grown out of the habit by now.’
He cupped her left cheek in the warmth of his hand. ‘It is one of the things that made me fall in love with you. I do not think you should change.’
She looked at him with wide eyes; her heart suddenly seeming to need more space than it was currently allocated inside her chest. She watched as his mouth came down as if in slow motion, his breath briefly caressing the surface of her lips in that millisecond before the final touchdown.
As soon as his mouth covered hers, heat exploded in her belly. Flames of need licked and danced along her flesh until she was whimpering against the sensual assault of his mouth on hers. The first demanding thrust of his tongue rocked her to the core, liquid longing weeping from the walls of her femininity, the pulsing ache between her thighs almost unbearable
.
His hands delved into her hair, holding her head as he deepened the kiss, his legs moving forwards against hers, making her step backwards until she was up against the wall.
She heard him groan with need as his hands left her hair to tear at her clothing, her loose-fitting cotton shirt popping every single button as he removed it from her. Her bra was next, the fastening barely undone before his mouth was sucking on each of her engorged nipples, his tongue rolling and curling until she was teetering on the edge of ecstasy.
He lifted his mouth from her breast to look into her eyes. ‘You are the only person who can reduce me to this within seconds,’ he said. ‘I swore I would not touch you, but now that I have I do not want to stop.’
She clutched at him with desperate hands. ‘I don’t want you to stop. I want you to make love to me. I’ve missed you so much.’
‘I cannot wait any longer to feel you again,’ he said, lifting her skirt to cup her, his fingers moving aside the lacy barrier of her knickers to sink into her.
‘Oh, God…’ she groaned as his fingers rubbed against her intimately. ‘Oh, please…please…’
He unzipped his trousers and released himself into her hands but he was too far gone for any preliminaries. After a brief moment he pushed her hands away and drove into her with a deep primal groan of satisfaction as her slippery warmth enclosed him tightly.
It was madness, it was far too rushed, it was reckless and almost savage, but it was unstoppable. Keira wondered if she was doing the right thing by agreeing to such intimacy between them while so much bitterness coloured their current relationship, but even as she rehearsed the words to slow things down her body had spun out of control.
Each urgent thrust took her higher and higher, her senses spinning as his mouth fed hungrily off hers. Her body sang with pleasure, every part of her responding to him with such instinctive fervour she could barely believe they had spent the last two months apart. Their bodies were still so in tune with each other, she knew him so intimately, and she knew exactly the moment when he was hovering on the edge of the precipice, his body tensing before the final devastating plunge into paradise.
She hadn’t quite made the journey to the pinnacle of pleasure when she felt him lose control, his body pumping hard for a moment or two as his low and deep groan of release came out on a whoosh of warm breath that caressed her neck.
It was one of those moments Keira would have liked a little more time to prepare for. She had never known him to take his pleasure without ensuring her own first. She couldn’t quite make up her mind if he had done it deliberately to imply she was nothing but a vessel for him to assuage his physical needs, or if he had genuinely lost control. She hoped it was the latter. Somehow that would make it easier to cope with.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, stepping back from her, his expression shuttered. ‘That was not meant to happen.’
She lowered her eyes as she tried to cover herself, her emotions see-sawing all over again. ‘It’s all right…It was my fault just as much as yours…’
‘Nevertheless I should not have allowed things to go that far,’ he said as he rearranged his own clothing. ‘I did not intend to make our reconciliation a physical one. This is not the way things are supposed to be between us. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, that’s all.’
‘I understand,’ she said and turned for the bathroom rather than meet his eyes. ‘I need to have a shower,’ she added, her offhand tone belying the true state of her emotions. ‘I’ll try not to be too long.’
Patrizio raked a hand through his hair as he watched her leave, his skin still tingling from the contact with hers, the scent of her filling his nostrils until he felt as if he were breathing the very essence of her into his soul.
CHAPTER NINE
PATRIZIO was waiting for her as she came downstairs a short time later. She took each stair with deliberate care, frightened that she would take a tumble as that dark brooding gaze followed her progress.
‘Keira,’ he said, ‘I think we need to talk through some things for a moment before we spend the evening in the boys’ company.’
Keira pressed her lips together, not sure she wanted a postmortem on what had happened earlier, so she disguised her feelings behind sarcasm. ‘It wasn’t a big deal, Patrizio,’ she said. ‘So you were a little trigger-happy. Maybe you need to sort that little problem out with your mistress. It’s really nothing to do with me.’