‘Oh, my God,’ she moaned as his tongue began to trace a moist circle inside her lips.
‘Your prayers will not help you now, cara,’ he mocked, still with that slight edge to his voice. But as he felt her body melt closely into his he responded with a raw hunger which drove the last lingering traces of guilt away.
It seemed forever since he had kissed a woman, and these were new lips. Erotic lips. Lush and scented with wine. He groaned and plundered deeply, his hands tightening around the small indentation of her waist, unable to resist the curve of her hips and the cup of her bottom. He pushed up her skirt until the flat of his hands were exploring the cool globes laid bare by the thin, lacy thong she wore, and he felt that he might explode. ‘You dress to kill,’ he shuddered.
And she felt like she was dying. With need. And with pleasure. She felt her arms snake instinctively around his neck as her hips melded into the rocky power of him, thinking that it was too long since she had been in a man’s embrace like this. She pressed her breasts against him, and he groaned, turning her in his arms and pushing her up against the wall, one lean, muscular thigh prising its way authoritatively between hers, and she felt the pooling of desire as it slicked against her thong.
She pushed him away from her, but only so that her fingers could fly to the buttons of his fine silk shirt, clumsily freeing them from their confinement, and he replied by swiftly unclasping and unzipping her skirt. It fell to her ankles immediately, and she stepped over it, wearing nothing now but a cashmere vest and a lacy thong.
With another small, angry growl of desire, Giovanni feasted his eyes on the front of the white thong, where the faint red triangle of hair tempted him from behind the flimsy lace. Her fingers were now scrabbling at his belt, and they were turning and touching like a pair of demented dancers, clothes falling free as they frantically kisse
d their way out of the sitting room.
He felt his hardness grow explosive, aware that their frenzied path had brought them to a door which he assumed must be to her bedroom.
Unprepared and unwilling to accept a moment’s more delay, he scooped her up into his arms.
‘Giovanni—’ she gasped.
The blue-black eyes glittered obdurately. ‘What?’
‘Where are you taking me?’ As she spoke the words, she knew that it was a foolish and redundant sentence, and his abstract, almost cynical smile told her that he felt exactly the same way.
‘To bed,’ he ground out, and kicked the door open.
CHAPTER FOUR
GIOVANNI carried Kate straight over to the bed and put her into the centre of it, and, his eyes still holding hers with their icy glitter, began to unzip his trousers.
‘You are protected?’ he asked, as matter of factly as if he were asking her for a cup of coffee.
She shook her head. ‘No.’ Pointless to tell him that she had been single for over two years. He did not want a history of her love-life, he just wanted a practical answer to his question.
His eyes narrowed and he nodded almost thoughtfully as he withdrew a packet of condoms from his pocket, and Kate found herself wondering slightly wildly whether he was always so well prepared.
She lay there watching him. She knew that she ought to feel some sense of shame at what was happening. What she was allowing to happen to them, but her only sensation was one of glorious expectation. Even when his mouth twisted in another faint, cynical smile as he eased the zip carefully over his erection.
Wearing nothing but a pair of dark blue silken boxer shorts, he arrogantly kicked the trousers away from him and Kate heard herself gasping with unashamed pleasure as the boxers followed.
Greedily she ran her eyes over his naked body, focusing on the gleaming olive skin and a tight, taut torso. His shoulders were broad and his hips sensuously narrow, whilst the long, hard thighs were unbelievably lean and muscular.
He saw her watching him, and he deliberately touched himself. Saw the way that her eyes dilated as he stroked his finger arrogantly along his aching hardness, provocatively sliding on the sheath and turning practicality into eroticism. And then she lifted one pale, smooth thigh in unconscious invitation, and he could play that particular game no longer. ‘You are wearing far too much, cara,’ he told her softly as he climbed onto the bed next to her.
On an instinct she bent her head forward and licked luxuriously at the Adam’s apple that curved at his throat, and felt him shudder beneath her tongue. ‘Am I?’ she whispered, transfixed by the hungry gleam in his eyes as he glittered a hungry gaze over her body.
‘Much, much too much,’ he murmured, his accent deepening. He peeled the cashmere vest over her head and felt the pounding of his heart as he caught his first sight of her breasts. So full and so pale. Encased in virginal white lace. His mouth twisted at the irony of that, but his thoughts were banished by the need of his body.
‘Matri di Diu!’ he muttered thickly, and dipped his head to her breast, unable to stop the quick flick of his tongue against the nub which strained so frantically through the delicate white lace.
‘Oh!’ The pleasure of his touch was so intense that it was almost like pain. No, not pain—because if this was pain, then how to define pleasure, pure and sweet? Her head fell back helplessly against the pillow as he flicked his tongue again.
‘You like that, don’t you, cara?’ he enquired almost idly, watching the way that her hips moved against the bed in a frantic little circle, and the heat of his own longing almost made him lose his mind. ‘Don’t you?’ he repeated harshly.
‘Yes!’
He unclipped the bra and her breasts fell free, and once more he bent his head, taking the whole nipple greedily between his lips, and sucking on it hard, in an erotic imitation of the way she had sucked his thumb earlier, and Kate very nearly passed out with pleasure.
‘Giovanni…’ Her head moved from side to side on the pillow, as if in denial. No, not denial. She could deny this man nothing. Not a thing.