‘Well, I think I should do this.’
His iron grip already held her shackled, but it was her own desire for him that really held her imprisoned and was her greatest enemy, Julie recognised as he lifted her from the bath with one easy movement that barely moved his chest, ignoring the water cascading from her as easily as he ignored her feebly voiced protests. In the background the music rose to a crescendo of pleading, but Julie no longer needed to plead for her lover.
‘Your clothes are wet.’ What an inane comment to make.
‘Then, like a good wife, you’d better take them off for me.’ Rocco mocked her.
Undress him? Julie felt boneless with the melting heat of her own longing.
The signs of her desire were clearly evident, but that desire was not for him, Rocco warned himself. Her thoughts had been with another man when she had lain there beneath the water, thinking of his touch.
He wanted her. He was her husband.
He took her hands and placed them on the wet fabric that covered his chest. ‘Undress me,’ he commanded.
If she did as he was demanding she would be lost.
‘No,’ she refused, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to.’
It was a lie, but he couldn’t know that. For a minute, when he released her hands, she thought he was going to let her go and walk away. But then he cupped her face and started to kiss her—oh, so slowly and deliberately—in such an intensely focused way that she knew exactly what the punishment for refusing him was going to be.
She tried to resist, keeping her lips tightly locked together, keeping her eyes wide open and refusing to look at him, tensing her whole body against his slow, sensual seduction of her.
It had to be someone else who was making that small husky sound of pleasure. Another Julie who was tipping back her head and closing her eyes as she willingly offered herself up for his caress, who trembled wildly in a paroxysm of fevered arousal when his fingertips gently brushed her throat and then her breasts, whilst his mouth coaxed and tormented her own into eager participation in the kind of kiss that ravished her senses and laid bare her longing for him.
She wanted him so badly. She wanted him body to body with her, flesh to flesh, touch to touch. Her hunger for him was fed by the thrust of his tongue against her own and the touch of his hands on her naked body, caressing her naked breasts, shaping the indentation of her waist and the curve of her hip. His fingers dipped into her own secret wetness, sending showers of fireworks of liquid pleasure exploding through her.
She had to touch him as he was touching her. Impatiently she started to tug buttons through buttonholes in the urgency of her need, meeting and matching the passion of his kisses as the sensation of his skin beneath her fingertips accelerated her arousal.
Her lips followed the eager, explorative journey of her fingertips, tracing the strong column of his throat and the broad sweep of his chest. His body hair was soft against her mouth; her fingers were clumsy on the belt that barred her way to the intimacy she longed for.
Her protest when Rocco suddenly seized her hands to stay them was a raw sound of female deprivation.
‘Hush. Wait,’ Rocco told her, sweeping her up in his arms to carry her from the bathroom into the bedroom, where he placed her on the large bed.
Looking up at him through the shadows, Julie felt as though her heart was so filled with love for him that it couldn’t contain the intensity of her emotions, that it was spilling from her like tears of acute pleasure. She lifted her hand to his face, tracing its shape wonderingly. If he left her now—But he was removing the rest of his clothes, and her heart lifted on the surging tide of her own desire as she looked at him, visually absorbing and recording every precious detail of his physical presence before finally giving in to her need to reach out and stroke her fingertips along the hard, erect length of him.
Her intimate touch tipped Rocco over the edge of his self- control. He took hold of her, kissing her mouth and then her breasts, tugging gently on her nipples, and then less gently when he felt the immediate surge of her response and heard her cry out to him. Her hands reached down to hold his head against her body. His hands found her and caressed her, pleasured her to the point where her pleasure was almost more than she could endure.
‘My love,’ Julie whispered emotionally, moving feverishly against his touch, commanded by it and yet driven to push past that command to a place where she could command him. ‘My only love.’
Thought and feeling melded together, burning away the old Julie, setting their mark on her for ever. She didn’t even see the look of dark bitterness shadowing Rocco’s eyes as he listened to her, much less register the moment of tension in his body as he swung between pride and desire, wanting her so desperately and yet filled with a need to reject that wanting, having heard her proclaim her love for another man.
In the end his desire won. The pleasure his touch gave her was his mark of possession as he waited for her to come down from that place where he had taken her with the knowing stroke of his fingers to the plateau where his own desire waited impatiently for her.
How well they fitted together—as though she had been made only for him, Julie thought dizzily as he stroked into her, filling her, re-s
ensitising her still-responsive flesh. Her muscles closed possessively around him, wanting him, rocking with sweet erotic pleasure at each movement within her, until the sweetness was stripped away and there was only a dark, raw passion that had her clinging to him as they swung above the chasm. She cried out to him in the darkness, feeling him sweep them both upwards to brilliance so surely that she was both laughing and crying with joy when he held her through the powerful spasms of their shared orgasm.
It was over. She felt so weak, so lost—and so afraid. Rocco was lying on his back, apart from her instead of holding her as she longed for him to do.
She had called him her love, but of course he was no such thing, Rocco acknowledged. She had meant those words for another man; the man she had exchanged inside her head for him.
What a fool he had been not to recognise until he had her exactly what had happened to him. He didn’t just want her. He loved her.
Rocco was regretting what had happened. Julie could tell. That was why he was lying so far away from her. How was it possible to have known so much happiness and yet now feel such dreadful pain? She longed for him to hold her and to whisper to her that he wanted her love. What a fool she was.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN