Chapter Thirty-seven
The following week with Vanni consisted of one halcyon day after another, golden and peaceful, achingly sensual and sweet. He took her to the picturesque village of Saint-Jeannet one late afternoon, where they strolled to the Place St. Barbe and dined while staring out at the stunning view of the sea and surrounding rocky cliffs. In Cannes, they walked through the open markets and chose food and flowers for their evening dinner at La Mer. In Cassis, they took a boat out and toured the calanques, massive limestone walls that enclosed inlets and bays resulting in the most jaw-dropping scenery Emma had ever imagined.
Mostly, however, they opted to stay at La Mer and indulged in each other’s company in the beautiful, peaceful surroundings. Vanni hired two men to come to the villa and erect a blue-and-white-striped pavilion on the private beach by the sea. They also brought a cushioned double lounger that was divided at the top only, so that two people could either sit up or lie down side by side, and tables and two chairs.
“You’ll burn easier than you think if we spend hours on the beach every day,” Vanni had explained.
He’d been right, of course. With the pavilion in place, they spent entire mornings or even days on the beach swimming and napping and making love. Mrs. Denis never came down to the beach, but upon some sort of prearrangement with Vanni, she brought them lunch at one o’clock. Vanni would jog up the hundreds of steps to claim it and bring it down to Emma.
Emma had brought a historical women’s fiction book with her on the trip and took it to the beach the first day when the pavilion had been set up. The vision of Vanni returning from a swim took her attention off the pages as he arose from the azure waters like a bronzed Greek god and came to collapse on the lounger next to her. She swatted him playfully with the book when he intentionally dripped cold water all over her. Grinning, he grabbed it from her. Water drops clung to his long eyelashes as he narrowed them and read the back cover.
“Read out loud to me?” he asked, handing her back the damp book.
She thought he was kidding, but began to read aloud where she’d left off. He stretched out next to her, and Emma tried to keep her attention on the page instead of on the long, glorious expanse of wet male next to her. Realizing it was a hopeless cause, she carefully set aside the book on the table next to her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, watching her with a quirked brow as she straddled his midriff and lowered over him.
“I’m having a salt craving,” she told him before she licked a warm, solid pectoral muscle and tasted the sea and Vanni on her tongue. He smiled, watching her for a moment as she kissed and licked his shoulder and chest, experimenting with the feeling of crisp chest hair, hard muscle and smooth, warm skin with her lips, teeth, and tongue. She hovered for a moment over a small dark brown nipple. His hand went to the back of her head, cupping it, and she kissed the disc, laving it delicately with the tip of her tongue. She looked up at him, feeling his nipple pebble. He lifted his head off the lounger and was watching her with a tight focus. Suddenly, his ridged abdomen muscles flexed as he sat up slightly and pulled the back of the lounger up, so that he was in a sitting yet partially reclined position. His fingers tightened in the back of her hair.
“Go on,” he told her, one eyebrow going up in a gentle dare.
She smiled before she scooted back slightly over his damp body, her inner thighs and bottom coming into contact with his wet trunks and the growing fullness behind them. She took a bite out of the side of him, just over his ribs, and he grunted softly, his fingers tightening in her hair. Her tongue soothed the sting. She lowered further, straddling his thighs. A thrill went through her when she felt his abdominal muscles jump as if her lips and tongue sent an electric current through them. His muscles were so dense and delightfully defined, his skin taut and smooth. When she reached the narrow path of hair that led from his belly button below the waistband of his swim shorts, she pressed her
lips and face against it and twisted her head slightly, loving the sensation of the silky hair against her mouth. He made a hissing noise above her. She glanced up and saw that his eyes glittered with arousal as he stared down at her. He pulled slightly on her hair, urging her without words, and she let him guide her in his need. He pressed when she was over the bulge of his cock, and she came down over him, finding the rigid column with her seeking lips and biting at it gently through the damp fabric of his shorts.
“Emma,” he muttered, and it was both an endearment and a taut warning on his tongue. She looked up and held his gaze while she held the girth of his cock between her bottom and top teeth and slid them back and forth in a gentle sawing motion. His face tightened in a grimace. She reached up and cupped his full, firm testicles, squeezing them gently while she found the succulent cap of his cock beneath the fabric and scraped her teeth across it as well. The feeling of him always aroused her, but he so rarely let her touch and play with him at will. He was like a forbidden treat she relished. By the time he jerked his trunks downward to his thighs, exposing his naked, swollen cock, she was starved for him.
“Slow down,” he murmured as she took him into her mouth and pulsed him just below the head, applying a hard pressure against her rigid tongue and lips and sucking hungrily. She looked up at him lounging there, the image of his bronzed, naked, cut torso and rigid face from this angle decadently beautiful. His fingers tightened in her hair. “We have all day,” he told her softly.
She closed her eyes, overwhelmed by the fullness of the moment, and tried to push the memory deep into her consciousness: the soft sigh of the waves hitting the beach behind them, the seabirds calling in the distance, Vanni’s taste and the hard pressure of his cock filling her mouth, hurting her a little because her hunger was so great. Instead of running from her hunger, however, she submitted to it fully, taking him deeper than she ever had before, his patient instructions assuaging her anxiety, the golden day stretching out before them and his gentle hold in her hair assuring her there was time . . . always time.
It was so easy when she was there with him in that magical little world they’d built together to forget that their time was running out.
* * *
He’d never experienced something as sweet or so arousing as Emma making love to him with her mouth on that warm summer afternoon. Her unselfishness surprised him, and yet it didn’t. She always gave freely. Completely. He could feel her sexual hunger, a pure, untainted desire to provide him pleasure and joy. But there was something more that he sensed. Her submission to his desire sparked her own arousal. When her heat escalated, his did. Several times, he pulled her back from the brink, urging her to soften, wanting her to be comfortable with this manner of lovemaking . . . wanting it to last.
He lay there, swimming in pleasure and sensation, watching her with a rapt focus. Her blond hair was turning lighter under the influence of the Mediterranean sun; it fell in wind-tousled waves around her face and felt so soft in his gripping fingers. The sprinkling of freckles on her nose that he prized so greatly were growing slightly more prominent under the sun, but he’d never tell her that, knowing how much she hated them.
She was a sexy, unmade bed, innocent and brazen at once. Every time they made love, he discovered a new height to how aroused she could become . . . how aroused she could make him. Her cheeks were rosy, whether from the sun, the heat, or arousal, he didn’t know. He watched as she wet the entire stalk of his cock with her pink tongue, her velvety dark eyes shining as he met his stare.
“Suck the balls into your mouth,” he instructed quietly. “Now use your hand on the staff.” He grunted when she did what he asked, proving again she wasn’t only an eager student, but also an apt one. He winced in pleasure, his head falling back against the recliner. Her small hand fisted him tight. She was a little ruthless on the lubricated, blood-engorged flesh, but he liked it.
He loved it.
After a while, he urged with his hand and she rose over him, holding the base of his cock with her fist and inserting the head into her mouth again.
“Use your teeth on the head, but lightly,” he instructed, watching and tensing in pleasure as she followed his direction. He grasped her head with both hands, urging her to take him into her mouth again. When she sucked him so hard that he grimaced in stark pleasure, he warned her yet again.
“What’s your hurry?” he asked, his fingers tightening in her hair. She paused, looking up at him, her cheeks hollowed out as she sucked. He snarled at the potent image she made.
“All right,” he conceded. “Have it your way, mon petit ange.”
He groaned as she sucked him deep and he felt her throat tighten around the tip. Agonized pleasure seized him. He didn’t want to hurt her. He did, a little. He never would in any real sense of the word, and those paradoxical desires made his need sharp and cutting. He pulled her back, gasping, a coat of sweat breaking out on his skin. She took him deep almost immediately again, her nostrils flaring for air. He grunted in disbelieving pleasure, his need roaring in his veins. Through the blur of his raging lust, he saw a tear fall down her cheek. He gasped and pulled back on her hair, but she was having none of it, bobbing her hard over his lap, the friction of her taut lips and pumping fist killing him.
He felt that familiar tingling in his balls and urged her to use more force. “You’ve done it now,” he grated out, watching her fixedly as she pumped his cock with mouth and fist. “I’m going to come in your hot little mouth,” he said, the ferocity in him breaking free.
He gasped at the sensation of her taking him deep and began to shudder in orgasm. He came into her throat, but dislodged his cock as the second shudder tightened him. Pleasure continued to wrack him as he ejaculated powerfully on her tongue, and she sucked and swallowed.
An ecstatic moment later, he opened his clenched eyelids. Had he hurt her?
Her eyes were open and fixed on him as she continued to bob her head over his cock. There was a blazing quality to her gaze as she sucked him clean, and he was reminded yet again that he was foolish to think his flashes of savageness could ever degrade her. She was as deep as the sea and every bit as mysterious.
“Come here,” he said, holding out his arms for her. He held her against him, his hand moving between her thighs. He squeezed her tighter when she climaxed against him a moment later, eating the small whimpers that fell across her lips, treasuring her pleasure as much as he had his own.
More.
The thought of losing her felt like hot knives piercing him, stealing his breath. But he would lose her. All things that he treasured left him in the end. Emma had been wise—as she was in a lot of things—for setting the limit of parting. Not knowing when the ax of loss would fall was worse.
Wasn’t it?
He flipped her onto her back on her side of the recliner and came down partially over her, burying his face in her neck. He closed his eyes and inhaled her fragrance, letting it chase away his pain until it was only a dull, throbbing ache.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Despite her distraction that first time, she did read to him sometimes while they lay together next to the sea. She’d wondered at first if he wouldn’t fall asleep after a while, given the steady cadence of her voice and the hypnotic, rhythmic waves hitting the beach, but when she’d glance aside occasionally, she’d see the aquamarine crescents of his eyes as he stared up at the top of the canopy or out at the sea . . . or at her face.
She set aside the book once and picked up the glass of lemonade Mrs. Denis had sent down with their lunch, taking a sip and setting it down again. “She was a lot more calm than I would have been, meeting a queen,” Emma said, referring to the passage she’d just finished reading in the book where the heroine of the book, a sixteenth-century peasant unaware of her royal roots, had been presented to the monarch of the land.
“You were pretty calm when you met royalty,” Vanni said fr
om where he lay next to her, his own glass of lemonade perched on his taut belly and seeping moisture onto his skin. He was turning even more golden brown and beautiful with each passing day in paradise.
She laughed, and then did a puzzled double take when she saw his serious expression. “When did I meet royalty?” she asked.
He reminded her of the couple she’d met in the racing box—the mustachioed man and the sober, polite woman sitting next to him. She just stared at him. “They were not,” she scoffed after a moment.
“Well, granted, he’s several steps away from the crown, but still . . .”
A shiver of amazement mixed with outrage and amusement when she realized he wasn’t kidding. She slapped him on the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, trying desperately to remember the details of the couple and what she’d said and done. “Did I make a fool of myself?” she demanded anxiously. “Wasn’t I supposed to address them in a certain way?”
“No,” Vanni assured, chuckling. “He’s enough steps away that a formal address isn’t required in non-ceremonial settings.”
“He seemed so nice and . . . normal.”
“I’m sure he thought the same of you,” Vanni said drolly, grinning as he set aside his drink.