Getting into bed beside her, he pulled her into his burning body. He groaned in unison with her long moan, aching and relieved, as their flesh touched without barriers for the first time. Then, gradually, he felt her tension dissipate in the serenity of deep sleep.
He watched her, at peace in his arms, for as long as he could, before he too succumbed. To the first true rest of his life.
* * *
He woke up to unknown yet breathtaking sensations. Silk and velvet sweeping all over his body.
Liliana was trailing her hands and hair and lips over him, caressing and kissing and delighting in him.
The light beyond his closed lids said it was around sunset. He’d never slept that long. Nor had he ever slept with anyone present except his brothers. He’d certainly never fallen asleep with a woman in the same bed. Not once in his life.
He kept his eyes closed for as long as he could bear, to savor her worshipping, his heart drumming to a slow, hungry rhythm.
Then he couldn’t take it anymore. In the same second he opened his eyes, he reached for her, swept her around and beneath him. This time, there would be no stopping him.
“Antonio.”
The way she made his name sound like an aching plea. For him. For everything with him.
He took her lips. A thousand volts crackled between them, unleashing everything inside him in a tidal wave.
Maddened by the immediacy of her surrender, he captured her lower lip in a growling bite, stilling its tremors, attempting to moderate his passion. But she made it impossible when she parted her lips wider for his invasion, and her taste inundated him.
Such unimaginable sweetness. And the perfume of her breath, the sensory overload of her feel. Everything about her was a hallucinogen that pounded through his system, snapping the tethers of his sanity.
Her whimpers urged him to intensify his possession. His hands shook with urgency as he wrapped her legs around his hips, rose to revel in the overpowering sight she made trembling in his arms.
“Tell me, mi amore. Tell me you need me to take you.”
Her answer was only squeezing her eyes in languorous acquiescence.
“I will take everything you have, Liliana, devour everything you are and give you all of me. Is this what you want? What you need? Now? And from now on?”
* * *
Lili heard Antonio as if from the depths of a dream.
Everything that had happened since he’d come to her yesterday making his offer of himself, on her terms, felt like one.
But in her wildest fantasies, she wouldn’t have dared hope for Antonio to feel the same sweeping desire for her, or to succumb to it, let alone as quickly as she had.
But he did. He had. And once again he was demanding her confession and consent. He was holding back to make certain she craved his invasion and sanctioned his ferocity.
Oh, how she did. Even if the power of his dominance, the starkness of his lust, staggered her. She might have come to his mansion, let him take her to
his bed, might have been so bold as to wake the sleeping tiger, but now as she lay beneath him, waiting to be devoured, a storm of agitated desire overwhelmed her.
Her heart plunged into arrhythmia and she felt as if her every cell swelled, screamed for his possession.
Almost swooning with need, she gazed up at him as he loomed above her, the fiery palette of the horizon framing his magnificent body, setting his beauty ablaze. His eyes looked filled with tempests, precariously checked. He was giving her one last chance to dictate the terms of her surrender before he devastated her.
Feeling she’d die if he didn’t she told him, “Take all of me, give me your all. Do everything to me, Antonio...everything. I need it all.”
Raking her body in fierce greed, he bared his teeth on a soft snarl as he cupped her breasts in hands that trembled, kneaded them as if they were the most amazing things he’d ever felt. Then he bent and took one nipple in the damp furnace of his mouth, squeezing a shriek out of her. She unraveled with every nip and suck, each with the exact pressure and intensity to extract maximum pleasure. He layered sensation upon sensation until she felt inundated.
She was shaking out of control when he slid down her body, painting her with caresses and licks until he stilled an inch from her core, his breath on her making her feel she’d spontaneously combust.
He lit her fuse when he spoke, his voice a ragged, bass growl. “Perfetto, bellezza, magnifica.”