It was so raw. It was somale. It was a glorious ferocity and she felt its glorious teeth inside her. It was a cresting wave that never quite broke, or always broke, and made her want to do animal things, like dig her nails into his skin. Bite his shoulder.
And when she did those things, following some deep, inner feminine savagery, he made deep noises of approval, and thrust harder. Deeper.
Annika sobbed out his name, a terrible, wonderful wave rolling over her. She arched up against him, and he laughed.
Then did it again.
And again.
Until everything inside her became a storm and when she flew apart, she heard him call out her name.
Then follow her, straight into all that sweet fury, as if it was who they’d been all along.
As if he’d known who they were from the start.
Annika took a long while to come back into her own body, there in a bed in a strange room, far away from New York and the life that she’d known.
And no longer the innocent she’d been.
No longer innocent at all... And she had expected such a momentous thing to feel complicated. She had heard so many terrible stories. Even some supposedly good stories that had lingered over the mechanical issues of the act. She had expected tears, and a great deal ofI’m a woman now, but all she felt was...wonderful.
She could barely rouse herself. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to move again. And then when she did, she found Ranieri gazing back at her. Gold eyes and dark hair, and a possessive look on his sensual face.
And as she watched, a slow, hot sort of smile spread across his mouth.
“I think we can say we have well and truly taken the edge off,” he said, his voice a low rasp.
Then he was crawling over her, pulling her with him. And to her utter shock, Annika felt those same wildfires burn bright in her anew.
“Now,” Ranieri said in his sternest voice, kissing his way down the length of her body and settling himself between her legs, only looking up to flash a bit of that gold at her before returning his attention to the part of her that wanted him most, “why don’t we do this properly.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
NOTHINGCOULDHAVEPREPAREDAnnika for her honeymoon.
The days were warm, golden bright, and perfect. The nights were cool and called for fires in the grate and long walks in the vineyards, her head tipped back to take in the sky sloppy with stars. He had brought his trusted staff with him from New York and they managed to be both efficient and mostly invisible. It was at mealtimes that she was most grateful that they were here, heaping the bounty of this enchanted valley before them, so that there was no part of her day or night that was not a feast.
If this was the marriage her father had wanted for her, she was only astonished that he hadn’t hurried her into it sooner. Had he known all along? She hoped so.
Because this was magic.
Ranieri was magic.
Annika couldn’t get enough of him. No matter how many times he took her in the night, she woke up starving for more. No matter how he spread her before him, letting the golden light dance all over her naked body, she wanted to give him more.
There was nothing she wouldn’t give him, she thought after a week had passed, a soft, hot rush of sensation and delight. She only grew more voracious. She only wanted more. There was no sensual banquet she wasn’t prepared to share with him.
Their days took on an easy routine. They tended to wake at the first hint of light, turning to each other in that wide bed they’d claimed as theirs. It sat at the back of the house, so that sometimes Annika imagined that she could hear her own cries echo back to her from the hills beyond. And no matter how wild or adventurous they’d gotten the night before, their mornings were always about fire. Need.
As if, she sometimes thought, neither one of them could believe that this was real.
Ranieri usually left her to spend his morning in the cottage’s study, tending to his empire from afar. But Italian mornings were early in New York, so Annika allowed herself to be lazy. Sometimes she got up when Ranieri did, but more often she turned over and dozed.
She would have been the first to say that she’d led too privileged a life to have earned her idleness, and some mornings, the guilt of that had her charging out of bed. But as the days passed, she felt less and less guilty. She couldn’t remember losing her mother, yet the loss had marked her whole life. Losing her father had been two terrible days, with five years of a slower, more pervasive grief in between. The day of his accident and the day of his death had been unbearable in their own ways, especially because she’d had all that time in the middle to let herself imagine that things might be different. So much time that his death had been a shock, when perhaps she should have seen it as a blessing.
Because he was free now.
It was only here, across the ocean in Italy, on a honeymoon with the least likely man alive, that Annika found the space to let herself mourn.