The first skin-to-skin contact drew a shocked long, low moan from her parted lips and she pushed her small breasts against the solidity of his warm chest. Then, as his clever fingers slid over her slickness, teasing the delicate folds and tight, aching nub, she lost all sense of self. There was just the pleasure and the ache.
When the rhythm stopped, she let out a small cry of protest but was quickly distracted. Ezio was kissing and licking his way down her body, drawing keening moans of pleasure as he left a tingling trail that went deeper than the surface, it went to her very core.
Her heavy-lidded eyes opened; his body was curved over her.
‘Oh my God, you are so perfect...’ she breathed, placing her palms against his chest, spreading her fingers, feeling the thud of his heart, the satiny texture of his skin.
His face was all sharp, fierce angles, the sybaritic line of his cheekbones drawn knife-sharp by the bands of colour scoring the crests. Her fingertips slid with growing confidence over the hard slabs of his stomach before she slid lower, pausing for a moment in her carnal exploration as he sucked in a sharp breath, her tongue caught between her teeth.
Then she reached the hard column of his erection and tightened her fingers, feeling the throb of his silky-smooth shaft.
‘Later...not now... Now I need to be inside you, Tilda,’ he rasped. ‘I need to have you tight around me.’
Kneeling over her, her face between his big hands, he rained kisses on every inch of her skin before he finally claimed her mouth. As he kissed her with a wild passion she equally matched, she felt as though he’d drain her.
Resting on his elbows, he lowered himself slowly and teasingly, first against her belly and then the mound of her sex, making her back arch. Only his hands on the crest of her hips kept her grounded.
His powerful chest was heaving, as though he was fighting against some invisible barrier to draw in air, the barely repressed raw wildness in his face exciting her more than she would have thought possible. The danger in him was an aphrodisiac, yet his touch as he ran a thumb down her cheek was so gentle, tender, a sharp contrast to the passion.
Fighting the urge to take her right here, right now, he battled to contain the madness that was consuming him. Those little throaty sounds coming from her parted lips, and the wanton glow in her green eyes, were sense-and self-sapping.
This was a kind of madness he had never experienced before.
Still kissing, he reached for the trousers that lay in a heap on the floor beside the sofa, pausing only to swear when his fingers did not immediately locate the foil package in the pocket, and grunting when he did.
She’d have begged him to take her, but her vocal cords wouldn’t work; she was just a mass of craving, screaming nerve endings. But it was OK; she didn’t need to beg or plead.
There was no pain, just a blissful sense of relief as her body expanded and adapted to accommodate him.
He sank into her, slow and careful, feeling the pulsing of her tight body around him, aware that this was all new to her. He always satisfied his lovers—it was matter of pride for him, and he gained pleasure from their enjoyment—but this was different.
This wanting to make it good for her was more... The emotion that he had excised with surgical precision from the sex act was back...not that this complication mattered to him in the slightest at that moment. All that mattered was Tilda, her heat, the rightness of being inside her.
Her head tucked into his shoulder, where he breathed words of encouragement, and other words which she couldn’t translate but still excited her. Clutching his sweat-slicked back, she met his thrusts, sinking into herself with him until nothing existed as the pressure built inside her.
She felt aware of every individual nerve ending, floating feet above the ground at the same time, then as her muscles clenched around him she found herself striving for something just out of her reach, encouraged by the throaty, raw and often indecent coaxing in her ear.
Then she was falling, flickering lights behind her eyelids as nerve endings fired, the heat bathing every contracting muscle in her body as she felt him thrust into her one last time before he collapsed on top of her.
She enjoyed his weight for a few moments before he rolled off her. Wedged in the narrow space between him and the back of the sofa, she turned onto her side and curled against his body.
After a moment he started to stroke her hair. She sighed and kissed the damp skin of his chest. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked when their breathing patterns had slowed.
Ezio was avoiding thinking; if ever there was a moment for living in the moment, this was it.
‘I am thinking that we should do that properly in a bed.’
‘I think I like improper,’ she said, her cheeks heating at her own audacity.
‘Theos, I was definitely getting that impression too,yineka mou. Let us go and explore the improper possibilities a bed offers.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘RELAX,HE’LLBEFINE,’ Ezio said, placing his hand on the small of Tilda’s back. He had adapted his stride to her heels and the disparity between their inside leg measurements as they walked towards the car. ‘And don’t look back.’
She flashed him a look. The last time he had said ‘relax’ had been earlier that morning, when he had revealed that they were having lunch in Athens at a world-renowned restaurant as the guest of Saul and his wife.
He had chosen his moment pretty well. Tilda had been quite mellow, having woken up to a naked man who, it turned out,wasthe sex god the tabloids called him, looking as though he wanted to eat her.