The knot on her wrap was loosened and the whole thing fell to the floor in a whisper of silk. She tugged the nightgown over her head and dropped that too. Such a pretty thing to discard but the heat in Leo’s gaze as it slid over her body was compensation enough.
She caught up her hair in a clip, then took Leo’s hand and led him beneath the water. She picked up soap and a sponge and worked up a lather. She swept it across his arms and shoulders, over that broad chest, the flat abdomen.
She handed him a bottle of shampoo and waited while he washed his hair and sluiced the suds away and tried to control her breathing as she watched him, a need clawing along her spine and pooling as molten heat between her thighs.
She stepped behind him, to soap his muscled back, the deep cleft between his buttocks, the vulnerable skin of his inner thighs.
She anointed his feet with the sponge, his shins, the backs of his knees.
He turned, his erection jutting upwards. She bathed him there too, her hand massaging through the mat of hair surrounding it, before sliding along the shaft. She pressed her thumb in a circle around the tip, revelling in his fractured breath. She’d banished the defeat and weariness there had been in his eyes when he’d arrived at her door. There was only hunger and heat in their hooded depths now.
It wasn’t meant to feel this way, it was just supposed to be physical. A way to ease the tension riding him. Not something that shook his heart.
Leo trembled with every touch of her fingers. They seemed so sure, so steady.
He felt as steady as a skiff tossed on a raging ocean.
Her fingers squeezed around him and he moaned. It echoed off the tiled walls and came back at him through the steam. She held him firm and he wanted it to last for ever.
As she worked him she pressed her mouth to his chest, grazed a nipple with sharp white teeth. He groaned again and wrapped his fingers in her hair and tugged to tip her face up to his, to kiss her, trying to claw back some control because he was fast losing what little he had.
Throughout all that had happened today, over and over he’d thought of this. Being with her again. He was usually a generous lover but right now there was just a raw, selfish longing to see passion kindled in her brown eyes and watch them melt to rich, dark chocolate. To feel those supple legs clamped about his waist, as her body rode his. Demanding pleasure from him and sending him into wild oblivion.
For tonight—and he knew it had to end tonight—to forget everything and just be with her.
With one step he’d pinned her against the tiled wall. Then he lifted her, thrust into her. Sank to the hilt so there was nothing but heat and lust between them.
Her gentle lover was gone.
There was no tenderness, no care, but Violetta didn’t want it.
She didn’t want the urbane prince, she wanted the man, stripped of his veneer of royal restraint and at his most elemental.
He’d come to her, needing her. She dismissed any notion it was because she was conveniently there. That wasn’t the look in his eyes when she’d opened the door to him.
She’d drawn him in. She’d led him here, to this moment, to the lash of passion and hunger and a flaying need to prove they were alive and whole. After all they’d both seen that day, the devastation, the terrible loss, they needed to feelalive.
The water sluiced away the suds and the dirt, washing them both clean. Their hands on each other, their bodies joined, making them new. Blurring the edges of the pain, the images of suffering they’d witnessed.
Easing the endless pain of those deeper hurts and betrayals by those who should have loved them and hadn’t.
In this moment they’d become each other’s soul mate. It was them against the world.
Violetta’s heart flowered opened, the last of her defences fell, and she let him in. Gave him everything, holding nothing of herself back.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Oh, God, Leo, I love you.’
She came around him on a cry.
Still buried deep inside her, he stepped from the shower, grabbing towels to fling beneath them as he laid her on the tiled floor.
Before her eyes the prince was unravelling and the man he tried so hard to hide emerged. Almost savage and never more beautiful than now, when she was his sole and absolute focus. On his knees between her thighs, his hands clamped about her hips, he pounded into her. The corded muscles of his neck grew tighter and tighter, his gasping breaths more frantic.
Then on a roar of completion, he flung back his head and spilled himself inside her.
Violetta lay there, her heart pounding, briefly unable to summon any strength to move.
On his knees still, breathing hard, Leo shoved an unsteady hand through his wet hair. Rivulets of water ran down his heaving chest and abdomen and disappeared into the crisp dark hair around his sex.