‘Why do I get the feeling this is a first for you?’
‘Everyone is a learner at some stage...’ she framed jerkily.
Gaetano yanked down his zip for himself and then tossed her back flat on the bed again while he divested himself of his trousers and his boxers. ‘If you touched me now, it would all be over far too fast,’ he told her thickly. ‘That’s why I’m going to do most of the touching and you will lie back and let me do the work.’
‘If you think of it as work, I don’t think you should bother.’
‘Nothing would stop me now. I can hardly wait to be inside you.’ Gaetano leant over her, his urgent erection pushing against her hip. ‘Having you in my bed has been my fantasy for weeks.’
‘Fantasy never lives up to reality,’ Poppy said nervously. ‘I don’t want to be a fantasy.’
‘Sorry, it’s my fantasy,’ Gaetano traded, stroking a wondering hand down over the slender curve of her hip to the hot, damp secret at the heart of her.
Her hips jerked and her eyes shut as he traced between her thighs. Her breath snarled in her throat. She was so sensitised that she shuddered when he circled her clitoris with his fingertip. Her whole body was climbing of its own volition into a tight, tense spiral of growing need. Even the brush of a finger against her tight entrance was almost too much to bear. Her hips pushed against the mattress, her heart thumping like thunder inside her chest as he shimmied down the bed, fingertips delicately caressing her inner thighs as he pushed her legs back, opening her.
‘No, you can’t do that!’ she gasped in consternation.
‘Stai zitto...’ he told her softly. ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do in bed.’
The flick of his tongue across torturously tender nerve endings deprived her of voice and then of thought. Her head shifted back and forth on the pillows, the thrum of hunger building up through her body to a siren’s scream of need. She gasped, she cried his name, she moaned, she lost control so completely and utterly that when the explosive release of orgasm claimed her it took her by storm. And the world stopped turning for long minutes, her body still quaking with wondrous aftershocks while Gaetano looked down at her with satisfaction.
As Gaetano tilted her back she felt the smooth steel push of him against her still-throbbing core. The tight knot low in her pelvis made its presence felt again, the hollow ache of hunger stirring afresh. He slid against her, easing into her by degrees, straining her delicate sheath.
‘You’re so tight,’ he groaned, pulling back again and then angling his hips for another, more forceful entrance.
The sharp stinging pain made Poppy flinch for a millisecond and then her body was pushing on past that fleeting discomfort to linger on the satisfying stretch and fullness of his invasion. A little moan broke low in her throat and she moved her hips to luxuriate in the throbbing hardness of his bold masculinity.
Gaetano swore in Italian. ‘You feel like heaven,’ he growled in her ear. ‘Am I hurting you now?’
‘Oh, no,’ she told him truthfully.
And then he moved again, withdrawing and spearing deep enough to wring a cry of startled enjoyment from her. From that moment on her eagerness climbed in tune with Gaetano’s every measured thrust. Her heart raced, her legs clamping round his lean hips as she lifted to him, matching his driving rhythm while the electrifying excitement continued to build. And when she reached that peak for the second time she plunged over it in a fevered delirium of intense quivering release and lay adrift in pleasure.
‘That was amazing,’ Gaetano muttered thickly, rolling over onto his back while curving an arm round her trembling body. ‘You were amazing, bella mia.’
Poppy felt totally exhausted and she was content to lie there in the circle of his arms and marvel at the sublime sense of peace she was experiencing. Belatedly, she acknowledged that her throat and head had now become seriously sore. She hoped that Gaetano wouldn’t catch her cold and felt guilty for not warning him.
In fact she was just about to mention her affliction when Gaetano sat up to say quietly, ‘Possibly part of the reason it felt so amazing was that it was the very first time I’ve had sex bareback.’
‘Bareback?’ she queried.
‘I didn’t use protection. I had a health check a couple of weeks ago to ensure that I’m clean and you’re guarded against pregnancy,’ he reminded her. ‘I couldn’t resist the temptation to try it.’
Poppy made no comment because she knew that he would be ultra-careful with her in the protection stakes because to be careless and risk a pregnancy would come at too high a price for either of them.