Taking this slowhadbeen the best way. Yet now his capacity for delay was gone. Being with Ida each time she came had only made his own need more desperate.
Cesare nudged her knees wide. Her smile disappeared but she lifted her arms, inviting him down to her, and he couldn’t stifle the siren’s call any longer.
Her body was soft and accommodating, fragrant and welcoming, and he fitted between her hips as if they were made for each other.
He lifted himself on his elbows, not wanting to squash her, but that left his chest just far enough from hers that her peaked nipples teased him with each breath.
Cesare gritted his jaw, feeling the welded-tight pressure in his groin and thighs, the building heat, and knew he wouldn’t last.
Her eyes really were the most amazing colour. They beckoned him to Paradise.
Slipping his palm under her thigh, he raised it so her leg was bent, his aim to make it easier for her to take him. She lifted her other leg and even that slide of silky skin felt far, far too good.
Cesare pushed home.
It was all he’d anticipated and more. Much more. Ida fitted him like a velvet glove, so close he had to shut his eyes and concentrate on not losing himself on the first thrust.
But there was more. A snag. An unexpected sensation that made him try to pause, but it was too late. Even as he registered the sensation it was gone.
He opened his eyes and looked down to find Ida wincing, her eyes screwed tight and...was that perspiration on her brow?
His brain conjured an unthinkable possibility.
Was it possible she’d been innocent as in totally inexperienced?
He was still striving to process that when green eyes met his. They looked foggy. With pain?
He was withdrawing, his mind whirling, when she grabbed his shoulders and pulled. As if she had the strength to stop him going.
No, it was the determined set of her jaw and the way she hitched first one leg higher around his waist, then the other, that stopped him.
‘Don’t go now.’ Her voice had an unfamiliar raspy edge. ‘You promised me a wedding night and I want it all.’
Cesare stared into her flushed face, wondering how badly he’d hurt her. Was she saying that because she felt she owed him or because she really wanted this?
‘Don’t make me plead, Cesare.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
He lifted his hand to her cheek, watched her turn and press a kiss to his palm and felt the tight band around his chest ease. He trailed unsteady fingers to her berry-tipped breast and felt it peak as her pupils dilated and her flush deepened.
Slowly Cesare leaned forward, taking her mouth as his body took hers, gently but steadily, aiming to stir her senses as surely as she stirred his.
But his own arousal was too acute for patience. He slipped his hand between them, teasing her with his fingers while he drove into her with all the control he could muster.
Urgent hands grabbed his shoulders then his skull, and to his relief soon he heard the muffled sound of her ecstasy building, felt her little shudders. If he could just last a little longer...
Cesare moved faster, driven by his own rhythm of need, growing more urgent with each thrust. Then he was swallowing her screams of completion and that shot him over the edge, spilling himself in a desperate, pulsating climax that blanked his mind and undid his body in a cataclysm of pleasure.
Rapture was the word that came to his befuddled brain much later as they lay together, he on his back with his arms around her, she with her head buried in his neck. He’d always enjoyed sex but that had reached an entirely new level.
Now and then, another little tremor ran through him, and he’d feel her quiver around him in response. Even that felt too acute, too profound.
Four years of abstinence, he told himself when his head finally cleared. That was the explanation. Four years without a woman in his bed. That was why this seemed phenomenal.
In that time his sole focus had been turning the company around from the disasters after his father took over as CEO when Cesare’s grandfather died. That and triumphing over Calogero.
Plus, whether from the old-fashioned values instilled by his grandfather, or from stubborn pride, Cesare hadn’t wanted to break his vow of fidelity, even to a wife he didn’t respect.