When she roused herself from delirium he was leaning above her and her heart fisted. She adored the way his damp hair hung around his face, making him look wicked. A perfect picture of debauchery.
He licked his lips and let rip a feral growl that seemed to come from the depths of his chest. ‘I’m going to take you, Luciana. Fill you up. Pour myself into you. But I’ll be damned if I’ll do it on a beach. I want you in my bed.’
He lifted her up effortlessly and she wrapped her legs around his waist as he strode up the deck into his bedroom, kissing her all the while, never leaving her mouth even when they tumbled onto the bed, hands everywhere as they desperately tried to touch as much of each other as they could reach.
She tore her lips from his. ‘Thane, please. Don’t make me wait.’
Pushing his arms beneath her shoulders, he cupped her head in his hands, pinning her completely as he trapped her in his dark hypnotic gaze. ‘You’re mine, Luciana. You’ve always been mine.’
And then he pushed inside her in one long, deliciously hard thrust.
The stupendous clash of their cries filled the air, caromed off the walls.
Lord, the relief. The screaming, delirious relief and joy and rightness. The inordinate power they created was so all-consuming she slipped into that boneless delirious state once more.
Every one of her senses was as sharp as a pin and yet the moment was dreamlike. Even the erratic rhythm of his breathing seemed in perfect tandem to the thrash of her own heart.
Thane crushed her to him, cradling her, still embedded deep, his strong, muscular body shaking, his face buried in her neck. ‘Dios, Luciana. You feel so snug. So incredible…’
As if being inside her, reuniting their exquisite connection, had doused some of the urgency, deeper emotion now flooded the space between them, and Thane lifted his head and tenderly brushed her damp hair from her face, kissed her cheeks, her nose, her brow. So lovingly, so affectionately, that her heart splintered.
Too much, Luce, this is all too much. Back off or you won’t survive this. Him.
No. She couldn’t let go. Not yet.
His touch sculpted her behind, hooked around her thigh and urged it to curl over his hip as his pelvis locked with hers.
‘That’s it, angel, now let me watch you.’
He ground against her, watching, as if taking in every nuance of her feverish response, and when he hit her sweet spot she shivered and cried out, gripping his hair. He exploited it, rolling his hips, pushing his iron-hard length deep inside her, thrusting over and over until she was mindless, begging, delirious beneath him.
‘Thane…’
Bliss opened up before her, fathoms deep, a chasm that would take her—body and soul. For one shimmering, breathless moment she teetered on the brink…and then she was falling, falling, tumbling, crashing as she hurtled towards ecstasy.
Thane picked up the pace, slamming into her, chasing his own nirvana, until he stiffened with a guttural cry of release, pouring himself inside her, racked with convulsions that left him weak and heavy in her arms. Trembling with the aftershocks like tiny flashes of lightning as the storm dissipated. And she loved it. Revelled in his weight, in his ragged breath whispering over the sensitive skin beneath her ear, his pounding heart against hers.
When lucidity fully returned she realised silent tears were tracking down the sides of her face. She saw again the Rhine Falls of Zurich—a stoic, bittersweet witness to her fragile joy. Because it didn’t matter how tightly Thane wrapped her in his arms, as if she was all he’d ever wanted. As if she truly were his angel and they basked in the heavens. Because come the dawn all hell would break loose.
* * *
Luciana wrapped herself in a robe––the black silk her only armour and sat at the base of the bed, leaning against the carved footboard, watching the morning sun dapple over the hard contours of the man who lay sleeping, naked, on his stomach.
He was a study in masculine perfection. So beautiful. His face reminded her with exquisite poignancy of Natanael. And for the first time she didn’t look at him and feel fear or trepidation or anger or dismay. She looked at him with one crystal-clear thought. Or rather she allowed herself to.
This was the man who had given her the son she loved so much. This was the man who’d helped to create a miracle of joy and wonder and beauty.
This man was the father of her child. The very man she’d fallen in love with so long ago. And she could not, would not keep their son from that man a moment longer. No more than she could keep Thane from Natanael.