Always able to judge accurately when his weight would turn from necessity to burden, he rose off her, swept her enervated mass over his rock-solid one, dragging a crisp sheet over their cooling bodies.
She wanted to cling to this moment, to savor the descent with him...but everything slipped away...
* * *
Her mind a silent, empty scape, she tried to open lids that felt glued together. How strange. There’d never been peace after Richard...
Richard!
Her lids tore open, almost literally, and there he was. Illuminated by the dim daylight seeping in from the window of what she now realized was a hangar-size bedroom. He was propped up on one elbow beside her, looking down at her, his gaze one of supreme male triumph as he coated the body he’d savagely pleasured in languid caresses.
She was in his bed. She’d begged him to take her—repeatedly. If she could find her voice, she’d do it again right now.
“I didn’t intend to rush your pleasure the first...or subsequent times. I wanted to keep you hovering on the edge of orgasm so long, when I finally gave it to you, I knocked you out on the first try.”
“You did knock me out every single time,” she croaked.
“No. Knocked out as in nothing could wake you up for hours afterward. I did that the last time only.” He pinched and rolled one delightfully sore nipple, glided his hair-roughened leg between hers and pressed his knee to the soaked junction of her legs, dragging a whimper from her depth. “But no harm done. It’s time to savor driving you crazy.”
Her body clamored for him harder than ever. This addiction hadn’t subsided; it had gotten worse.
She caressed his face, his shoulders, his chest, reveling in the longed-for delight of feeling him this way. “Your efforts would be in vain. I’m already crazy for you.”
“I know. But I want you desperate.”
Before she could protest, his tongue thrust inside her mouth, claiming, conquering. His hands, lips and teeth sought all her secrets, sparked her ever-simmering insanities until he had her writhing, nothing left inside her but the need for him to finish her, annihilate her, leave nothing of her.
Clawing at him, crushing herself against him, she tried to drag him inside her. “Just take me again, Richard.”
He held her filling eyes, as if gauging if she was truly at his required level of desperation. Seemingly satisfied, from the grim twist of his lips and the flare of his nostrils, he rose above her, leveling her beneath him.
Locking her arms above her head, his knees spreading her legs wide-open, he was where she needed him most, penetrating her in one forceful thrust.
This time the expansion of her already swollen and sore tissues around his massive erection sharpened into pleasure so fierce, it was almost unbearable. Darkness danced at the periphery of her vision. She gasped, thrashed, voiceless, breathless. His face clenched with something like agony as she clung to him as she would a raft in a tempestuous sea.
She sobbed into his lips. “I wanted this every minute...”
“Yes. Every. Single. Minute.” His growls filled her lungs even as he refilled her, the head of his shaft sliding against all her internal triggers, setting off a string of discharges that buried her under layers of sensations. It all felt maddeningly familiar, yet totally new.
Then everything compacted into one unendurable moment before detonating outward. She shattered.
Her flesh pulsed around his so forcefully she couldn’t breathe for the first dozen excruciating clenches. He rumbled for her to come all over him, to scream her pleasure at the top of her lungs. His encouragement snapped something inside her, flooded air into her. And she screamed. And screamed and screamed as he pumped her to the last twitches of fulfillment.
Then he rose above her, supernatural in beauty, his muscles bulging, his eyes tempestuous. He threw his head back, roared her name as every muscle in his body locked and surrendered to his own explosive orgasm.
Instead of fainting, she remained fully aware this time throughout the stages of the most blissful aftermath she’d ever experienced with him.
Suddenly he spoke. “I wasn’t satisfied with how things ended with you in the past. It felt...incomplete. And I must have everything wrapped up to my satisfaction.”
For long moments she couldn’t breathe, waiting for a qualification to tell her she’d jumped to the worst conclusions of his words.
He only validated her suspicion. “I got you here to close your case. If I may say so, I reached a spectacular conclusion.”
Feeling as if he’d dumped her into freezing water, she fought to rise to the surface and from his arms.
Without one more word or glance she dragged the sheet off his body, wrapped herself in it and teetered out of the bedroom, looking for the clothes she hadn’t been able to wait for him to tear off her body earlier.
She felt him following her, heading to the open-plan kitchen. Her numbness deepened.
When she was dressed, and as neat as she could get herself after he’d ravaged her, she turned to him.
He raised a mug. “Coffee? Or will you storm out now?”
“You have every right to do this.” Her voice was thick and raw as it always had been when he’d made her scream her heart out in repeated ecstasy. It intensified her shame. “I deserve whatever you say or do. After all you’ve done to me, I disregarded all the injuries you caused me and fell into your arms again.”
“And even now, you’d fall there again if I let you. But I’m no longer interested. I’m done.”
Gritting her teeth against the pain digging its talons inside her, she said, “Then, I can look forward to never seeing you again for real this time. And no matter what you’d like to tell yourself you can get me to do, I’m beyond done.”
“Yes, you are. That’s the other thing I got you here to do. To tell you that.”
She frowned. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“You’re done here. You will tell your new partners you’ve changed your mind about the partnership. You will terminate your lease, pay whatever early termination penalty your contract states, then pack your bags and leave this city, preferably the States. And this time, you will never return.”
Four
In her first twenty-four years, Isabella had suffered so many brutal blows, had endured and survived them all, she’d believed nothing would shake her or knock her down again.
Then Richard had happened to her. Every second with him, and because of him, had been a succession of earthquakes and knockouts. After he’d exited her life, it had been a constant struggle not to fall facedown and stay there. But it hadn’t been an option to give up. She’d had no choice but to forge on. But she’d thought even if she saw him again, whatever madness he’d induced in her, her own ability to experience towering passions, had been expended.
Then he’d reappeared and just by dangling himself in front of her, he’d made her relinquish all sanity and beg for his destruction.
Now there he stood, barefoot, in only pants, leaning indolently on the counter of his futuristic kitchen, looking like the god of malice that he was. He sipped painfully aromatic coffee in utmost serenity, clearly savoring its taste and her upheaval.
But what else did she think would happen after she’d committed that act of madness? Hadn’t she already known she’d regret it? Or had she been that pathetic she’d hoped it wouldn’t end horribly? That she’d have the ecstasy she’d hankered for without the agony that she’d learned would come with it? Had she even thought of the consequences as she’d grabbed for the appeasement only he could provide?