“On the contrary, I’m turned on by the fact you’re as excited as I am. Let me help.” He pushed to sit up and she nervously edged closer. With no clumsiness whatsoever, he opened her skirt and brushed it off her hips.
He brought her twitching hands to his shoulders and pressed one palm to his neck so she could feel the rapid slam of his pulse. “I’m so aroused, I can hardly breathe.”
His skin was faintly damp with perspiration, his nostrils flared and tense.
Yet he was in complete control. She stroked her fingers through his hair, as though she’d been given the gift of petting a tiger. The strength and power in him awed her and the flare of excitement in his eyes excited her. It was reassuring to know he was reacting so strongly. Heady. He began to roll her leggings down and she pushed her panties off with them, kicking them away as she stood before him, still nervous, but driven by that urgency again.
A primordial noise rumbled in his chest as he looked at the thatch of blond over her mound. His splayed hands grasped her hips and drew big circles to her butt cheeks and the backs of her thighs, nudging her closer to the edge of the bed between his open thighs until her knees and shins rested against the side of the mattress. His hands lingered to caress in slow circles that were driving her mad while he blew softly on her curls.
A helpless noise left her and she dug her fingernails into his shoulders. Her inner muscles clenched while the rest of her went taut.
“Shy?” He dragged his gaze upward as if it took supreme effort. “Or something more?”
“Shy,” she managed in a paper-thin voice. “I’ve never—No one—”
He set a light kiss against her mound and she forgot how words worked. Every single nerve ending throughout her body pulsated.
He was a ridiculously patient man, teasing her with another small kiss into the crease where her thigh met her pelvis, then the other side. When his tongue traced a barely-there caress along the seam of her folds, skating a not-quite-fulfilling touch across the bud swollen with yearning, she moaned his name. Her fingers moved mindlessly in his hair.
He groaned and heat enveloped her flesh. She had thought what they’d done on the sofa was a type of paradise she could never again live without, but this. This was the sort of rapture that would induce her to do nearly anything to keep experiencing it.
He proved it, too. Just as the last vestiges of control were abandoning her, when she was so aroused she was relying on the hard hands under her butt to keep her upright while she pushed her hips into his lascivious kiss, he dropped his head back to look at her from beneath heavy eyelids.
An unconscious noise of loss throbbed in her throat.
He smiled, wicked and dark, then twisted to throw pillows into a pile against the headboard. He dragged himself to sit against them and met her gaze as he rocked to get his briefs down, revealing his thick erection. He took himself in hand, squeezed.
“You’re going to decide how much you can take.” He sounded as primal as she felt. He unwrapped a condom and rolled it on. “I can still feel heat. Pressure. Let me feel how hot and tight you are.”
He invited her to straddle his thighs. There was no modesty as she splayed her knees on either side of his hips, but given what he’d done to her already, inhibitions were moot. He held himself steady for her to position herself and she began accepting him into her. It was deliberate and overwhelming, both physically and emotionally, but she had never wanted anything so much in her life.
The pinch of his broad shape entering her was sharp enough to startle her. She steadied herself by gripping the headboard.
“Take your time.” His voice was gruff, his skin pulled taut across his cheekbones. He watched her with such intensity, she ought to have caught fire.
She was on fire. The pressure between her legs burned, but he shifted his touch and caressed her, using her own moisture to lubricate his penetration, enticing her to chase that capricious flutter that promised such exquisite pleasure.
He was saying things in Sicilian. Dirty things, maybe, but his tone was filled with praise and encouragement. Earthy pleasure. He didn’t seem to care that she was being tentative. He groaned in suffering, but the fingers that dug into her hips didn’t force her to take any more of him than she was ready for.
His intrusion hurt, but the internal stretch seemed to amplify her growing arousal. He kept caressing her, soothing her taut flesh with gentle fingers where they joined, then heightening her desire with circling touches across the straining button he’d anointed so mercilessly with his tongue.
She could hear herself making noises that bordered on distress as she hovered in the space between acute pain and profound pleasure. Such exquisite torture. How did anyone stand it?
“Give me your nipple,” he coaxed in a voice that resonated from deep in his chest.
She did, leaning her breast closer to his mouth. The movement caused him to shift inside her, alarming her with the stinging sensation. She gasped, but as he suckled, she grew wetter and found herself sinking and lifting, seeking that hot friction. She was afraid to take all of him, but oh, it felt lovely to have the tip of him moving inside her.
This was the mysterious primeval knowledge she’d sought. This was the ethereal world she had heard existed between the poetic descriptions of sensual magnificence and the corporeal reality of sex. She had never understood how another’s touch could be more gratifying than her own, but his hand and mouth and penetration became her entire world.
This man, with his head dropping back to watch her, somehow heightened everything about this experience into something exalted. His scent permeated the air she breathed and his lips tasted of her own essence. She sank all the way down, taking him fully inside her, and dazzlement turned his eyes silver. She could feel their sweat mingling, and their noises of pleasure were a perfect harmony.
She had never felt so connected to anyone. As they moved like this, they were essentially one being, experiencing together something that could not have happened apart. Not with anyone else, ever, anywhere. Only them. Here. Now. Like this.
As she rode up and down every last inch of him, her arousal contracted to a tight point inside her. She stilled, fighting to hold back from the paradise she longed for, hovering on the brink of losing control.
“Giovanni,” she breathed. “I’m—”
“Do it,” he growled.
She moved with unfettered greed, thrilling at the feel of him buried deep inside her, and the euphoria of climax crept up on her. In a mindless need to have him with her, she scraped her thumb across his nipple and sucked his earlobe while her orgasm engulfed her, flooding her with shuddering ecstasy.
He locked his hands on her hips and his whole body clenched right before he released a ragged cry of gratification.
CHAPTER THREE
“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” FREJA murmured next to him, pulling Giovanni from his postcoital doze.