Dervla’s lids drifted closed as he pressed his lips to the hollow at the base of her throat and then made his way by means of a series of erotic kisses up to her mouth.
She gave a startled little cry as he suddenly swung her up into his arms. ‘What are you doing?’
He strode towards the door and kicked it open. ‘I don’t want the first time to be on the kitchen table.’
‘I don’t mind where it is so long as it happens.’ Did I just say that?
CHAPTER NINE
BREATHING hard, but not, it would seem, from the exertion of running up two flights of stairs carrying her—Gianfranco had taken them two at a time and not shown any signs of fatigue—he kicked open the door to this huge bedroom dominated by a large four-poster.
Probably the rest of the furnishings were just as impressive but Dervla was not actually interested in the décor. Her entire attention was focused on the man who laid her down carefully in the middle of the vast bed, before switching on a lamp.
He was still breathing hard as, kneeling on the bed, he tugged his shirt from his trousers and fought his way out of it.
Dervla’s gasp was audible. Desire clutched low in her belly as she stared at him in silent awe.
He was hard and sleek, his golden streamlined body carrying not an ounce of flesh to blur the perfection of the muscle definition in his chest and ridged, hair-roughened stomach.
She wanted to touch him, feel his bare skin against her own; she wanted to taste him, and feel his hands on her body. She wasn’t aware that she had expressed her growing desperation to fulfil these ambitions until he slipped the buckle on his belt and promised in a throaty drawl, ‘You will, cara, you will …’ His eyes didn’t leave her face for a second as he slid his trousers down over his narrow hips and kicked them away. He stood there for a moment wearing just a pair of boxers that did little to disguise the strength of his arousal.
Propped up on one elbow, he arranged his long lean length alongside her. He trailed a line of kisses down the curve of her jaw as he reached for the hem of her top.
Dervla gave a sensuous little wriggle to assist him as he lifted it over her head and flung it across the room.
Feeling the air on her overheated skin and enjoying the sensation, she laid her hands flat on his belly and felt the convulsive contraction of muscles underneath his silky, hair-roughened skin.
‘You have bruises,’ she whispered, her eyes darkening as she traced the uneven outline of one of the livid areas of discolouration along the crest of his right hipbone. ‘It must have been agony!’ she accused, thinking of how he had maintained his silent vigil.
‘No,’ he said, taking her hand in his and moving it lower. ‘This was agony,’ he contradicted thickly. ‘This is agony,’ he rasped throatily as he pulsed hard and hot against the constraints of her hand.
He didn’t just fill her hand but her mind and soul, stretching her emotional capacity to the limit and onto a new, mind-expanding level.
‘You’re the only medicine I needed, or wanted. I knew that I would find the comfort I needed in your body.’
There was dark colour scoring his jutting cheekbones as he held himself above her, staring with hot, hungry eyes at the rapid rise and fall of her straining breasts inside their lacy covering.
‘Virginal white,’ he murmured, his smile inviting her to share the joke as he reached for the front-fastening clasp.
Some joke!
The unintentional reminder made Dervla tense, but then his hands were cupping her bare breasts, weighing them in his big hands. The incredible sensation left little room in her pleasure-soaked brain for misgivings.
Her eyes drifted closed as she listened to his accented voice, telling her she was perfect and sounding flatteringly shaken about the discovery.
Any residual qualms totally vaporised when his thumb began to tease first one straining peak and then the other into burning life before he applied his lips and tongue to the same task.
Convulsed with pleasure, her entire body responding to his lightest touch and caress, she was barely aware of his stripping away first her jeans and then her lacy-edged pants until she felt his fingers slide into the bright curls at the apex of her legs, searching for the slick, hot centre of her.
Dervla shuddered with a nameless need as he pressed soft kisses to her closed eyelids and touched the tight, throbbing, sensitised flesh at her centre. The shockingly intimate invasion drew a keening cry of startled pleasure from her tight, aching throat. His caresses took her to the brink of something outside her experience but he pulled back quite literally before she crested the peak.
‘Oh, God, I’m …’
‘You’re perfect; we’re perfect,’ he told her before he slid down her body, kissing his way down the gentle curve of her stomach. ‘This,’ he added, kneeling between her parted thighs, ‘will be perfect too.’
Dervla sighed as she stared greedily at his magnificent glistening naked body. She didn’t doubt for a moment his ability to deliver perfect in many forms. It was only her doubts concerning her ability to fulfil his apparently pretty high expectations of her that brought a faint frown to her damp brow.
‘I have to have you … Dervla, you are driving me out of my mind.’
She responded by looping her arms around his neck, arching her back and pressing her bare breasts provocatively to his chest.
She was conscious of his breath hot on her neck as he pushed his way past the swollen lips of her resisting flesh and into her.
Her body arched under him and a sigh of amazement was wrenched from the very depths of her being.
‘Per amor di Dio!’
Barely even conscious of his stricken exclamation, Dervla wrapped her legs around his hips and clung onto his sweat-slick shoulders. At some level she did register the tremors that shook his big body as he held himself in check, but there were so many other incredible things happening that mostly she just registered how unbelievable it felt to have him hard and thick inside her.
‘This is incredible, you’re … oh, my—!’ she gasped as he sank a little deeper.
She cried his name over and over like a litany as he filled an emptiness she hadn’t known existed inside her, sinking deeper into her silken tightness, coaxing her towards the moment of total fulfilment, his own body shaking with the effort his restraint cost.
Then in the final moments as she hovered on the brink he ditched that restraint and with a cry plunged into her until they both reached the splintering climax simultaneously.
As he shuddered into her in the final convulsions of release she gave herself to him without reserve.
‘Oh, Gianfranco!’ she gasped, taking his face between her hands and pressing a fervent kiss to his lips. ‘You have no idea how glad I am I stayed. You are totally perfect.’ He actually looked like a man who had just been hit by a thunderbolt, but what
