could feel little quivers emanating from her.
He inched himself around so her abdomen was level with his mouth. He placed his lips to it then looked up at her.
She was gazing down at him, her eyes apprehensive and confused but her colour raised.
‘You are not a woman pretending to be a man, you are a woman. You have a spine of steel and a mouth tender enough to heal a wound with a kiss.’
He kissed into the dip of her side and trailed his tongue to her hip and zagged it slowly across to her pretty blonde mound.
Scenting her excitement, he pressed his nose into the fine hair and inhaled.
‘You have the scent of a woman, not a man.’ He flicked his tongue out and encircled her swollen nub.
A tiny moan came from her throat.
‘You have the silkiest skin of any woman.’
Now her eyes were dark and hooded.
‘Look in the mirror,’ he whispered, ‘and tell me what you see.’
She stared at herself.
‘I see...’ Her words were heavy, laboured.
‘Do you see the woman with the power to be whoever she wants to be? Do you see the woman who can embrace the passionate core beating inside her? Because that’s the woman I see when I look at you, Elena.’
Her hands reached down to take his head in her grasp, her fingers digging into his scalp.
Her desire, unspoken, was given as an invitation.
Burying his face in her heat and sliding a hand up her back to steady her, Gabriele gently used his tongue to bring her to the heights he knew gave her so much pleasure.
He doubted he would ever tire of watching her orgasm.
That first time had been special. Discovering her virginity in such a manner had been as much a shock to him as the feel of him inside her had shocked Elena. Watching that shock slowly turn into bliss and then wonderment, knowing it was his arms she was coming undone in... It had been more than special. He’d thought nothing would ever be able to match it.
Instead, his amazement had grown.
Though he knew his thoughts would only confirm Elena’s opinion that all men were pigs, he couldn’t help the delight it gave knowing only he had discovered Elena’s hidden passion. Every response was his and his alone. And every time she touched him, it thrilled his selfish ego to know he was the only man she’d touched in this way. The only man she’d ever touched.
Her desire for him was not something she could hide—he had learned to read his wife very well. Her eyes responded in an honest way she still wouldn’t allow her body to fully do.
He hoped the day would come when she seduced him. When she would press her lips to his and breathe into him.
If she would only let go, set all her inhibitions and doubts about him free and embrace with everything she had what could be explosive.
She had no reason to trust him. He knew that.
By the time he earned it, their marriage would be over. One way or another.
But then her fingers dug even harder into him and her thighs trembled and his thoughts vanished, his concentration solely on her and her pleasure.
Only when he felt her go limp did he look back at her, smiling to see the dazed expression now echoing back at him.
Taking a firm hold of her hips, he got to his feet and lifted her into the air, a lock of her white-blonde hair falling into his face.
In three strides he carried her to the bed and laid her down.
She parted her legs for him and with one thrust he was inside her.
Until that moment he hadn’t realised how deep his own ache had been.
It was an ache he carried with him on an almost permanent basis.
IF ELENA’S NERVES got any tighter she would go springing across Piazza del Duomo.
Gabriele, who had earlier massaged her shoulders in an effort to relieve her tension, rubbed her wrist with his thumb.
‘I’m sure your family will behave themselves,’ he said. In the five-minute walk to the hotel they were throwing the party at, he’d made a variety of assurances at least seven times.
‘It’s not their behaviour that concerns me.’ She was only half lying. Over one hundred people would be attending their ‘celebration’. Every single one of them knew of the animosity between her father and her husband.
The media furore had died down in the past week, but today talk of their wedding celebration was everywhere. Rumours had circulated of paparazzi offering thousands of euros for an invitation. All anyone seemed to care about was who would hit who first—her husband or her father...?
Since when had she started thinking of Gabriele as her husband?
There was no time to ponder this strange turn of events as they’d arrived at the hotel.
A media scrum greeted them but the hotel had beefed up its security and cordoned the media away from the hotel steps.
Clinging tightly to his hand, she climbed the stairs under a hail of flashing bulbs and shouted questions.
Hotel staff greeted them in the foyer, welcoming them with glasses of champagne. Gabriele had booked the whole hotel, one of the oldest and most prestigious in Florence, for the evening, bedrooms and all.
Anna Maria was in the dance room waiting for them. Gabriele left them to it while he went to greet the band, infamous hell-raisers who’d had half a dozen global bestselling albums and who had flown in from America especially for the evening. While they milled by the free bar, their roadies were setting up on the stage.
‘What do you think?’ Anna Maria asked.
As Elena gazed around the room, taking it all in, she couldn’t help the wistfulness that raced through her. The high vaulted ceiling and frescoed walls were magnificent on their own but the tables decorated with silver balloons and the scattering of tiny silver horseshoes, the streams of ribbon twisted around the pillars in the room’s corners, gave it a romantic effect that made her ache that this was all a lie.
‘It looks beautiful,’ she said.
She looked over at Gabriele, deep in conversation with the band’s singer, and wished...
Wished for what? That this could be real? That their marriage could be born out of love, not hatred and vengeance?
He caught her eye and made a drinking motion, asking if he could get her anything.
Touched, she
