hair in his hands and carefully made a new knot of it, high on the top of her head, and then wrapped his arms around her and held her there against him.
He didn’t let himself think about anything. Just the sheer perfection of her body against his. The silken slide of the salted water, making her skin a smooth caress against his. He waited as she relaxed in increments against him, as she softened and, eventually, sighed. And only then did he begin to wash her.
He took his time. He touched her everywhere. He put his hands on every inch of her skin, saving that slippery heat between her legs for last, and a hard sort of satisfaction gripped him when she let out a hungry little moan at his touch.
Only when he’d made sure she was utterly boneless did he finish, standing her up and toweling her off, then carrying her back into the bedroom to put her in his bed at last. Her gaze never left him, wide and nearly green, and he’d learned her tonight. He knew what that faint quiver in her body meant. How she flushed when he crawled over her, a bright red on top of the pink she’d turned in the heat of the bath.
And when he was fully stretched out above her, skin to skin, he learned her all over again.
With his hands, his mouth. His tongue and his teeth.
He explored her. She’d given him something he could hardly get his head around, could barely understand, and this was how he expressed his gratitude. His wonder. All those tangled things inside him that he knew better than to look at too closely. He worked them out against her lovely body, inch by perfect inch.
She arched up beneath him and he feasted on her breasts. She rocked against him and he held her down, tracing every muscle and every smooth curve, making her his. Making every last part of her inarguably his.
And this time, when he surged inside her, she was soft and shaking and ready for him.
She cried out his name.
Luca set a more demanding pace, gathering her beneath him, lost in the sleek glory of her hips against his. He built her up high. He made her sob. And then he threw her straight off that cliff and into bliss.
Once, then again.
And only then, when she was shattered twice over, her eyes slate green and filled with him and nothing else, did he follow her over that edge.
IT WAS NOT until the following morning—after Luca had woken up to discover that none of the previous night had been one of the remarkably detailed dreams he’d had about Kathryn over the past couple of years, because she was still there, sprawled out beside him and wholly irresistible—that he allowed himself to think about what the inescapable fact of her innocence meant.
First, he’d rolled over, instantly awake and aware and as hard for her as if he’d never had her. She’d come awake a moment later, and he’d watched her eyes go from sleepy to pleased to wary in the course of a few blinks.
He’d found he hadn’t cared much for wary.
So he’d pinned her hands above her head and settled himself between her thighs. He’d expressed his feelings on her tender breasts until she’d been gasping and arching beneath him, and then he’d driven himself home once again, losing himself in all her molten sweetness.
And he’d found the sound of her gasping his name as she convulsed around him far, far preferable to any wariness.
He managed to control himself in the shower they shared—but barely—and maybe the fact that doing so was so much harder than it should have been kicked his brain back into gear.
Kathryn was dressing, her head bent and a certain set expression on her face that he didn’t like. He stood in the doorway to the bathroom with only a towel wrapped around his hips and watched her, aware that he should not be feeling any of the things that stampeded through him then. He knew that expression she wore. He usually liked it when the women he bedded showed him that particular blankness, because it meant they planned to walk away from him with no fuss. And quickly.
He didn’t want her to walk away.
He wanted her right here, and he didn’t care how crazy that was. How insane this entire situation was. That no one but him—that no one, especially him—would ever believe that Saint Kate had been a virgin until now.
“Kathryn.” She didn’t precisely jolt when she heard her name, but that wariness was back in her gaze when she lifted it to his. “Why did you marry him?”
She pressed her lips together in that way of hers that he should not find so fascinating. She tugged her bra into place and then bent to pick up her crumpled dress, frowning at it in a way that made something in the vicinity of his heart clench. Luca didn’t speak. He swept up his own discarded shirt and prowled over to her, watching the way her eyes widened as he approached. Her lips parted slightly, as if she needed more air, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t like that.
He liked entirely too much. Her lush little body, packaged in that lacy bra and matching panties that highlighted parts of her he could never obsess about enough. The faint marks from his mouth, his unshaven jaw. He was a primitive creature, he understood then, though he’d never thought of himself in those terms before. When it came to Kathryn, he was nothing short of a beast.
Luca liked his mark on her. He liked it hard and deep, so much it very nearly hurt.
He settled his dress shirt around her shoulders, then tugged her arms through. And then he took his time buttoning it up, fashioning her a dress that was much too big for her frame, but was in its way another mark. Another brand.
The beast within him roared its approval.
“Are you going to answer me?” he asked in a low voice as he rolled up one cuff, then the other, to keep the sleeves from hanging nearly to her knees.
She swallowed, and he saw that her eyes had changed color again, to that slate green that meant she was aroused. Good, he thought. He didn’t imagine he’d ever be anything but aroused in her presence again. He wasn’t sure he ever had been anything else, come to that.
But she blinked it away and took in a shuddering sort of breath.
“He said he could help,” she said.
She moved away from him, and the sight of her in his shirt did things to Luca that he couldn’t explain. He didn’t want to explain them. They simply settled inside him, like light.
“Why did you need help?”
Kathryn worried her lower lip with her teeth, which he felt like her mouth against his sex, but he held himself in check.
“My mother was single when she had me,” she said, and Luca blinked. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t that. Something so...mundane. “She’d never expected or even wanted to have a baby at all, but there she was, pregnant. Her partner made it clear he couldn’t be bothered, and in case she’d any doubts about that, moved out of the country straightaway, so no one could expect him to contribute in any way to the life of a child he didn’t want.”
“He sounds charming.”
Kathryn smiled, very
