With a hard pressure, Raphael pulled at the base of her neck. “What happened when you looked at my arousal, Pia?” He breathed the question into the crook where her neck met her shoulder.
Wrapping her hands around his midriff, she hid her face in his chest again. Everything she was feeling, everything he said, this moment so thick with desire, it was such a profusion of sensations like she had never imagined. “Please, Raphael... I can’t speak it. I can’t...”
With a hard laugh that sent shivers down her spine, he took her mouth in a ravishing kiss that plundered beyond just her lips. It was as if with every kiss, he was stealing away parts of her.
Pulling away from the languorous weight of his kiss, she tilted his head down so she could look at his face. His lips were swollen this time. His nostrils flared, his jaw so rigid that Pia caressed it tenderly.
She drank him in, from the small scar on his upper lip to the small mole near his eyebrow.
“I’m sorry I... I can’t give words to what I feel. I...”
“Nessuno.” A forbidding look descended in his eyes. “Never be sorry for what you are, Pia. Not with me. Never with me. I forbid it.”
His thunderous expression made her smile. His arrogance that he could just forbid her from feeling stuff! “But I heard that men like women to be adventurous in bed.” She loved being with him in this moment. The promise of their near-naked bodies was heady, her desire for him thrilling. But it was the peek inside of Raphael’s head, this insight she was getting into the core of the man that Pia relished the most.
His fingers gripped the collared edges of her shirt, “I do not care what you heard or were told, Pia. Your diffidence only makes me realize how much you must want to let me do this.”
She frowned. “Do what, Raphael?”
The ripping of the buttons on her shirt was the answer to her question.
She gasped at the coldness of his palms as they cupped her small breasts. He pushed her and she bowed back, her trust in him complete. His mouth buried between her breasts, Raphael punctuated his kisses with words. “What I want from you, what will pleasure me, I will teach you, si?”
“I want to please you,” she whispered softly.
His eyes flared hotter. “You will.” Pursing his mouth, he nipped her flesh, leaving a wet trail. “And what will pleasure you, what will send you over the edge, we will discover it together.”
“Si,” she said, floating on a cloud of sensation and never wanting to come down.
In return for her surrender—or was it reward?—he separated the edges of the shirt and pushed it off her shoulders. It hung at her elbows, baring her to his drinking eyes.
They darkened impossibly as he stared at her small breasts with their plump nipples painfully distended.
No man had ever seen her like that and Pia couldn’t bear the potency of the moment, of things that she hadn’t even considered. Of things she had already given over to Raphael by giving him this intimacy.
He pressed a reverent kiss to her midriff, his large hands easily spanning her waist, then a trail of hot, wet kisses up and down, from her navel to her pubic bone.
The cool sheets were a welcome contrast against her burning skin as he busied his fingers with her breasts.
He licked the aching tips as if he were testing their rigidness, their plumpness. Soft flicks, long, leisurely flicks, his gaze telling her without words how much he liked the taste of her. Gauging with those piercing eyes what she liked.
Pia arched her chest into his mouth, pressed her fingers into his nape to keep his mouth at her breast, and then flushed at her own shameless abandon. Eyes dark, Raphael noted it. She closed her eyes.
Every sensation was magnified a million times. A running kaleidoscope of colors burst behind her closed lids, as if her every sense was on the verge of explosion, of new birth.
The rough, sucking sounds he made with his lips, the Italian that emerged from his mouth drove Pia wilder, hotter, wetter between her thighs.
And suddenly his mouth was gone, leaving her desolate.
Her eyes flew open, her breath serrated.
His eyes gleamed with possessive wickedness, a feral satisfaction. “I wish I could show your face to you now, mia cara. Your eyes are so wide that they drown your face, your mouth is pink and swollen from my kisses, your skin is trembling and marred already with my attentions...
“Shall I carry you to the mirror, Pia?” His eyes held hers, a thousand unsaid desires in them, dark fantasies she could see them both drowning in. There would be nothing of her that he didn’t touch, that he didn’t take. Nothing he didn’t own. “Shall I show you what I see? How beautiful you are?”
She opened her eyes, saw his nostrils flare. And blushed hot when she sensed the scent of her arousal thick in the air. A muscled leg thrown over her thighs, he leaned over on an elbow.
“There is nothing shameful about what you feel for me, tesoro. About what you need from me.” His mouth closed over the turgid nipple and pulled, and Pia jerked. She clutched her thighs tight as sensations zoomed and coalesced there. As if there was a direct connection between her nipples and the shockingly wet place between her thighs.
His broad palm descended between her thighs and when Pia squeezed them again under another pull of his wicked mouth over her nipple, he was there, giving her the pressure she craved.
His fingers opened her up, a wicked smile curving his lips. Holding her gaze captive, his sculpted mouth blew on her hot, wet nipple, and his fingers drew mesmerizing circles over her folds, stroking, petting, spreading the dampness.
And then his finger was inside her, stretching her.
Spine bucking off the bed, Pia gasped at the sudden invasion.
“You’ve never done this before?” he asked softly, as if he was afraid to scare her off.
Pia couldn’t even answer, for every ounce of her brain’s rationale was busy processing the caresses of his thumb. Somehow, dear God, he’d found that spot that seemed like her entire being was centered there even as he pumped in and out with his other fingers.
Pressure drew her body tight, like a bow stretched too much. “I would like an answer, mia bella.”
Pia shook her head frantically chasing the speed she needed, arching her lower body into his hand. “No. Per favore, Raphael...”
“Anything you want, bella.”
And then his thumb settled there, pressing and stroking mindlessly until Pia writhed against that touch, frantic in her own skin.
It was science, it was hundreds of years of evolution and yet what Raphael did to her felt like magic. As if what happened between them couldn’t be explained away by a theory.
The world dissolved into pure sensation as he stroked her just the way her body needed it. Unbearable pleasure broke over her in cresting waves, building one over the other, throwing her out into
