realization made the moment even more poignant, raised it from just sex to something else.
She moaned as he joined her on the bed and covered her body with his. Protested with her nails on his back when he took her mouth in a leisurely kiss. Bucked up when he skimmed his mouth over her taut nipples without taking them into his mouth.
Her soft mewls goaded him on and on.
Flipping her pliable body easily, he separated her legs until she was straddling his arousal. Her spine arced under his touch as the softest, hottest part of her pressed against his erection.
She was damp and ready for him.
“I need you, Raphael, now,” she breathed, writhing her body over his. With her eyes closed, her unruly hair flying around her face, her high breasts beckoning him, she was a potent invitation.
Slowly, softly, he brought her down on him so she could feel every last inch of him. He spread the lips of her sex with his fingers, the sight of her taking him in incredibly erotic.
Her low moan made him lose the last bit of control. He wanted her far too much and found himself thrusting, hard and rough, up into her snug sheath until he filled her completely.
Her shocked gasp rent the air.
“Pia? Cara mia, did I hurt you?”
Spine still arched sensuously, she bent toward him until the peaks of her breasts rubbed against his chest. Her eyes were glazed, a soft smile spreading her mouth. “No. I just forgot how it feels when you’re inside me. And this way...” She flexed her hips in an age-old feminine rhythm and he sank deeper with a muttered oath. “This way...you feel like you’re everywhere.”
She took his hand and brought his palm to her heart, where it thudded. Her skin was damp to his touch, the scent of her arousal coating the very air he breathed.
Her eyes, crystal clear in the soft light of the evening, pinned him. “You’re here, Raphael, in my heart too. Did you know? Somehow, you have made me fall so utterly in love with you.”
Everything froze inside Raphael as his brain struggled to process those heartfelt words. Words he thought he was ready to hear, words he had even thought his due because that was the only way Pia would enter a marriage. Words he hadn’t realized would steal the breath from him, would knock him out at his knees.
Mere words had never meant anything to him before, so how could it feel like hers could pierce him clean to his soul?
With a glorious smile, Pia pulled herself up and ground down on him. Sending pleasure pulsing through his groin. Her declaration rang in his ears as his body drove deeper, faster, again and again into her slick wetness.
Her moans surrounded him as he pulled himself up and stroked her swollen clit with every thrust. Something let loose within him, and he wanted to wring every ounce of pleasure from her body.
He wanted to give her this, because it was the only thing he had to give.
Soon, she was exploding around him, her muscles clenching him and releasing him in a cataclysm of pleasure. It spurred him on to his own mind-blowing climax.
But still she was not done. While his lungs struggled to draw air, she bent over and pressed a damp kiss to his mouth. The scent of her and him and sex was a potent cocktail in the air, a heady drug that he wanted every night.
“Ti amo, Raphael,” she whispered, with a shy smile. Before Raphael could even wrap his mind around her words, around the truth of it shining in her eyes, she fell asleep on his chest, with him still lodged deep inside her.
Raphael woke up when dawn began to paint pink fingers over the sky. With a warm, silky-soft body tucked up into him as if it was made for him. As if she was the part that completed the puzzle that he hadn’t even known was incomplete.
Sinking his free hand into her thick hair, he gently pushed it back from her face. Long lashes drew crescent shadows under her eyes, which sported dark circles. Had she been studying for some infernal test again? Had he tired her that much with his relentless need for her?
It seemed as if her words had unlocked some fathomless desire in him, for the more he had her, the more he wanted her.
Even in sleep, her face lost none of its artless charm. Something snagged in his chest as she burrowed deeper into his arms. Maledizione, but her trust in him was absolute, limitless.
Having never been on the receiving end of such unconditional, nonjudgmental emotion, he didn’t know how to handle it. A part of him wanted to distance himself from her, wanted to slam the door on whatever she had opened between them.
He wanted to wake her up and say, Demand something from me. Ask for something in return.
If she didn’t, he felt as if he would never know the value of what she was giving him. As if he would never recover his balance in this relationship.
She wriggled again with a soft huff, and his body came alive.
His arm was tucked under her breasts, her head in the groove of his arm. The lush curves of her buttocks pressed against his groin invitingly and his erection twitched and lengthened in greedy response.
He let his gaze linger over her naked body. And felt a jolt of shame when he saw the imprints of his fingers over her hips and inner thighs. Dio, he was a civilized man, not an animal. And yet, the thought seemed to have no control over his libido.
Careful not to wake her, he pulled his arms from under her and slipped out of the bed.
After a quick shower where the innocent enchantress had once again sent his lust into overdrive, where he had quite mercilessly pounded into her already-used body, he had barely toweled her dry before she had fallen into a deep sleep.
But even as those long lashes had been fluttering closed over luminous eyes—how had he never realized how big her eyes truly were behind those spectacles?—and her breath had been slowing down, she had kissed him softly. Slowly, as if in his mouth lay the key to her dreams.
Her cheeks had been pink, her eyes shining with that love she so easily whispered about to him.
Just you.
No two words had ever caused such a powerful longing to rush through his body. Struck such deep fear into him.
He hadn’t been just Raphael in a long time, if ever.
He had been a scholarship engineering student at university, a son who had lost his father amidst a financial scandal and not allowed time to grieve, a young man who had suddenly become responsible for the pampered lifestyles of his mother and sisters, a man driven by ambition to wipe clean the scandal associated with his father’s death, a protégé under the genius of Giovanni Vito, and then finally a CEO who had chosen and pursued the most beautiful, the most glittering, insubstantial butterfly of a woman to be his trophy wife.
But the way Pia looked at him, with startling emotion from the depths of her warm brown eyes, for the first time since he had accepted Giovanni’s unspoken challenge, unease settled in his chest.
If all the trappings of his wealth and status were removed, if his ambition and his driving need not to become his father or share his fate were removed, then who was
