gaped at him.
He dragged her to him, possessed her lips in a kiss that almost extracted her soul before he withdrew, his voice a deep, ragged entreaty. “Marry me, Eliana.”
Ellie bent to taste the powerful pulse in Rafael’s neck.
Dragging her teeth down his shoulder and chest, she whispered hot, explicit words of desire into his flesh.
Then she came to the scar that was the one thing marring his perfection. It snaked from his back over his left kidney around to his abdomen below his ribs. He’d only told her it was an emergency surgery when he was much younger, and wouldn’t go into specifics. It hurt her, terribly, every time she saw it or touched it. But it didn’t seem to hurt him. And when she touched it, like now, especially with her lips and tongue, it sent him berserk. As she traced it now with both, his great body shuddered beneath her on a long groan of torment.
Feeling all-powerful eliciting such desire from him, she squeezed his steel buttocks as she slid her leg between his muscled, hair-roughened ones, her knee pressing an erection that felt harder and more daunting than ever before.
It never ceased to amaze her, the constantly renewable need they shared. They were both on fire again and it had been only an hour since they’d last made love.
Like always with him, time warped. It had been six weeks already since he’d asked her to marry him. Since she’d said an inordinate number of yeses. And those six weeks felt at once like six hours and six years. So much had happened since. So many experiences, so much delight. So much love.
Love. She still couldn’t believe it sometimes. Rafael loved her. As much as she loved him. Though being the supreme alpha male who had to be superior in everything, he insisted he loved her more. Way more, according to him. She’d only said she had a lifetime to prove him wrong on that front.
She’d moved in with him that same day. Or rather, she’d stayed where she was. He’d assigned her a PA who’d gone to her place to pack everything in meticulously sorted boxes and to get her out of her lease. He wasn’t about to let her keep a place a two-hour drive away, and if he had his way, she wouldn’t drive again. Or be in a car again. He actually assigned her a helicopter to take her to and from her father’s offices.
She let him shower her with extravagances. For now. He was too rattled by her accident and was overreacting. She would gradually pull him back from the extremes he now went to—to protect and pamper her—to a more rational level.
Though in one arena, she really hoped he’d never stop being excessive. In bed. Those unusual demands he’d said he’d make on her that first night? That had been an understatement.
If anyone had told her in her oblivious inexperience that she’d meet the insatiable demands of a sex god like Rafael, she would have scoffed. What they had together shouldn’t even be possible. But it was better than possible. It was real. And it was beyond description.
What made their intimacies even more incendiary was that they continued to be just as incredible together out of bed. Rafael was getting more and more embroiled in her work with her father, as well as her work at the orphanage. And he was letting her into his world, introducing her to his “brothers” and involving her in his work.
And that was where she’d discovered the level of his sheer, mind-boggling genius.
She now realized that his Numbers pseudonym was apt. He was a literal genius in that regard—and the ramifications of his ability were almost endless. Not that he appreciated it when she used that classification. He’d made it clear she shouldn’t repeat it to anyone, because he never wanted anyone to know the true extent of his capabilities. It was very helpful for him to be underestimated.
Realizing “anyone” included her father, she made it clear that anything about him, or between them, would never be divulged to anyone else.
It remained the only dim area in the glittering wonderland that was her life with Rafael. That the man she loved was taking longer than expected to warm up to his future father-in-law. And that was when her father, seeing how magnificent Rafael was to her, now thought him an answer to his prayers, too.
Not that Rafael did anything to indicate he disliked her father. It was just...a feeling. Overtly, he went to every length to be attentive and welcoming, and he was taking serious interest in her father’s business woes. He even had her providing him with all the details so he could come up with solutions. She had no doubt he would. After all, he could do anything.
Another thing she was gladly letting him orchestrate was their wedding.
She still could barely believe that in two weeks’ time, she’d be Senhora Moreno Salazar. Or, as she’d told him while laughing until she cried, she’d be Eliana Larsen Ferreira Moreno Salazar.
Rafael had put the world at her disposal in preparing their wedding. But she’d insisted he do it instead, on the caveat that he made it a very simple ceremony. Just them, her father and half brothers and his brothers, right here on the mansion grounds.
She wasn’t widening the circle to friends and colleagues because it would only detract from the real purpose of the ceremony. Their union. All she wanted was his ring on her finger, and to profess their vows in front of their nearest and dearest before rushing off to resume “plunging deeper into passion.”
Yeah, that had turned out to be the only accurate way to describe what they had.
She now couldn’t wait to tumble into that abyss once more.
Painting his body with her fingertips, trailing patterns over him with her hair, she chuckled when his whole body vibrated.
“I hope you know what you’re inviting with this act of extreme provocation.”
“Which act are you referring to?” She nipped his nipples, pouring fuel on his reignited passion, her own raging.
And it was his fault. In their last hour-long lovemaking session, he’d upgraded her experience from multiple to continuous orgasms. He’d sure created a monster. At least, a bigger monster than the one he had spawned from the start.
He grabbed her around the waist, lifting her as if her one hundred and forty pounds were minus the hundred, making her straddle him, scorching lust flaring in his eyes. “I have a list. Each with a consequence all its own.”
She rocked against him, sliding the lips of her core up and down his incredible length and girth and hardness, bathing him in her flowing arousal and their combined pleasure.
“Terrible consequences, I hope.”
“Unspeakable.” He dragged her down at the same moment he thrust upward, impaling her to her core.
Eyes rolling back, his name tore out of her, body and mind unraveling at the excruciating expansion and pleasure.
Then he was showing her the consequences of teasing him, his full force behind every ram, sparking orgasms from the trigger he hit over and over in her depths until all existence converged on him and what he was doing to her.
It soon became too much, and she shrieked for that final
