her legs coiled around him, even as she urged him on, Sophie was frantically trying to hold back.
How do I let you leave? she wanted to sob as her orgasm gathered.
‘Luka...’ She said it again as she started to come and the intensity scared her.
‘Let it happen...’ Luka said, and his rapid thrust gave her no choice but to do as his body commanded.
Inwardly he beat her to match his rhythm but it wasn’t that that had her toppling over the edge, it was Luka, and the feel of his shoulders tense beneath her hands. It was the last look at the world without fully having the other, this strange brink they both found themselves on. Luka was in that beat before coming, past the point of no return when he felt her pulse to him and he just unleashed. Nothing could ever top this, he knew. Her intimate pulses beckoned and he gave in to the tight, soft warmth of her endless caress.
For Sophie it was the sensation of falling but not a gentle one.
Every bump, every sob, every fear seemed enacted in slow motion. She wanted to curl up in protection but his hands held down her arms. She hoped for a moment of clarity but he was pounding her senses again. Kissing her hard as his climax receded and then thrusting again, giving up the very last of himself as she lay there, knowing she had nothing left to give.
She had been taken.
‘SO THAT’S WHAT it feels like,’ Sophie said.
‘Not usually.’
They were lying in his bed and watching the evening sun over the ocean.
Sophie’s head was resting on his chest and she watched a cruise liner glint in the distance.
‘Not usually?’ she checked.
‘Truth?’ he asked, and she nodded. ‘There is usually a knot of disquiet.’ He took her hand and he placed it just beneath where his ribs joined, and he pushed her fingers in. ‘Just there.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
He moved his hand to the same place on her. ‘Do you have it?’
‘No,’ Sophie admitted. ‘No knots, no disquiet.’
She knew what he meant, though, as she tried to imagine a moment where the man lying there wasn’t Luka.
It felt written in her DNA that this time belonged to him.
‘You really want to work on them?’ Luka asked, and they must have both been looking at the same thing because he voiced her thoughts.
‘No, I really want to be a guest on one of them.’ Sophie smiled. ‘But for now working on one would be wonderful.’
‘What would your father say?’ Luka asked.
‘What will my father say?’ Sophie corrected, because it was going to happen, she was determined, but she answered his question. ‘I don’t know how he’s going to react,’ she said, listening to the thud of Luka’s heart as he stroked her hair. So much had changed now. ‘I guess people will understand that I might want to get away after the shame of you dumping me.’ She laughed and dug him in the ribs but then she was serious. ‘I don’t know how my father will be about it but I don’t think I can factor that in when I make my choice... I don’t know if I want to stay here in Bordo Del Cielo, Luka. There is too much past...’
They were the same, Luka realised.
‘I think my father is up to no good,’ Sophie admitted. ‘I love him yet I want to get away from him. I want no part in that type of life.’
During his last years at school Luka had started to question the way things worked here and he had fought hard to go to university in England. There, his eyes had been fully opened as to his father’s ways and from that distance he had decided to stay away.
Sophie had worked it out from here, Luka thought.
Or was starting to.
‘My father doesn’t work, he sits in a bar most of the day and into the night. What are these meetings he says that he has to go to?’ She looked up from his chest and instead of giving her an answer or avoiding the subject he offered the unexpected.
‘Come to London with me,’ Luka said.
‘With you?’
‘You could apply to the cruise liners from there. I could help you to get on your feet. I am a part owner of a hotel, you could work there till you get your dream job...’
Sophie lay there, thinking about it. She wasn’t surprised that he part owned a hotel—Malvolio would have seen to it that his son was looked after.
‘I have a flat,’ Luka said. ‘You could stay with me for a while.’
‘Stay with you?’ Sophie blinked. ‘I don’t know if that would work out...’
‘Why not?’
‘Luka, while I accept this is a one-off, I really don’t want to be there if you bring another woman home...’
It angered her that he laughed and Sophie climbed from the bed. ‘I’m going to have a shower and then I have to go to church...’ She stopped talking when she saw the sheets that bore the evidence of what had just taken place. ‘Oh.’
‘I’ll sort it all out,’ Luka said. ‘I’m not going to leave them for Angela. Go and have your shower...’
As Sophie did so she thought about what Luka had suggested and she thought too about her cross response.
It was true.
She somehow had to hold in her jealousy at the thought of him with someone else. She’d agreed to break things off, a part of her had even been happy about it and certainly she had been relieved...
That had been before they’d made love, though.
How could once with Luka ever be enough?
He had taken her, left her exhausted and sated.
Now, though, even the recent memory was bringing her back to sensual life. She soaped her tender breasts and saw the bruise that his mouth had made. Her sex was hot and swollen and as Sophie soaped the last traces of him away she wanted him again.
She walked out with a towel around her to the sight of a naked Luka changing the sheets. Now from a relative distance she could admire his naked beauty. He was tall and lean and she could see the muscles on his thighs as he bent to rather haphazardly tuck in the sheet. His shaft, though soft against his leg, lifted a little from the movement and she wanted to take the sheet from his hand and get back to bed.
‘Is that the first bed you have ever made?’ Sophie teased, trying to keep
