The Ranieri Bride

‘I will not!’

He bent, becoming nothing more than a seething, dark, passionate blur as he lowered his head and took possession of her mouth.

No one ever said that making love had to be a gently-flowing river which slowly became a flood. Sometimes the raging torrent came first. As it did now, as tempers drove it and the desire to fight each other became as compelling as the desire to drown in each other’s surging swell.

The kiss was their combat, a fight for supremacy over her nightdress, a combat both knew he was eventually going to win. He was rock-hard and she took malicious pleasure in brushing against him with her knuckles and feeling him shudder and suck in his breath. He buried a set of fingers in her hair and tilted her head back so he could delve deeper into her mouth with the sensual stab of his tongue. She wriggled and squirmed and kissed him back, passion for passion. Their hearts were pounding, their breathing fast. When the thin silk slip was wrenched from her fingers, hot skin met with hers and she felt the flash of excitement sting in her blood.

‘You ripped it!’ she gasped as the silk was raked over her head and tossed aside.

‘And you loved me doing it,’ he rasped, before dipping his head lower to devour her pinprick, tingling breasts.

She cried out and scraped her nails down the skin of his back, sending tight muscles into rippling spasm. When he began moving lower she used her nails in his hair instead. The slide of his tongue was pure heaven. Goose-pimples sprang out across her flesh. She tried to arch her body up towards him but he held her flat to the bed, his hands cupping her hips and, with the force of his weight, he pressed her thighs apart.

His fingers stroked her either side of his lapping tongue. He explored her as no other man ever had. She was groaning—she could hear herself—groaning in sensual agony. ‘Enrico,’ she kept on saying as the muscles around her sex flowered and flexed.

He paused to look up, streaks of desire heating the golden skin across his cheekbones and glazing his darker-than-black eyes. She was almost there; he could feel the swelling, pulsing evidence of her climax balancing her right on the edge. Her hair was spread out across the pillows, cut and styled now to a thick and glossy spiralling pelt. Her eyes were shut, her arms thrown up above her head in wanton abandonment, her breasts shifting like two white mounds of female passion with their tight pink peaks urgently begging for his mouth.

Something hot washed right through him: desire for this woman like he’d never felt with anyone else.

‘You want me,’ he husked.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Like this?’ He licked across her clitoris.

Her whole body arched violently. ‘No—!’ she cried out.

‘Like this, then!’ In a single, snaking movement he arrived over her and with a thrust he probed her prepared flesh with the rounded tip of his shaft.

Her arms wrapped round him. ‘Yes, like that.’

‘You are begging me.’

She opened her eyes, bright green and sparkling with sensual accusation. ‘Is this your ego joining in?’

‘If you say so,’ he responded. ‘But I still want to hear you do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Beg,’ he rasped.

She captured his mouth in a deep, drugging kiss that was almost, almost the finish of his resistance. And she knew it, too; Enrico was sure she did because she timed it to the last, agonising split-second before she broke the kiss then begged softly: ‘Please, Enrico.’

He sank his full length into her hot, wet sheath, then tensed on a teeth-gritting groan as her muscles grabbed hold of him and clung.

‘Dear God,’ she shook out.

‘Madre de Dio,’ he muttered.

He moved and her legs wrapped tight around him. Bright sparks of pleasure hit the backs of his eyes. His skin was alive, fingers of pleasure clawing at every engorged muscle. He eased his hands beneath her hips and lifted her closer, recaptured her mouth, then began the long, deep, thrusting ride with the hard tips of her breasts rasping against his hair-roughened chest, and her fingers locked in his hair.

Time disappeared—space—the sweat-slicked, heaving stroke of their rhythm fusing them together into one pounding, pulsing sexual whole. It seemed to go on and on—the long pleasure before the short, blinding, white-hot pleasure, the glory of building towards the final climax that made the act of physical loving worthy of its name.

She broke first, on a whimper that tore their mouths apart. Her head went back, her fingers shifting from his hair to clutch at bunched muscles in his shoulders, and her small sobs grew louder as her pleasure quickened. Her pulsing muscles tugged and he joined her with long, thick, shuddering thrusts of his hips that left the two of them wasted.

He was lying heavy on top of her but he couldn’t move a single muscle. She was lying so still beneath him he had a sudden image of her slowly melting into the bed.

It had only ever been like this with her—the lethargy that came with this kind of satiation that sapped every bit of his strength.