Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘But school—the twins!’ she tried again—desperately.

At least she succeeded in bringing his dark head up. His eyes looked like black pits filled with flaming frustration, his lips were parted, warm and soft.

‘How long?’ he demanded, tension holding him like a string of prickling barbed wire.

Cassie tried to think without taking her wary eyes off him to look at her bedside clock. She didn’t trust him. She could still feel the powering urgency being pressed against her, and her own body wasn’t behaving itself. There was a pulsing ache taking place deep down in her abdomen, sensual moisture already livening the tender place between her thighs.

She tried for a breath. He was waiting for an answer, taut and bold and still. Her head twisted round, eyelashes flickering as she glanced away from him at the clock then back to him again.

‘H-half an hour.’ She watched his frustration flare to monumental proportions and like a rat throwing itself on a trap she sealed her own immediate destiny. ‘Jenny, m-my neighbour, picks them up, s-so let’s call it forty-f-five minutes before they get back…’

The flare of frustration became a glow of pure arrogance. ‘I can work within those parameters,’ he drawled.

Next second her pencil skirt dropped to the floor. The veins in her slender thighs started to sting as her blood began to race through them. Sandro was yanking his tie off, eyes fixed and intent on her face. He stripped with a grace and a speed that held her breathless and speechless.

‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t going to do this,’ he admitted, the lithe move of his hips seeing his trousers stripped from his legs along with whatever else he was wearing beneath.

‘Do what?’ Cassie couldn’t stop staring. He was magnificent naked.

‘Make love to you again before we married.’ He fed his arms around her and drew her against all of that taut masculinity, uncaring, so assured about the perfection of his own body. ‘I was going to make us wait, build on the tension so you’d be so hot for me you wouldn’t think of changing your mind.’

‘Arrogant,’ Cassie shook out as he slipped her blouse from her body and unclipped her bra.

He didn’t even complain that she’d been too shy to strip herself. He caught the weight of her breasts in his palms and lifted them to meet with his lowering mouth. The sharp sting of pleasure that shot through her body forced a shaken gasp from her throat.

On a low growl he caught it, licked it from her lips as it arrived there. His hands followed the smooth, squirming contours of her body right down to her bottom, which he cupped, then lifted her into the waiting bowl of his pelvis and the tasting kiss jumped into pure, naked heat. He just took and kept control of her senses through the energy in his body and the direction of his kisses, stripping her of the final layers of her clothing until finally—gratefully, he laid her down beneath him on her narrow bed.

No more talk—no breath spare for it. The fever took over from the moment he lay down beside her then rolled towards her and sent his long fingers stroking into the warm, moist juncture of her thighs. He roughed out a string of soft curses when he discovered she was so ready for him.

Weak, fretful, clinging to him, green eyes washed with pleading as they clung to his smouldering dark glare, he caressed her into a writhing turmoil of agitated pleasure, watching—watching as she fell apart for him. It did not occur to her that giving her pleasure heightened his own until she reached down to clasp him and watched him fall apart too. His control fled on the single ragged breath he took, and he ran his eyes over her with a fierce possessiveness that verged on the wild. Her whimper of protest when he drew back from what he was doing for her was replaced by a series of fevered groans in answer to the exquisite caresses he plied across her quivering flesh. By the time the first driving thrust into her came she lost what bit of sanity she had left.

‘Cassie…’ he breathed into her mouth as the intensity of what she was experiencing caught hold of him too.

Her fingernails clawed twin death grips into his shoulder muscles, her lungs fighting for breath against the hot urgency of his mouth. She was aware she was losing touch with reality, aware that he was losing it with her, aware that they climbed the towering walls of excitement together and even let go together, tumbling into the long, rolling waves of intense, soul-shuddering release.

Last time they’d done this it had been wild and uncontrolled. This time it crossed both those barriers to reach a different level entirely. Coming down from it was physically painful; letting her grip on it slip away was like giving up an elemental part of herself. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t make her limbs work, so they remained wrapped around his hot, sweat-slicked, muscle-flexed frame.

He touched his lips to her hot cheek and she felt his tremor. His fingers were unsteady as he used them to comb her tumbled hair back from her face. When she managed to lift up her heavy eyelids she saw his eyes were too black to be real, glazed and drunk on what they’d shared. They didn’t speak; their eyes did it for them. No smiles, no teasing, no attempt at a joke to ease them from this point on to what had to follow—the final touchdown with earth again, the separation.

As her legs finally allowed her to relax their hold on him, they slid down his powerful thighs and legs without breaking contact with his warm golden skin. He was heavy on her but she liked it, liked the way her breasts were crushed against his hair-roughened chest and the flat of her stomach took the weight of his pelvis. He strung slow, gentle kisses along the satin arch of her eyebrows, the top of her nose, then her mouth again, and the tension in her arms slowly relaxed, her fingers feathering across his wide, muscled shoulders then the line of his jaw and onto his cheeks.

This was how it had been for them their first time together—every time they’d come together during that long, fruitful night in her narrow, girly pink bed.

How could he have forgotten that? How could he have wiped it from his memory as if it had been nothing worth remembering?

The doorbell gave a sharp, stinging peal, screaming through her head like an alarm bell and dumping her rudely back into now.

‘Oh, my God, the twins,’ she gasped, launching him off her with the strength of ten women and jackknifing to her feet.

Her legs were still luxuriating in a million warm tingles, so making them move was the most difficult process. Grabbing up her robe because it was the nearest thing to her, Cassie dragged it on over her love-flushed body. Forty-five minutes…they’d been lost in what they’d been doing for forty-five minutes! It sent her dizzy just thinking about it.

‘For goodness’ sake, move, Sandro!’ she shook out at him because he was still lying on her narrow bed how she’d left him, flat on his back with the long length of his nakedness on full display.

Cassie reeled her gaze away from him and opened the bedroom door, her fingers trembling as they tried to comb her hair out of its disarray as she reached for the front door latch and opened it to face her two children and her next-door neighbour feeling what could only be described as as guilty as her wildly flushing skin.

‘Our daddy is here!’ Bella squealed in excitement.

‘We saw his car outside!’ Anthony joined in.