Damiano disposed of the boxer shorts. Her face flamed. Aroused he was distinctly intimidating but it was of the variety of intimidation that filled her with hot, quivery sensations. Suddenly ashamed of what she recognised as pure lust within herself, she dropped her head, no longer able to see anything but Damiano’s beautifully shaped brown feet approaching the bed.
The mattress gave slightly under his weight. The silence hummed. She sat there, head lowered over knees.
‘You’re such a little cheat,’ Damiano condemned with a throaty chuckle as he reached for her and tumbled her down against the comfortable pillows.
‘Sorry?’ Eden spluttered, disconcerted by the swiftness of that move.
Rolling over, Damiano slid a long hard masculine thigh between hers and held her captive beneath his superior weight. He trailed a mocking forefinger along the curve of her soft lower lip and made it impossible for her to avoid his intent scrutiny. ‘I saw you watching me.’
He was just inches away. She reddened fiercely. Her mouth ran dry.
‘And…’ Damiano dragged out the word ‘…I also think you like what you saw—’
‘No—?’
‘No?’ Damiano questioned, raising a sardonic dark brow.
‘I m-mean yes, but—’
‘Don’t want to hear the “but”.’ With a husky growl of very male gratification, Damiano teased at her mouth with his own, lighting a trail of fire to run through her shivering body. Those light, frustrating kisses merely stoked her growing tension. She squirmed under him seeking greater force, her own hunger demanding more.
‘So tell me you want me,’ Damiano invited thickly.
‘What?’ she framed blankly, fingers curling into his broad shoulders with a frustration she could not suppress.
‘I want to hear the words…’ Damiano confided, sliding down the bed and, by so doing, revealing to her for the first time that he had already somehow contrived to remove her bra without her noticing.
Dismay flashed through her. ‘Damiano!’
‘No, cara…’ His hands clamped down over her wrists before she could attempt to cover her bare breasts. ‘You’re beautiful…you are really beautiful and I need to look at you just as much as you like to look at me,’ he spelt out in a devastatingly effective demand for equal rights.
She trembled, feeling so horrendously vulnerable, staring down at her pale breasts with their shamelessly swollen pink nipples. And then she saw Damiano surveying the same view like a hungry tiger, hot golden eyes pinned to her with a visual intensity that shook her. He had already released her wrists but she had little difficulty in resisting her once compulsive need to conceal herself from him. She was now watching him in total fascination. She arched her back slightly, shifted her hips, feeling like a madly seductive stranger beneath such erotic male appreciation.
He was just looking and she was already starting to burn again. He lifted a hand that was noticeably unsteady and curved it to her super-sensitive flesh. He lowered his proud dark head and let the tip of his tongue flick a pouting peak and her whole body just surged up in response. ‘I want you!’ she moaned, helpless in the grip of that devastating wave of sexual hunger.
Damiano rewarded her with a wolfish smile that made her heart flip over and filled her with such a flood of love that she felt as fluid as water. ‘You’re all mine,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘You’re the only woman I have ever been with who has only ever been mine. I really get a high out of that.’
He brought his mouth down on hers with an explosive passion that she needed as much as he did. Heartbeat thundering in her eardrums, she gasped as he stroked her breasts and she dug her fingers into the dark silk luxuriance of his hair. She couldn’t get enough of that hard, demanding mouth. She strained against him, controlled by the heat and the strength of her own craving, every defence finally abandoned.
‘Please…’ She gasped, struggling to get breath back into her lungs but desperate to get his hot urgent mouth back on hers again.
‘You’ve changed so much,’ Damiano ground out, his breathing even more fractured than her own as he skimmed an impatient hand down over her quivering length and deftly rearranged her so that he could remove her briefs.
She had never been so conscious of being naked but the daylight had nothing to do with it. Erotic anticipation now fired her. She was reaching for him even before he was reaching for her again. Tiny broken sounds were wrenched from her as he pushed her back against the pillows and employed his lips and his tongue on her tingling breasts with a hard, sensual expertise that was entirely new to her. And, new as that more forceful approach was, it drove her crazy with excitement.
‘I never thought I would see you like this…out of your mind with desire for me!’ Damiano extended with raw appreciation, black hair tousled, tough cheekbones scored with feverish colour. ‘Eden…Eden…’
And even the way he raggedly groaned her name made her react. She was all heat and constant movement. The burning fever that had taken control of her was way beyond anything she had ever experienced. With a sure hand, he found the damp, pulsing heart of her and she cried out loud on the incredible surge of excitement he unleashed.
Glittering golden eyes invaded hers. He was watching her every reaction. Disconcertion tried to penetrate the blinding, all-pervasive sway of passion and for a split second she attempted to regain some measure of control. But she was way beyond that ability and dimly registering that shocked her too, only his dominant control over her was too great by then.
‘I…I can’t help it…’ She tried to say, not really knowing whether she was trying to apologise or not and, if she was, what she might be attempting to say sorry for.
‘I know…’
She was enslaved, enthralled by the passion, her writhing body entirely ruled by his knowing touch. And in no time at all that oh, so skilled touch became near agonising torment for she wanted…she wanted so much. And the hunger was so powerful it was eating her alive and her hands were clinging to him, her hips rising, the ache of emptiness a torment.
‘Please…’ she begged.
In one lithe movement, Damiano came over her, tipped her back, a devouring need more than equal to her own blazing in his smouldering golden gaze. As he entered her yielding flesh, she uttered a high-pitched moan and jerked in sensual shock from that invasion. Her excitement was at such a pitch by then that she thought she might pass out from the sheer overload of pleasure. The powerful response of her own body gripped her now. Heart crashing, he drove her to the heights she had never known existed. Stunned by the wild ecstatic intensity that shattered her into a million pieces, she sobbed with joyful release and slowly went back into free fall.
Eden’s eyes were awash with tears but wide with shock at the same time. Never ever had she imagined she might experience such glorious pleasure.
Damiano released her from his weight and hauled her back into intimate connection with his damp, hot frame. He kissed her breat
hless and held her back from him, scanning her still shaken face with questioning intensity. ‘You truly didn’t realise that you were missing anything five years ago,’ he breathed on the back of a rueful laugh.
‘You mean…it’s always supposed to be like that?’ she gasped, too taken aback by the idea to be self-conscious.
‘I used to think of spiking your pure orange to make you let go in bed but I knew you would never forgive me.’ Damiano splayed long brown fingers round her cheekbones, gazing deep into her incredulous green eyes. ‘You just would not relax. You had so many hang-ups. You hit my male ego right where it hurts. The only woman I couldn’t satisfy was my wife…’
‘I was quite happy with what…well…you know,’ she mumbled, thinking in a positive daze at what she had just learned. How could she have known there was more when she had never experienced anything more until now? She remembered pleasure but a pleasure that was frankly mild in comparison with what she had just enjoyed. She remembered liking the start better than the finish and vague feelings of dissatisfaction but nothing she hadn’t accepted as normal and natural. From that first painful initiation, she had stubbornly decided that making love would always be something he received more pleasure from than she did.
But there was more to it than that, Eden recognised in sudden shame. She had had resentments of her own from very early in their marriage. The marital home in which she felt like an intruder, the family who had regarded her as a social inferior, Annabel, the ex-fiancée, who wouldn’t quit flaunting her own preferential status. She had blamed Damiano for her unhappiness and had made no attempt to overcome her inhibitions. Damiano, she registered with shaken new self-awareness, had not been the only one set on a war of attrition…
Damiano curved her to him so that she was plastered to every powerful angle of his indolent length. ‘Sex was a taboo subject. You once said that it was bad enough having to do that sort of thing without being expected to talk about it as well,’ he groaned.