Angel of Darkness

‘I hate you,’ she said again, unable to think of anything more vicious to say in the state she was in.

‘Say that just one more time,’ Angelo bit out in a sizzling undertone across the bonnet of the Porsche.

‘And you’ll what?’ she shouted back with seething contempt as she strode into the house. ‘I hate you...I hate you...I hate you!’

A powerful hand caught her wrist and yanked her round in the hall.

Her teeth grinding together, Kelda collided with incandescent golden eyes. It was like falling on an electric fence. ‘Let go of me!’ she hissed. ‘Or, so help me, I’ll scream the place down!’

‘Go ahead,’ Angelo invited, hauling her roughly up against him. ‘Scream.’

Kelda was in the grip of such fury that she took full advantage of the invitation. In a passion, she threw her head back and screamed so loudly she hurt her throat and choked. She waited in the simmering silence. Nobody came running. Her lashes fluttered in bemusement.

Before she could part her lips again, Angelo literally grabbed her off her feet. One minute she was standing on solid ground, the next she was airborne and on the way up the stairs. ‘Put me down!’ she screeched.

He kicked her bedroom door wide, kicked it shut again and dropped her down on the bed. ‘Angelo—’

‘Shut up.’ He came down on top of her in one lithe movement, pinning her flat with his superior weight. She was in the act of struggling to raise a punitive knee when he brought his mouth down hard on hers.

Still in a fury, she dug her ha

nds like claws into his luxuriant hair and then the passion flooded her in a roaring tidal wave. It came out of nowhere, attacked and took her prisoner. A passion so instantaneous it wiped out everything that had gone before it. Electrified by the raw, devouring heat of his mouth, she was possessed by an excitement so intense that she felt dizzy and disorientated.

Her blood was drumming in her veins, her heart hammering like crazy. She was hot and cold all over and unable to keep still. He delved between her lips with his tongue and her thighs trembled. He kissed her until she was breathless and burning, not a single part of her body untouched by the sheer intensity of her arousal.

He hauled her sweatshirt off with more impatience than finesse, burying his mouth with a muttered imprecation in the sweet valley between her heaving breasts. He struggled out of his shirt. She heard fabric tear and reached instinctively up to bring him back to her again, lacing her arms round his neck, her fingers lacing into his hair in an ecstasy of excitement.

He muttered something in Italian. He sounded shaken, unlike himself. He came back to her again, the black curling hair on his chest abrasive against her taut nipples, thrusting his hands beneath her back to force her into even more intimate contact with his hard, muscular length. A choked sigh of satisfaction escaped her as he crushed her against him. She couldn’t get close enough to him and evidently he couldn’t get close enough to her.

He pressed his mouth to an achingly sensitive pulse at the base of her throat and sensation stormed through her. His hands found the proud swell of her breasts with surprisingly gentle hands and shaped and stroked, deliberately not touching the hardened peaks until her muscles clenched with frustration and she arched her back and helplessly invited him to that deeper intimacy.

And then, with a soft laugh, he captured a taut nipple and laved it with his tongue, teasing with his sharp white teeth before taking the unbearably tender bud into the moist cave of his mouth. It was a sweet torment that drove claws of raw need into her quivering body, and when he employed the same technique on her other breast she began to moan and tremble, utterly possessed by the power of sensation.

He ran the tip of his tongue down over her taut stomach and a rush of heat made her hips jerk. She wanted to drag his mouth back to hers. She wanted him everywhere at once because her whole body was beginning to scream with the hunger he had incited. He skimmed off the remainder of her clothing in one bold movement, rolling on to his side to devour her mouth in a series of rough, deep, drugging kisses while he dispensed with his own.

He came back to her naked. He was hot and damp and very male and she gasped at the power of her own pleasure in the feel of his body against hers. It was so different, so alien and yet, strangely, so gloriously right. Her fingers spread over the satin-smooth skin of his back and he jerked as if she had pulled a string. Moving without warning, he took her swollen mouth in a sudden explosion of renewed passion, holding her down, letting his hand travel over her silky, quivering stomach to the tangle of red curls at the apex of her thighs.

Nothing she had so far experienced prepared her for the wild excitement that overwhelmed her when he explored the moist petals of her femininity. His touch was so exquisitely pleasurable that she cried out. She was on a high of unbearable sensation, twisting, turning, entirely at the mercy of her own needs, but on another level she was highly attuned to the same build-up of excitement in Angelo.

His breathing was fractured, his heartbeat thumping a tattoo beneath her spread fingers. He moved with lithe determination, gripping her thighs and pulling her to him.

‘I have waited so long for this, cara...’ he muttered almost savagely.

A faint feathering of instinctive fear of the unknown momentarily gripped her as she felt the swollen hardness of his manhood against her. But it was shattered by the hunger he had unleashed inside her. That hunger, too long denied, sought only satisfaction at whatever the cost. Yet she was naïvely unprepared for the driving force with which he invaded her body with his own and the sharp pang of pain which momentarily clenched her muscles and made her bite into the soft underside of her lower lip.

Angelo stilled and stared down at her. In the dawn light she could focus on him with clarity. His lustrous golden eyes betrayed a brief glimmer of rare uncertainty and narrowed, suddenly raking her hectically flushed face. ‘I’m hurting you,’ he whispered, not quite steadily.

The pain had gone as quickly as it had come but her untried body had yet to adjust to that most intimate invasion. ‘No.’ The denial was jerky, swift.

‘You’re so small,’ he breathed, sinking his hands beneath her slender hips, lithely shifting between her thighs with a stifled groan of pleasure and splintering control.

She felt possessed then, utterly and completely. He moved on her, slowly, deliberately until all she could focus on was the extraordinary response of her own body. All control was gone. The savage rhythm took a hold of her and she burned up in a heatwave of sensation, crying out at the moment of climax and subsiding into an aftermath of pleasure so intense she almost passed out. Angelo curved both arms round her so tightly she could scarcely breathe, and with a sleepy smile she fell blissfully asleep.

When she woke up, Angelo was making love to her again. The curtains were closed. She didn’t know whether it was day or night. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to think, only feel. Angelo allowed no time for thought, even less for conversation. It was as though there was nothing but the moment to be lived for. He was ruthless in his single-minded pursuit of pleasure.

‘What time it it?’ she whispered when she opened her eyes again, grudgingly reluctant to obey the rousing hand on her shoulder.

‘After midnight.’ Angelo was dressed and that struck her as extraordinary.