STILL held in Raphael’s arms, Charley could feel the hard, urgent pulse of his arousal against her as she relaxed into him, stirring a new surge of eager desire within her body that had her moving languorously against him; satisfied and yet at the same time aware of the capacity within her to be aroused to fresh need—aware too of a deep inner ache that had not been quenched.
What she had just experienced was the beginning, not the end, and the movement of her body against his was sending Raphael a deliberate message to that effect.
Even so he still hesitated, forcing down the impulse to carry her over to the bed and spread the softness of her body there beneath his own, so that he could enter her and lose himself in her in the way his flesh ached for him to do, but then Charley moved against him, pressing closer to him, snapping the tautly strung fragility of his self-control.
As though he had given his need words and spoken them to her, Charley whispered vehemently, ‘Yes!’ and within seconds he had removed the last of their clothes and they were on the bed, her body soft and eager beneath his hands.
This was wonderful, heaven, beyond anything she could ever have imagined. Raphael’s skin felt like oiled silk beneath her explorative touch, his torso narrowing down to a flat belly, his body ridged with muscles beneath the warmth of his skin, and the reality of his erection a thousand times more breathtakingly erotic than any artistic phallic images she had ever seen. She reached out and stroked her fingertips along its length in wondering delight, gasping in sharp pleasure as her touch transferred the delicate stroke of Raphael’s tongue-tip against her earlobe to the hard possession of his mouth against her nipple, his lips tugging on its pouting sensuality after its earlier pleasuring. Instinctively she closed her hand around him, her body shuddering as she felt the fierce pulse beating from his flesh into her own, and then arching on a spasm of sharp pleasure when his teeth grated delicately against the sensitive flesh of her nipple. Had she thought that she now knew desire? She had been wrong. What she had known had been merely the foothills of a far greater height.
Bending her head towards him, Charley whispered to Raphael.
‘I was right. You are the most wonderful lover.’
‘How can you know?’ he mocked her softly, kissing the valley between her breasts and then making his way up towards her mouth.
‘My body knows,’ Charley answered him, ‘and that is why it wants you so much.’
Ridiculous that a few words should have such an intense effect on him, Raphael knew. But they had. It was time. He couldn’t wait any longer.
Cradling Charley against his side with one arm, he reached towards the drawer in the bedside table with the other.
Guessing what he was seeking, Charley placed her hand on his chest and shook her head, telling him fiercely, ‘No. I want to feel you inside me—just you. Your flesh against mine as nature intended. Not—not a…a chemical barrier that isn’t you… I’m on the pill so we’re safe. I want to feel you inside me, Raphael,’ Charley repeated determinedly. ‘Just you—all of you…’ She was kissing him in between her words: eager, passionate little kisses that, like her touch on his body, showed him how much she wanted him.
He should ignore her pleas. He should behave sensibly. He should ignore the way his body had reacted when she had said she wanted him inside her. He should…
‘I want you so much,’ Charley whispered.
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It was too much, and too late to stop himself now, with the soft weight of her in his arms, her body lying eagerly open to his possession, her muscles closing tightly around him as he slowly thrust into her.
Charley shuddered and gasped, and then sighed with exalted pleasure, her hands gripping Raphael’s shoulders as he moved slowly and carefully into her. Each sensation built on the pleasure of the one before it, as though she was climbing a set of steps. Her body protested, her muscles tightening to hold him where he was when Raphael pulled back a little, but his next thrust reassured her body that he wasn’t leaving it, simply moving deeper and then deeper still, until she was moving with him, wrapping her legs around him, welcoming the increasing sensation of fullness and energy within her.
She was Eve and the apple—all the woman he could ever want, and impossible for him to resist. Her response to him was driving him both to want to conquer her and at the same time give all of himself over to her. His whole world had narrowed down to the bed and to her, one moment spread out beneath him, the next wrapped around him. The scent and sight of her, the sound of her pleasure, the feel of her skin under his hands, the hot, slick power of the way her body received and held him…
It was happening. It was coming. A flutter at first…but now the sensation gathered and gripped her. Charley sucked in a lungful of air and then tensed, her nails digging into the flesh of Raphael’s shoulders as she looked up into his face.
His skin was sheened with sweat, the muscles in his arms corded and locked.
She held nothing back, Raphael recognised, concealed nothing. He could see the ecstasy in her expression as well as feel the surging rhythmic contractions of her orgasm. His own body trembled and then shook, his throat arching and his whole body pulled as taut as a bow in that final second before he joined her in his own release into pleasure.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHARLEY looked up from the weekly progress chart she had been studying. It was three weeks now since Raphael had brought her back to the palazzo and left her there. She pushed back her chair from the pretty, delicately painted wood desk. She had been uncertain at first how Raphael would feel about the fact that Anna had given her as her office the pretty little sitting room which she had told her had last been used by Raphael’s mother, but Anna had assured her that he wouldn’t mind, that he had told her simply to make sure that Charley had somewhere to work.
Three weeks: twenty-one nights of unbearable aching longing, and twenty-one days of fighting to keep Raphael out of her thoughts.
She had had three wonderful days with him in Florence. Those she would never, ever forget. Three wonderful days and three even more wonderful nights: days during which Raphael had shown her his Florence, and nights when he had shown her the power of her own sexuality.
He might not have been a demonstrative lover in public, holding her hand and pulling her to him as she had seen one young man doing with his girl in the Boboli Gardens the afternoon Raphael had taken her there, but he had showed his desire for her in other more subtle ways—via a certain look, a certain touch—and there had definitely been no holding back from showing her his desire when they were on their own.
On their final morning before they had left the city she had been lying in his arms, after Raphael had made love to her. He had kissed her and smoothed the hair back off her face, telling her, ‘You do understand, don’t you, that what has happened here between us in Florence must belong only to Florence?’
Yes, she had understood—but that hadn’t stopped her from asking him, almost begging him in desperation, even though she had already known what his answer would be, ‘Will we come back?’
‘No,’ he had told her, with a finality that had cut into her like a knife slicing into her heart.
She had known, of course, that that would be his answer. He had told her from the start not to want anything more than they had had. Then she hadn’t thought about the future—then she had been too driven by her desire for him to look deeper and see what was already growing beneath it. Then she hadn’t realised that she had fallen in love with him. Not then, but she did now.