Expectant Bride

'You respond to me like you were made for me,' Dio told her with primal satisfaction.

She watched him unzip his well-cut pants. Her eyes wid¬ened, a shred of awareness returning. His black boxer shorts were skimmed off his lean hips a split second later. Receiving her first view of a fully aroused adult male shook Ellie. And although Dio was even more beautiful than she had naively imagined, he was considerably more intimidating. Belatedly conscious of her own nakedness, Ellie sat up and wrenched at the sheet so that she could squirm beneath its cover, her heart pounding against her breastbone as if she had run a three-minute mile.

The knowledge of her own inexperience provoked a cur¬rent of panic. Dio strolled back to the bed without inhibition. In fact she doubted that Dio had ever had the slightest urge to hide himself in the bedroom. 'You're shy,' he murmured almost tenderly, but he threw back the sheet to join her, with scant allowance for that reality.

'Yes... Dio—'

'I want to look at you,' he confessed, curving her into the hard, abrasive heat of his powerfully masculine body with a long possessive arm. 'You're shaking...'

'You're making me nervous.'

He meshed lean fingers into her thick hair and brought her mouth up to his, tasting her with deep, sensual appreciation until her head swam and the nerves were squeezed out of her by more physical reactions.

He lifted his imperious dark head then. Brilliant golden eyes gazed down into hers. This isn't a one-night stand. This is something exceptional and special. I don't sleep around,' he asserted with husky sincerity.

Ellie raised an unsteady hand and brushed the tousled black hair off his brow, her heart banging somewhere in the region of her throat. She couldn't believe the power he had over her. She couldn't believe that a man finally had her hanging on his every word, hoping and praying that he was worthy of her trust. It was a terrifying feeling, but when he held her eyes and touched her there wasn't a fibre of her being capable of resisting him.

Dio ran an exploring hand over her trembling length. She jerked and gasped, her whole body already so sensitised he could reawaken her with the slightest touch. When he teased the soft silver-gilt triangle at the juncture of her thighs she moaned, and thrust her burning face into his hard shoulder. With devastating expertise, he traced the hot, swollen centre of her and located the most sensitive place of all. And from that point on Ellie was lost, without hope of reclaim, stormed by endless exquisite sensations that just as quickly became a kind of sustained torture.

'You are so tight,’ Dio muttered in a sensual groan of appreciation.

The ache of need he aroused was unbearable. Ellie writhed out of control, tormented gasps wrenched from her as she clutched at any part of him she could reach. 'Dio, please...' she moaned in desperate appeal.

He slid over her, rearranging her with urgent hands. She clashed with blazing eyes and exulted in her femininity, sens¬ing his control was as ragged as her own was non-existent.

Fierce hunger seethed hi her shamelessly at that instant. She would have walked through fire to lie under him. And then he plunged into her, and the sharp, wrenching pain of that passionate invasion startled her into crying out in surprise.

Dio stilled. Stunned black eyes looked down into hers. 'Cristos...you can't be!' he exclaimed.

'Not any more...'

Something primitive flared then in his tense gaze. 'You like shocking me, don't you?'

Ellie was blushing like mad now, maddeningly conscious of the tiny smooth shifts with which he was easing his hungry passage all the way inside her. 'Can't talk now,' she mum¬bled, wholly intent on this new and fascinating experience.

A ragged laugh was torn from Dio. He kissed the crown of her head and began to demonstrate how much more ex¬citing it could get. Raw, out-of-control need possessed her as thoroughly as he did. She couldn't breathe for the insane race of her heart. The world could have ended, and nothing but the pounding surge of his body into hers would have mat¬tered. The intensity of the pleasure drove her wild, and finally off the edge into a hot, wrenching paroxysm of shattering release.

'You should have told me I'd be the first, pethi mou,' Dio rasped, out of breath.

'Didn't seem important,' Ellie muttered evasively, revel¬ling in the way he was holding her close to his hot, damp magnificent length, tears of reaction in her softened eyes which she was glad he couldn't see.

Was it possible to fall in love in the space of twenty-four hours? she wondered dreamily, struggling to recognise the person she now felt inside herself, but too happy and fulfilled to feel threatened by that change. Special? How special was special? She already knew how special he was to her. She wanted to wrap him up hi a big blanket of affection and hug him to death, and Ellie had never felt that soppy in her life before.