Far too critical of her own flaws to be at ease half-naked, Kerry scrambled beneath the sheet. ‘What does being yours…er…entail?’
‘Being a total sex slave for my pleasure…’ Sheer provocation in his gleaming gaze, Luciano surveyed her with a smouldering satisfaction he made no attempt to hide. ‘And not looking away when I take off my jeans…’
An uneasy laugh was dredged from Kerry, for she had been about to do exactly that. She lay there all of a quiver, wicked heat coiled at her feminine core, making her shift against the cool sheet. Suffering from not a single inhibited bone in his magnificent body, he peeled off those jeans with deliberate slowness and he watched her like a hawk. Studying him with an attention that had become distinctly fixed, Kerry tried and failed to suppress her nervous tension, for, while he was gloriously, breathtakingly male, he was also hugely aroused.
He slid into the bed and leant over her with wicked amusement still brimming in his clear dark golden eyes. ‘You can scream now if you want to.’
‘Stop teasing me…’
‘Your innocence is the hottest, sweetest turn-on I’ve ever had,’ Luciano confided, plundering her lush mouth with a hard, deep, explicit kiss that left her reeling. ‘Also the biggest threat—’
‘Threat?’
‘Take my five years of abstinence and your virginity and…we’ll work it out,’ he promised thickly, his hands cupping her hips to bring her into firmer contact with his throbbing sex. ‘But I can’t promise it won’t hurt…a little.’
‘Hmm…’ Kerry mumbled, only to gasp out loud as he rolled her back from him to explore the straining peaks of her breasts.
Every nerve-ending already primed with anticipation, her body was still supersensitised to his touch. She lay back, wanton with longing, shivers of desire rippling through her, the dulled, tightening ache between her thighs making it impossible for her to stay still. When he burned a passionate trail down over her unbearably tender flesh, a driven little moan parted her lips. Every feeling was intensified. The warm, clean male scent of him flared her nostrils, so familiar even after so long that her very senses rejoiced in him.
Her hands found the corded smoothness of his shoulders and then clutched into his thick hair, her hunger climbing with shameless greed and impatience. She wanted, needed…and he knew what she needed. He traced the moist, swollen heart of her and with intoxicating expertise roused her to a fever pitch of desire. She cried out in sensual shock, for the pleasure was mindless and unrelenting, and before very long the surge of her own hunger was more than she could bear.
‘Oh…please…’ she begged, hardly knowing what she was saying, her hips writhing, her whole being pitched on a tormenting edge.
‘Want me?’ His lean, strong face rigid with the control he was exerting over his own impatience, Luciano gazed down at the hauntingly lovely face that had somehow continually, infuriatingly superimposed itself over every other feminine image he had tried to rouse an interest in. Having her just once would end that, set him free.
‘So…much,’ she admitted.
Hot, hungry golden eyes locked to her with laser-force intensity. He came over her, spread her slender thighs with precision, took a deep, shuddering breath and plunged into the slick, wet heat of her. An agonised groan of pleasure was wrenched from him.
The sharp stab of pain made Kerry jerk and grit her teeth together. But the wonder of that intimacy, the sensation of him filling her, the wild surge of her own hunger for his driving maleness overwhelmed that discomfort. Instinct made her arch up to him and it was his undoing. What control he had wrested from him by that minor encouragement, he sank into her harder and faster and set a raw pagan rhythm to satisfy his own overriding need. White-hot excitement gripped her. Her heart hammered, her breath emerged in quick, shallow gasps. He drove her to a mindless peak where her body crested and splintered in a dazzling, electrifying charge of fulfilment. As she cried out in ecstasy, his own climax took him in a savage, shattering wave. His powerful body shuddered violently as he poured himself into her.
His first conscious thought was that she had to be the only woman in the world worth waiting five years for. He buried his face in the silky disarray of her hair and drank in the warm intrinsic scent of her and closed both arms round her tight. As she continued to tremble from the effects of her own release, he recognised that he had been very lucky. He had almost blown it but someone somewhere had decided to be merciful and make her wonderfully responsive.
‘I never dreamt…it would be like that,’ Kerry whispered shakily.
Luciano lifted hands that he noted to his dismay were unsteady and curved them to her flushed cheekbones. He encountered wondering blue eyes. ‘It’ll be better the next time, cara mia.’
While it dawned on him that in his original scheme of things there was not to be a next time and he endeavoured to explain his own mental shift in gear, his attention was stolen by the sight of the contraceptives still lying on the chest by the bed. The packet seemed to glint in smug reproach at him. He hadn’t used anything to protect her. Startled by that realisation, he tensed.
Kerry wrapped her arms round him and gave a blissful sigh, and he basked in her naive appreciation and shrugged off his concern. Just this one time, this one special time, he had been careless but he wouldn’t be again, he told himself. He rolled over, carrying her with him, and draped her over him with care to hold her close.
‘I feel sleepy,’ she whispered, her face buried in his shoulder, utter contentment embracing her because she knew that she loved him and nothing could have convinced her at that moment that taking a leap of faith had been wrong.
‘No rest for the wicked.’ Luciano hauled her up to him again to ravish her reddened mouth with renewed hunger. It was just sex, he reminded himself, nothing he had to make rigid rules about.
In the night he woke up, shaking and perspiring from the dreams that still taunted him with the knowledge of how unsafe life could be. As usual, he had believed he was back in his cell, angry and disturbed voices crying out in the night, inmates banging on the steel doors, while he fought the sensation of being trapped and helpless in a nightmare that never quit. But then the peaceful silence of the room enclosed him. He focused on the dying glow of the fire and the woman sleeping beside him and the agonising tension in his muscles eased.
He tugged Kerry closer, and as she gave a drowsy murmur he kissed her awake. ‘I need you,’ he breathed roughly. He despised himself for admitting that but not enough to deny his sudden, overpowering craving to remind himself all over again that he was free and able to lose himself in one of life’s most primal and basic pleasures.
Even though she was exhausted, Kerry woke up early, for rising ahead of her grandparents was her usual routine. Luciano had one heavy arm as well as a hair-roughened thigh draped possessively over her. She was uncomfortable but tender appreciation softened her eyes as she looked at him. At last he was asleep. She smiled, for she ached in places she had not known a woman could ache: he was a wildly insatiable lover. She was still stunned by the effect of all that pleasure and astonished by the extent of her own abandonment. But she felt no regret, no, not an ounce of regret, for she had been reassured by the undeniable depth of his need for her.
She lay surveying him: the blue-shadowed roughness of his stubborn jawline, the outrageous length of his black lashes that were the only femininising influence in that lean, strong-boned face of his and the bronzed vibrance of his skin tone against the white linen. He was, without a single doubt, absolutely gorgeous. He could also, without a single doubt, have broken that five-year abstinence with some very much more beautiful, sophisticated and experienced woman than she was. But instead he had come back to her. That had to mean something. If she still had feelings for him, why shouldn’t he still have feelings for her? She had to rise above her own negative habit of thinking too little of herself, she thought fiercely.
Easing inch by careful inch out from beneath Luciano’s hold, Kerry crept out of bed. She would make him breakfast. She just had this overpowering need to spoil him. Making do with the very basic bathroom facilities on the ground floor, she then trawled through her sparse and dated wardrobe to find something more presentable to wear than her usual jeans. It was too cold for a dress but the soft blue cotton shift she put on flattered her and she tugged on a cardigan with it.
Luciano wakened in a state of relaxation new to him. He looked for her. She wasn’t there. It annoyed him that he should be annoyed that she wasn’t there. He hoped she wasn’t making him breakfast because he knew he would end up trying to eat it even if it was inedible. His active mind soon switched to planning the future, for the previous night had supplied a very satisfactory framework. To a certain extent, he had misjudged her, he acknowledged grudgingly. Kerry had neither played a part in framing him for the crime for which he had been falsely imprisoned, nor played fast and loose with the money he had given her grandfather. When he still wanted her, why shouldn’t he keep her in his life? Why the hell should he make a big deal of that?
It would be on his terms: he would spend the occasional weekend at Ballybawn. The hire of a helicopter and a pilot would be essential. As for the castle, he would concentrate on the original and oldest part of