Angel of Darkness

Angelo cast off the robe without a shade of inhibition. For a split-second her gaze was involuntarily welded to the lean, dark magnificence of his powerful physique. Hot colour drenched her complexion as he pushed back the sheet and slid gracefully into bed beside her.

‘Angelo...’

He brushed his glass against hers. ‘Say goodbye to months of sexual abstinence,’ he murmured. ‘If this is what you want, I am more than willing to oblige.’

‘What I want?’ She gave a sudden gasp of shock as he quite deliberately angled his glass over one pouting breast almost completely bared by the slipping sheet and let champagne drip over her heated flesh. ‘A-Angelo!’ Her own glass dropped from her nerveless fingers and fell soundlessly on the floor.

‘I would hate to think your boredom might extend to what I intend to do to you in bed,’ Angelo breathed, hauling the sheet down with a determined hand and tipping her roughly back against the pillows.

‘Stop it! I don’t want this!’ she cried, so shocked she had trouble framing the words.

‘You’ve been gasping for it for weeks. You think I don’t know that? Do you fondly imagine that I can’t tell when a woman wants me?’

‘You swine!’ she launched, beside herself with rage and disbelief.

He bent his dark head and found the lush dampness of her nipple and her whole body jerked in electrified excitement. Her hands squeezed into fists as she fought the raw overload on her senses. It had been so long and she wanted him so badly. She could feel herself quaking on the edge of that wildness he had roused in her before. It was terrifyingly intense.

He followed the sweet trail of the champagne down over her quivering stomach and she made a sudden grab at his hair. ‘No!’

But his hands were on her thighs and he had already discovered just how weak she really was. She was tender and damp.

‘Evidently I wasn’t the only one seething with silent lust over dinner,’ Angelo murmured huskily, letting the tip of his tongue track the clenched muscles on her inner thigh until she trembled and shook and completely forgot that she was supposed to be fighting him off.

She shut her eyes, her heartbeat like a hammer pounding in her eardrums, and nothing existed but Angelo and what he was doing to her. She had never imagined...had never dreamt that she would let anyone...but she couldn’t have stopped him, couldn’t possibly have regained control of her shudderingly responsive body. He had devastated her with a depth of intimacy far beyond her limited experience and she was utterly overpowered by the incredible waves of pleasure.

She heard her own voice rising, heard herself moan his name over and over again and then her back arched and her teeth clenched and her wild cry of release was literally torn from her as he sent her plunging into a climax that blocked the whole world out for timeless minutes.

‘Maybe you’ll deign to smile at me over dinner tomorrow night,’ Angelo said roughly, sliding up over her and taking her mouth with explosive passion.

He ground his hips into her pelvis, letting her know just how aroused he was while his tongue possessed her mouth in a raw imitation of a far more basic sexual union. Hard hands tugged her thighs apart and he lifted his head, golden eyes stabbing into glazed green as he thrust slowly into the quivering depths of her body.

He thrust deeper; she melted. He moved; she moaned.

‘Bored?’ Angelo demanded thickly.

The sole response he received was a panted attempt to breathe at the peak of the most unimaginable pleasure.

‘Tell me you want me.’ He rolled over, carrying her with him, and let his mouth enclose the engorged tip of one sensitive breast.

‘All the time...oh, God, don’t stop...!’ she almost sobbed as he mercilessly stilled.

‘No divorce.’ A lean hand wound with painful thoroughness into the cascading tangle of her red hair.

‘Angelo...’ she pleaded.

‘No divorce.’

‘No divorce.’ She would have done anything, said anything, sold herself into white slavery for the next half-century just for him to continue. Tuscany all those months ago could not have prepared her for the savage seduction of what he was now making her feel.

He made love to her with smouldering sensuality and wild passion. He drove her over the edge of ecstasy more than once, and when he finally took his own pleasure she buried her tear-stained face into the sweat-slicked muscularity of one powerful shoulder and clung, still shivering with tiny after-shocks.

‘I hate to tell you this, but your mother was right,’ Angelo murmured in a black velvet purr as she abstractedly pressed tiny kisses against whatever part of him was within reach as he shifted languorously against her. ‘You can’t keep your hands off me. Think of how humiliated you would feel as an ex-wife, still falling into my bed at every opportunity...’

Kelda froze, dragged from her sensual languor by sheer shock.

She collided with incandescent golden eyes as fierce as knives. ‘And don’t think I wouldn’t take advantage,’ Angelo drawled softly, savagely. ‘I would. I’d be the wolf at your door, and every time I got you flat on your back I’d make you pay a hundred times over for the divorce. Does that prospect appeal to you?’

Shattered, she stared up at him, her blood chilling in her veins, pallor driving away her natural colour.