Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded

With a tiny, frustrated moan of reluctant supplication Cara softened her lips. Vicenzo clasped her head even tighter and stepped between her legs with his whole body. It made a fire race through her. And then, with devastating and skilful finesse, he kissed her until she could resist no more. Her mouth opened to his totally, accepting the invasion of his tongue, allowing him to taste her exactly as she’d yearned for him to do that night in London.

The mixture of relief and lust was dizzying as her hands crept up over his shoulders to anchor herself in this maelstrom of sensations. Tentatively she allowed her tongue to follow when he retreated, and the heady feeling of tongue touching tongue made her arch to get closer.

Amidst the raging desire, Cara was only hazily aware when he drew back and said throatily, ‘Wrap your legs around me.’ She did it automatically.

He brought a hand down to her bottom and carried her bodily out of the kitchen. She wanted him to kiss her again and never stop kissing her. She wanted him to make her forget, like he had before. And she wanted him with a bone-deep ache. She pressed kisses against his neck, his jaw, anywhere she could reach. The taste of his skin under her mouth was making her blood hum and her belly tighten even more.

When he laid her down on the bed in his room he filled her vision. Cara was incapable of thinking through the ramifications of what was happening. Perhaps if he’d allowed a moment for reality to sink in…but he stripped with impatient haste, and any chance of sanity intruding disappeared when he came down on the bed, gloriously naked beside her, his skin gleaming dark golden in the dim room.

When he reached for the hem of her T-shirt, his fingers against her bare skin made it prickle and her belly contracted. She let him pull it up and off completely, aware of him throwing it away. Her bra was dispensed with. Her breasts felt tight and sensitive, the tips tingling almost painfully, and as he ran a hand over one she arched her back, her eyes closing as she bit her lip.

He drew off her skirt and she felt a moment of trepidation as he looked down into her eyes for a long moment. Finally he bent his head, blocking out the light, and took her mouth in a long, drugging, soul-destroying kiss. She’d been afraid he wouldn’t kiss her again, and for a second had felt all that awful yearning she’d felt before. But now their tongues tangled feverishly and Cara arched into him, relishing the friction of his chest against her breasts.

He pulled her into him even tighter, and with one hand trailing down her back, leaving a line of fire in its wake, he cupped her bottom before pulling her pants off and down her legs. That familiar ache was building and coiling, tighter and tighter, that wetness between her legs… She brought her leg up over his, instinctively opening herself up to him in a way that had him groaning deep in his throat.

Cara put down a hand to touch and feel his silken length, like velvet over steel. He tensed against her and his mouth left hers. She looked into his eyes, saw his cheeks flush. She consciously shut out all concerns. This fire building within her was the anchor she had to cling onto. And she did—with a kind of desperation. She’d dreamt of this during the long sleepless nights since London—much as she hated to admit it.

Vicenzo pulled her leg up higher over his hip and, still facing her, reached down and pulled her hand away from its innocent caress. He found the moist centre of her desire, his fingers searching and seeking for that place where all her nerve-endings seemed to react, and her hands gripped his shoulders, her breath ragged. But he took his hand away and before she could protest she felt the hard masculine core of him thrusting upwards, a hand on her buttocks anchoring her more firmly against him. She gasped and felt her eyes widen as she felt that intrusion again, deliciously familiar and yet still slightly alien.

She was so inexperienced. Somewhere deep within Vicenzo he recognised that, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t allowed himself to really acknowledge it the first time. Her breasts moved up and down against his chest with her urgent breaths. As he pushed in deeper he felt her accommodate to his size, his length, with a series of convulsive movements, a twitch of her hips. This was what had bewitched him before, made him think that she was more experienced, and yet now he could appreciate the untutored nature of her movements, the gaucheness… He’d dismissed it because it hadn’t fitted with his image, and they’d fitted so well together that he’d not questioned his own assessment. Yet he’d been wrong. But he couldn’t think about that now. She was fast bewitching him all over again.

He bent his head and kissed her deeply as he finally thrust all the way, burying himself inside her. Her teeth nipped at his lower lip, her arms tightened around his neck, and as he started to move in and out the world was reduced to this room, this moment, this woman and the explosion that was approaching more swiftly with every driving movement of his hips into hers.

They teetered on the brink together, and then with a helpless cry Cara finally fell, deep, deep into a vortex of pleasure so all-consuming that if she hadn’t been clinging onto Vicenzo she feared that she’d have been swept away for ever.

When Cara finally came back to earth, and the stark reality of what had just happened, she extricated herself from Vicenzo’s embrace. His deep breathing only faltered for a second. Jerkily, she pulled on her clothes, but as she turned at the door to look back at the man sprawled on the bed she found herself gravitating to a chair in the corner of the darkening room. She sat there, just watching him, as if that could help her make sense of it all.

She still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. One minute she’d dropped the jar, and he’d been taking the splinter out of her foot with surprisingly gentle hands, and the next he’d been kissing her, and then… She only had to look at the gracefully sprawled limbs, the sheets tangled around his legs, feel the tenderness at the apex of her thighs. Was it because he had kissed her? Had he breached her defences so completely by doing that small thing?

Self-disgust ran through her. Her pathetic attempt to not let him kiss her had lasted for about ten seconds. She tried desperately to justify her actions. He’d caught her in an emotional moment and she hadn’t had the defences in place to resist him. But Cara knew she was lying hopelessly to herself.

She’d declared that she’d never sleep with him, but she’d just given him his wedding night of consummation practically gift-wrapped. She’d put up no fight. The memory of that incendiary kiss came back. Surely a kiss couldn’t represent so much?

She touched a finger to her lips. They felt bruised and plump. Sensitive. And she remembered just how good it had felt to kiss him, to be kissed by him so thoroughly. Her insides cramped with sudden panic at the surge of emotion and Cara got up and left the room silently. She went into the k

itchen and cleaned up the mess on the floor. She saw the drops of blood from her foot and her hands shook as she cleaned that too. Self-recrimination burned through her; had she acquiesced because she’d been seeking that elusive connection again? The connection that had never existed?

A cough came from the door and she looked up, tensing all over. Vicenzo stood there in nothing but his trousers, top button open, his arms folded across that formidable chest. Cara’s face flamed, and her belly quivered all over again with renewed desire—much to her abject disgust.

He arched a brow. ‘We wouldn’t want a repeat of what happened, would we?’

She bristled. She felt so exposed and vulnerable, her body still throbbing slightly. ‘No,’ she bit out, avoiding his eye as she wiped down the floor. ‘We certainly wouldn’t.’

He was beside her in an instant, and he pulled her up with a hand on her arm. ‘I was talking about the jar-dropping, not what happened afterwards.’

She glared up at him with every atom of strength she could muster. ‘And you know perfectly well what I’m talking about.’

He jerked his head towards where they’d both just been, irritation still prickling under his skin at finding her gone from his bed. ‘That was an exercise in proving just how easily you’ll fall into my bed. So, yes, Cara—with that kind of chemistry there will be plenty of repeats until this desire runs its course.’

The fact that he’d set out to coldly prove how easy she would be lanced her like a knife. She tried to jerk her arm out of his grip, but it tightened when he spotted something over her head behind her and reached for it. It was her wedding ring.

He took her hand and placed the ring on her finger. He tipped up her chin, but mutinously she avoided his eyes. She felt raw.

‘I don’t want to see that ring off your finger again, Cara.’

She bit her lip and refrained from telling him that she’d taken it off to cook as much as anything else. So she just said, ‘Yes, sir.’

Vicenzo tugged her hand closer. She still avoided his penetrating gaze. His knee-jerk response to needing to see that ring back on her finger had him reacting from a deeply visceral and private place. A rejection of that need.