The Man Who Risked It All

way down onto the bed. Lexi found herself stretched out on the cool sheet and losing contact with him as Franco rid himself of his shorts.

When he stretched out beside her and then rolled onto her she saw his bruising. ‘We should take this carefully,’ she whispered worriedly.

‘To hell with being careful,’ he growled, then dipped his dark head and claimed a protruding nipple with the burning heat of his mouth. He grazed her with his lips, his teeth, the fiery heat of his breath as he slowly moved across the swollen mound of that breast to the other breast and captured the rosy peak with a searing hunger that dragged a keening cry from her lips.

‘You taste like heaven,’ he told her.

Her anxious fingers speared into the glossy thickness of his hair. ‘Francesco …’ was all she could manage to say in response.

‘Si, amore, it is I.’ He sounded amused, yet oddly sombre at the same time. ‘You remember this? How good we are together? How it took so little to drive us out of our minds?’

Each dark question was punctuated by a different caress of his hands or his mouth. Lexi lay boneless and trembling with the need for him to keep on touching her, writhing with rising anxiety as he tracked kisses down her slender shape to her waist then sank a deep-tongued caress into her navel, where she’d always been way too sensitive to bear it without turning into a wild thing.

He lifted his head to look at her, triumph pounding through him at how thoroughly she’d lost control. He released a low laugh and bent to issue the same torment again. Lexi caught hold of the bulging muscles in his shoulders and sank her nails in, squirming beneath him in an effort to get free from such an overload of excruciating pleasure that was threatening to send her wild.

Then he wasn’t laughing at anything. He was snaking back up to claim her mouth in a deep, probing kiss. At the same moment his fingers timed a controlled glide into the hot, silken folds of her body. Lexi heard her heartbeat thundering in her ears and knew already she was careering close to the edge of a climax the likes of which promised to knock her off the planet with its intensity. Somewhere in the dim background she could hear Franco trying to soothe her down from the brink, but it wasn’t going to happen. For more than three years she had lived with all this passion crushed down inside, so she would not have to feel its powerful pull ever again. She’d let no other man get this close to her. She’d never wanted to feel like this again—so helplessly out of control—yet with this one particular man choice was lost to her.

She forgot about his injuries, his bruises, his wounded thigh—everything, scoring his back and his chest with her fingernails and moving her legs in quick, anxious need up and down the corded muscles in his calves. She felt hot, breathless—totally governed by what she was feeling. ‘Please, Franco, please …’ she heard herself begging, feverishly kissing his mouth, his jaw, his neck, dragging her hands down his body so she could close them once again around the velvet steel of his proud erection.

‘Lexi …’ he whispered unsteadily. ‘Slow down, amore.’

But she didn’t want to slow down. ‘Please …’ she gasped again. ‘I missed you so much … Please, Franco, please …’

As she felt the tremors breaking over his long, powerful frame he surrendered to her pleas and with a groan slipped between her parted thighs, slid his hands beneath her, then let her guide him where she most needed to feel him before he smoothly, surely drove himself deep.

Exhilaration ran through him like the most potent pleasure drug ever invented as her muscles closed around him, eager, possessive. He pulsed. She clung and fused her mouth to his again. They lost themselves in a voyage of rediscovery—no holding back anything. When she tripped the wire of an electric orgasm it was too soon; but he revelled in each quivering shock wave, held on and held on, until he could do so no longer and finally released his own shattering shock waves of fulfilment while their mouths remained fused and the pounding of their hearts beat in unison.

It was like dying within the most exquisite pleasure ever and then waking up again later to find you’d discovered your soul mate. They lay in a tangle of boneless limbs, too shattered to be able to move. He was burning hot and heavy on her, but Lexi didn’t mind. In fact she rejoiced in his weight, and his lingering pulse still beat a tantalisingly potent force inside her. She didn’t want to think or even breathe if it meant spoiling this special moment. His head was pressed in against the curve of her neck and her shoulder. Her fingers held it there. She smiled dreamily, because she loved the feel of his tongue tasting the warm dampness of her skin there. I feel whole again for the first time in years, she thought dreamily.

‘Lexi …’

‘Hmm?’ she mumbled.

‘Accidenti, cara, but I cannot move.’

‘Your bruises!’ As if she’d been stung by a sharp implement, Lexi came alive with a jolt of her limbs that made Franco release a groan in protest. ‘Didn’t I say we should be more careful? Which bit hurts the most?’

He managed to lift his head up so he could look at her, a wry humour in his slumbrous dark eyes. ‘All of me.’

‘Shall I try squeezing out from beneath you?’

‘I’m too heavy.’

‘I know,’ she teased, and he smiled a lazy smile.

Several minutes went by after that, because they ended up kissing, and the kisses were so gentle and tender there didn’t seem any rush to figure out a way to separate themselves without hurting him.

‘It is good to have you back where you belong, Signora Tolle,’ Franco husked, tasting the corner of her mouth. ‘Perhaps it is not a bad idea for us to remain like this for the rest of our lives.’ He gave a tiny nudge with his hips to highlight his meaning. ‘Someone will discover us in a few thousand years, still locked together like this turned to stone, and think we were so romantic.’

‘I don’t think Zeta will wait a few thousand years to check on us,’ Lexi responded with a soft giggle.

In the end Lexi managed to slide out from beneath him, leaving Franco to collapse onto the bed.

‘And to think I always considered you a really macho hunk.’ Lexi sighed as she got up and started gathering their discarded clothes.

‘I am a macho hunk,’ he insisted, watching her move around the room. ‘Did I not just perform with supreme macho efficiency even with cracked ribs and bruises?’

Lexi stopped what she was doing—perform with efficiency? Did he have to make it sound so—physical?