The Sicilian's Marriage Arrangement

“It is your first time.”

“I know.” She drawled out the word. “And I don’t want the chance to get scared again. When you touch me, nothing exists for me but you.”

He felt a smile come over his face and suddenly his need for satisfaction was almost wholly sublimated by his desire to show her what it felt to be made love to by a man who knew how to savor a woman.

“You will not be scared, cara mia. You will beg me for my possession and I will give it to you only when you want it more than the air that you breathe.”

Hope shivered at Luciano’s words, her tongue flicking out nervously to wet her lower lip. She was back to feeling fear despite his assurances, or maybe because of them. It was a sensual fear born from the heated expression in his dark brown eyes. Tonight, there would be no stopping.

He leaned down and tasted her lips. “You are sweet, mi moglie. Like candy.”

His wife. She loved the sound of that and her lips clung to his, but he pulled back to sit at the end of the bed.

Her eyes had closed during the kiss, but opened again. He was looking at her feet. “Luciano?”

He lifted her right foot into his hand. “You are very small, Hope.”

“And you aren’t.” His hand swallowed her.

His eyes dared her to imply that was a bad thing while his fingers moved against the sole of her unexpectedly sensitive foot. She didn’t feel like laughing though.

She wasn’t feeling ticklish, she was feeling excited and more so by the second.

She moaned as he brushed his thumb over her arch. He smiled and did it again. And again. And again. Then lifted the foot to kiss the instep and she moaned again, this time several decibels higher. What was he doing to her?

Feet were not erogenous zones. Were they?

“You smell of wildflowers.”

“Bath salts,” she panted.

He rubbed his lips along her arch, not kissing so much as caressing. “You’re soft like silk.”

He flicked his tongue out and licked. Her toes curled and air hissed out of her lungs on a shattered gasp.

“There are over seven thousand nerve endings in your feet.”

“R-really?” she asked breathlessly and then cried out as he pressed between two of her toes and she felt the reaction in a totally different part of her body.

He laughed softly. “Si. Really.” He touched her gently, but firmly. “If I caress you here, you feel it here.”

He brushed the nest of curls between her legs through the slick material of her gown while his other hand massaged her foot. Oh, man, he was right.

She tilted her pelvis upward, desperate for more intimacy, confused by her body’s reaction to his not-so-innocent massage. “Yes. Oh…I felt it.”

“And do you feel this also, carina?”

She bowed completely off the bed as he touched her again. “I feel it! It’s…” Her voice trailed off into a gasp of pleasure.

By the time he had given similar treatment to her other foot, she was incoherent with pleasure, having flopped back against the pillows, her body totally open to whatever he wanted to do to her.

Silk slid sensuously against her legs as he pushed her nightgown up inch by slow inch. He trailed his fingertips along her calves, pushing her nightgown up further until his mouth pressed against the skin behind her right knee. He tasted it and the dampness between her legs increased.

Whimpering, she squirmed against the bedspread as he continued his erotic tasting up her legs until he’d pushed her gown into a crumpled mass of blue silk around her waist.

Oh, Heavens. He wasn’t going to do that. He couldn’t. She couldn’t let him. She tried to scoot backward. “You can’t kiss me there!”

His response to her frantic efforts to get away was a sexy smile as two big hands clamped firmly to her thighs. Holding them apart when she instinctively tried to close them, he also held her securely in place. “I promise you will like it.”

“I…”

Then his mouth was on her. There. She’d read about this, but it felt more intimate than any words could describe. His tongue did things to her that had her body arching toward him, not away. An unbearable pressure built and built inside her.

The pressure burst without warning and her entire body went taut, every single muscle convulsing in rigidity and she screamed. She couldn’t hear her scream over the blood rushing in her head, but she could feel the rawness in her throat from the strain.

Luciano wanted to give Hope a surfeit of pleasure, finding vicarious satisfaction in her passion. He could feel each muscular contraction of her virginal body in his inner being. He had never experienced another woman’s pleasure so fully as his own and the experience was its own kind of fulfillment.