Michelle Reid - Mediterranean Tycoons

She didn’t look in a mirror—she didn’t want to see what was written on her face. She just crawled between the cool linen sheets, punched the pillow with a clenched fist, then laid her head on it and willed herself to go to sleep.

It took hours—hours of lying there willing and wishing, and replaying the events of the day through a revolving door of spinning images and arguments and…waiting. At some point she must have accepted that her wedding night was going to be the same sterile event her wedding day had been because she finally managed to relax and drop into a deep, dark sleep.

She was warm and relaxed and beautifully comfortable dreaming about gentle waves rolling into a soft sandy shore, when the feel of a set of long fingers gently massaging the silk covering her stomach brought her awake.

She opened her eyes, felt the lazy moist warmth of a pair of lips taste the sensitive hollow by her ear—and tensed.

‘NO, BE STILL,’ Luc’s dark husky voice commanded.

But the vibrating rush of sensual panic made Lizzy’s heart beat a fast tattoo against her ribs and on a soft breath she flipped onto her back, eyes wide and staring up at him through the darkness.

‘I thought you—’

He kissed the words away, sealing his lips to her lips and gently teasing the tiny tremor with his tongue. ‘We are going to rescue our wedding night, amore,’ he told her, ‘and we will take it very slowly, so slowly you will not remember to be scared.’

Lizzy wanted to say that she wasn’t scared but she couldn’t, the hand at her stomach awakening her senses to the message being relayed to them by the slow, sensual caress his fingers made across the slippery silk. And she could feel the heat of him as he leant over her, feel that the full length of his body pressing intimately against hers was naked and aroused.

She closed her eyes and parted her lips for him, felt his sigh as he took the invitation and sank his tongue into her mouth, gently at first, then with deepening passion as she responded, catching the increasingly erotic rhythm of his tongue stroking against hers. Her hands lifted up to clutch at him, her fingernails digging into the muscles braced like stretched satin in his arms, her body arching upwards in a compulsive need to press against that massaging hand.

As if the telling movement triggered something inside him, he slid the hand lower, skimming over her hips and her thighs to reach for the edge of her nightgown, then with a smooth, swift, experienced efficiency stripped it all the way up to her throat.

The loss of his mouth and the slick, lithe way he removed the scrap of silk over her head set her shivering and gasping, then the kiss was deep and hungry again, the massaging hand gliding now, over her newly exposed flesh. He stroked her thighs, the gentle contours of her hip and the indentation of her waist. When she whispered something into his mouth, he rose up and looked down her length to watch as his fingers moved on over the flat of her stomach to skim across the top of one pale rounded breast.

Lizzy closed her eyes when she felt the possessive claim that hand made and was ready this time for the burning wave of pleasure that drenched her as he stroked, then cupped, then grazed the aching tip with the pad of his thumb. Her nipples sprang out in a blatant leap and she squirmed in embarrassment.

He wasn’t embarrassed. He just used his long fingers to shape the quivering globe in preparation to take that tight dark rosebud into his mouth. A piercing hot sting struck from the centre of her nipple and shot all the way down to her thighs, bending her body like a wand. Once again he lifted his dark head and looked at her, then strung a gentle line of slow, tender kisses along the line of her jaw. Lizzy closed her eyes and endured until at last he stopped teasing and gave her what she wanted—the warm, seductive pressure of his mouth on her own.

She kissed him as if she would die if she didn’t. She floated on a sexual high. When he tried to calm her, she ran her fingernails into his hair and scored them down his back.

‘Il virago inglese’ he accused on a rough shaken shudder.

Lizzy didn’t care. She wanted his touch, she wanted to toss herself back to where they’d been on that other bed, before she’d chickened out and called a stop. And she wanted to feel every sensual sensation she knew was still waiting for her to experience.

So the tense curse that left his chest meant nothing to her until he used the superior strength in his arms to bring her tumbling halfway back down to earth.

‘I said slowly,’ he husked at her. ‘I will not ravish you, Elizabeth.’

But she didn’t know the difference between fast and slow. Her own wild senses were ruling her actions; the sweet, tight pulse of desire was controlling the pace. The fingers she sent spearing into his neck so she could bring his mouth back to hers were fierce and urgent. ‘I want to be ravished,’ she whispered to him.

His kiss-heated lips twisted into a grim smile. ‘You don’t understand the concept and I will not give you an excuse to accuse me of ravishing you once it is done and your conscience decides to torment you.’

Her eyes widened in protest. ‘I w-wouldn’t do that—’

‘You would,’ he insisted. ‘You want me but you don’t want to want me, you have simply allowed yourself to forget that. In fact,’ he added, sending a sardonic gleam to her liquid green eyes, ‘I predict you will take great pleasure in accusing me of anything that might come to mind.’

‘How can you be so cold and detached that your mind can even think of these things right now?’ she threw at him helplessly.

‘I am not cold and detached.’ But his dark face clenched. ‘I am just trying to play this as fairly as I can for you!’

‘Me?’ Lizzy choked out a laugh, feeling the whole wretched, glorious wash of pleasure swirl into bitterness. ‘You haven’t been fair to me since you met me.’ Clenching her fists, she used them to try and push him away. ‘You’re a lousy lover, Luc,’ she added in thick frustration when she couldn’t budge him by even half an inch. ‘The kind that sounds like he wants me to sign another contract before he condescends to move this marriage on!’

Once again her tongue had outpaced her common sense. Lizzy knew it the moment the cutting accusation was out. Her breathing disappeared, her eyelashes flickering as she took in the look that had frozen his face. Teeth burying themselves into her full bottom lip, she waited, heart pounding, her foolish stubbornness refusing to let her take the words back before it was too late.

And she knew she should have done—his complete stillness told her that she should. Yet he didn’t move, didn’t speak, he didn’t make any really visible sign that she’d managed to cut into him at all. It was just there in the pulsating silence, in the way she was suddenly feeling the difference in their age and experience, and in the tiny quivers stinging her muscles in places they should not be doing at a tense moment like this.

‘S-say something,’ she breathed when she could stand it no longer.

He moved then, like a man who had just come to a grim decision. One of his arms snaked outwards and suddenly a light switched on, bathing them both in a soft golden glow that did nothing to lessen Lizzy’s tension one bit. She actually felt her eyes turn black. Yet he still just continued to look down at her, into her huge wary eyes and the silken tumble of chestnut curls rippling the pillow around her delicately featured very pale face.

And her heart wasn’t beating fast now, it was thumping slow and thick. His face, his beautiful, beautiful face was still so expressionless it just didn’t go with what he did next.