Michelle Reid - Mediterranean Tycoons

What he did was to spear his long fingers into her hair, then curve them around the back of her neck. As she gasped he tilted her head back so it arched her slender white throat, then lowered his dark head and buried his mouth in her taut, smooth flesh.

Nothing in her meagre experience with men helped to warn her as to what was coming. It was seduction at its most deep and determined level. It was the man of experience making no concessions for her foolishly defiant innocence. He made love to her with a grim and silent precision; he dragged each and every sensually erotic sensation to the stinging surface of her pale, smooth, receptive skin. He moved his mouth in hot, sensual glides until he reached her parted, trembling mouth, then he kissed her long and deep and without mercy until she was dizzy with it, throbbing and drunk. And he used his hands and his mouth and his tongue in ways and in places she hadn’t known could be so deliciously good.

The quiet command of his voice worked her like a puppet. She was trapped, enslaved by the string-pulling power of his knowledge and her own desire to feel whatever he decided to bestow on her too-responsive flesh. He caressed each curve and hollow and soft warm crevice of her body; he drew her taut with exquisite sensation with his hands and his mouth and his teeth. He kneaded the rounded, swollen fullness of her breasts and sent her teeth into his satin, taut shoulder when he teased and sucked their eager tips.

She even felt him tremble once or twice when her restless, untutored fingers scraped across his flesh. And when the downward glide of his trailing fingers finally took control of the pulsing ache between her legs she flailed in a morass of hot feeling, lost to reality because her own heady consciousness had locked onto the will of her body and the way he slowly, relentlessly brought her climbing and crawling and panting and needing to a whimpering, pleading peak.

No single part of her did not know what it was like to be caressed by him—no nerve-end, no muscle, no velvet dark place of intimacy, until she pulsed and throbbed and breathed out his name in a helpless, breathless, sensual chant.

She hadn’t opened her eyes in ages, not since she’d lowered her eyelids in surrender and let him do this to her. But as she felt his weight easing down on top of her and her thighs being urged apart her eyelids lifted, her eyes making deep, deep contact with the heavy gold darkness in his.

Everything about him was heavy gold darkness, the breadth of his shoulders blocking out most of the lamplight, the long, hard-muscled torso pressing down on her with his hips. She felt the presence and the power of his erection nudge against her carefully prepared warm and wet and swollen flesh. His mouth was still somber, but it was tender when he took her mouth in yet another deep, drugging kiss.

Then it was there. His hands cupped her bottom to lift her and he made that first smooth, blinding thrust with his hips. Her body throbbed and stretched to accommodate him; she felt him like a burning shaft of fire in the innocence of her sheath. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into his shoulders and sensation poured in a swirling wave of fear and anticipation down the pulsing length of where they had joined.

‘You are sure you want this?’ he husked at her.

The fact that he’d even asked the question after so much pulsing macho male domination made tears sting the back of her throat. The point surely was—did he want it?

Lizzy nodded, her mouth just a breath away from his mouth, her eyes clinging dark and vulnerable and helplessly needy to his. It was his eyes that closed when he made that final invasion, his mouth that quivered tautly as she tried to choke back a cry of pain. It was his hands that trembled as he pushed the hair away from her face, then kissed it, kissed it in soft, soothing touches until he felt the tension slowly seep out of her. Then she felt him go deeper, felt the singing dance of her nerve-ends clamour to his probing force. His hands were gliding down the silken thighs to her calves then, and lifting them until her legs circled his waist.

The action sent him even deeper, he shuddered and whispered something in Italian she did not catch, then he was folding her into the strong embrace of his arms and moving—moving, feeding them both into a sensuously searing rhythm that throbbed like a living entity inside her. Her fingers clung to his back as he increased the pace with each hot, pleasurable thrust. She knew where she was going but didn’t know how to reach it. She whimpered anxiously against his mouth.

He caught hold of her hair again to push her head backwards. ‘Look at me,’ he said, and she lifted heavy eyelids she hadn’t been aware of closing, to be trapped in the burning dark flames in his eyes. Then, like that, he made it happen for her, made her body quicken and finally surrender to the bright and sizzling accelerated rush.

Her first cry broke his rhythm from deep and slow to short and fast and she lost it—lost whatever it was she’d been desperately hanging onto as she shot on an explosion of fierce pleasure into wild white pulsating light, while he held her and watched her and orchestrated each wave as it battered into her, each helpless cry, each quivering, broken, convulsive tremor that just seemed to go on and on and on…until with a low, thick groan he joined her, spilling heat on the flames with a sharp stabbing movement that sent an ecstatic pleasure rippling through every muscle and bone and sinew he had.

Seduction, she acknowledged long minutes later when she finally drifted back to earth again. I’ve just been completely, beautifully, thoroughly and ruthlessly seduced.

He still hadn’t moved and his weight was heavy on her; she could feel the still-pounding beat of his heart against her crushed breasts. She became aware that her legs were still wrapped around him, though their bodies were no longer intimately joined.

Still, she knew the image of the two of them like this was going to live with her for the rest of her life.

Coupling, she named it.

It was that physical and basic.

Releasing the still trembling tension out of her limbs, she slid them away from him. As if her movement made him also decide to move, he levered himself up onto a forearm, reached out and switched off the light.

It was so abrupt, so stunningly final. He didn’t release her when he shifted his weight onto the bed beside her, but there were no words spoken between them, no clash of eyes. It was as if now it was over he was expecting them both to just fall asleep.

It hurt. It made vulnerable tears sting the backs of her eyes and her throat. She was damp between her legs and the lingering tremor of pleasure still worked within her as her stretched muscles slowly contracted back to their original state.

When she couldn’t bear it and tried to speak he just put his hand to the back of her head and pressed her face into the prickly dark warmth of his chest.

He fell asleep like that—holding her. Lizzy had never felt so wretched in her entire life. Had she brought it on herself? Was this grim silent aftermath her reward for persistently taking stabs at him—at his irritatingly unflappable control, at his prowess as a lover? She wished she knew why she did it. She wished she understood how she could resent him so angrily yet want him so badly. She just didn’t understand herself at all.

She tried to move away from him, but his powerful arms held her fast. Oddly—again—she found she liked being held by him and slowly let her muscles relax.

It didn’t occur to her that he was lying there with his eyes wide open, and that each time she moved against him he was having to fight to keep his response in check.

And she didn’t know that while she was seeing what they’d just done as a basic coupling, he was seeing it as the most soul-stripping experience of his cynical sexual life.