He tipped up her chin. ‘I only want to make you feel good … There is nothing to fear.’
It was as though he had read her mind, and a jolt of surprise flashed through her. Transfixed, she watched as he lowered his head and, moving aside some of the fabric of her dress, pressed his lips onto the raised tissue of puckered skin that was revealed. She shook as though she would never stop. ‘Bella,’ he murmured.
She thought her heart would overflow. Bending lower, he reached for the hem of her dress and lifted it over her head without obstruction. The brush of silk travelling over Laura’s body seemed to inflame the heat that already seemed too hot to contain inside her. Her beautiful haute couture dress discarded, Fabian closed the gap between them and brought that incredible chest of his flush against hers. The sensation of skin against skin was like an electrical charge that made her dizzy. Everything in Laura ached to reach out and demand more.
Their intimate proximity seemed to have the same feverish effect on him. A little push and her bottom suddenly made contact with the sensual silk of the bedspread. Dropping down onto his haunches, Fabian carefully removed her shoes, unfastening their delicate emerald-green straps whilst all the while maintaining devastating eye contact with her hypnotised glance. Leaning over her where she sat, the tips of his tarnished gold hair tickling her skin, he dropped a provocative little kiss at the side of her mouth, then another one against her throat. The trembling that gripped her seemed to increase in magnitude.
Reaching for the zip of his trousers, he freed the waistband and swiftly removed them. He did the same with the ebony silk boxer shorts he wore underneath.
In awe, Laura gazed at the bronzed, firmly muscled toned skin that this action revealed, her mouth stripped of all moisture when she registered the startling evidence of his desire, and how generously he had been made.
With a knowing little smile, Fabian put his hand in the centre of her chest and tipped her back completely onto the bed. Just a brief second later and he was covering her with that incredible body, pressing her deep into the sensuous fabric beneath her, taking her mouth in a kiss that demanded everything she had to give and much more besides. With the most erotic of touches he skimmed his palms seductively across the bared satin surface of her breasts, his blue eyes intensely engaged by the sight of them. Then he lifted his head to look straight into Laura’s eyes.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he breathed.
‘When you look at me that way … I feel it,’ she replied, her heart racing. Mark had never told her she was beautiful … he’d always been too busy pointing out her inadequacies.
In another searing hard kiss Fabian’s demanding mouth met hers. His breath was hot and his tongue was erotically silky. Laura thought her desire would burst at the seams if he did not give her what she ached for soon. This man—this self-contained, unashamed denouncer of love, fighting a silent war with his past—this paradoxical man with his heavensent looks and melting eyes who longed for children of his own but not a wife he could love—had released something inside her she’d almost forgotten might be there. Something pent-up and necessary that she’d long suppressed throughout her devastatingly difficult and painful marriage to Mark.
Now, as Fabian murmured in her ear and then reached for the protection he had in his trouser pocket, she watched him roll it on over his aroused sex with bated breath. Returning to her swiftly, to drag her white silk panties urgently down over her legs, he moved her silken thighs apart with his knee and pressed deep inside her—filling and scalding her with his demanding length. Her back arched at the impact, heat ripping through her like a fire bent on consuming everything in its path, and she knew she would never forget their first intimate connection if she lived to be a hundred!
Laura clutched the smooth hard biceps that bulged like iron as he thrust into her, rocking her body in the primal rhythm of this most intimate act, secretly delighting in the feminine power that she wielded over him in that moment. It made her forget that she wasn’t beautiful all over, that she had scars that would be with her for the rest of her life … both inside and out. Fabian was murmuring seductively to her in his own passionate tongue, and although Laura did not understand everything he said, the sound and intense expression of the words made her blood sing. Willingly she surrendered to the avalanche of feelings that seemed to hold her in thrall and build inside her, and as he drove into her again and again, holding her fast against him, she was unable to stop herself from crying her pleasure out loud to the softly cloaked night.
‘You cannot hold back now, my beautiful Laura.’
‘Fabian … what you’re doing to me!’
‘Tell me …’ he whispered, before he put his mouth to her breast and sucked hard. ‘What am I doing?’
‘You’re making me … You’re making me—’
She gasped as waves of honeyed heat flowed violently through her and then, as they ebbed, turned into a sweet, languorous half-dream that meant she could barely bring herself to move. But at the same time she had the notion that she had never been more awake or aware in her entire life before.
‘Don’t move,’ Fabian ordered gruffly, before thrusting into Laura one last time and groaning his own intense satisfaction as his head fell forward between her breasts.
‘I couldn’t move even if I wanted to,’ she whispered, her lips edging into a smile.
‘Marry me,’ he said, raising his head, want and need flaring bright in his eyes.
A crescendo of longing swept through Laura’s heart. How could she think of refusing him when he was everything she’d ever dreamed of in a man? She might be judged weak and too reckless for words, accepting such a proposal from him, but her feelings had a life and a mind of their own, and they were far too powerful to ignore.
She thought about the small boy who’d suffered such a hurtful childhood—ill-treated by his father and losing his mother far too young—and at the same time she thought about Fabian’s need to redress the balance by being a good father to a child or children of his own. And Laura thought about her own fierce need to be a mother.
‘All right,’ she heard herself say. ‘I will.’
Lifting her hand, she stroked the thick tarnished gold strands of his temptingly silky hair, and he turned his lips into her palm and kissed her. Sensing her heart swell with emotion, she knew that she’d reached her decision long before he’d felt moved to ask her the question again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘WE SHOULD go to Roma.’ ‘Rome?’
‘Si—I have an apartment there. We can have a short holiday and take the opportunity to spend some time alone together. I will show you all the places and sights that the tourists like to see, and some of the not so famous ones that only the locals know about … Sound good?’
‘It sounds wonderful … But, Fabian?’
‘You have reservations about this idea?’
He said all this as he was dressing, and as Laura watched him button up his immaculate white shirt over that heavenly chest, with its slick, solid musculature, she felt as if she was suspended in some euphoric dream she never wanted to wake up from.
The past two weeks had been a whirl of organisation and activity, with an emotional trip back to England for Laura to spend time with her parents before returning to Tuscany and an impatient Fabian back at the Villa de Rosa. Her family had been dumbstruck she’d made such a shock decision to remarry—and to a man she ‘barely knew’. She’d just about convinced them she really did know what she was doing, and had not finally succumbed to a breakdown after all that had happened.
The civil ceremony for Laura and Fabian’s marriage had taken place just yesterday. Their