So that was what the ultimate in physical pleasure felt like!
That connection men and women throughout the ages had killed for.
Lia now understood every one of those emotions.
Her orgasm had been a pleasure such as she had never dreamed of. Pure ecstasy. It had connected her to Gregorio in a way she had never experienced before with anyone else.
There was none of the awkwardness or embarrassment she had always felt with David as Gregorio carried her across her darkened bedroom and lay her down on the bed before lying on his side next to her.
‘Are you okay?’ He lifted a hand to caress the hair back from her temple.
‘Better than okay.’ She nodded, still trying to catch her breath.
‘Light on or off?’ he queried softly.
‘On,’ Lia decided, and she turned to switch on the lamp on her bedside table.
She moved up onto her knees, wanting to see all of Gregorio as she slowly undressed him. That hard and muscled chest. The taut abdomen. The long length of his arousal. Those long and muscular legs.
She already knew he was going to look like a mythological god. All golden flesh and hard muscles.
‘Arms up,’ she instructed as she lifted and then removed his T-shirt completely, revealing his chest covered in a light dusting of dark hair, his nipples like bronzed pennies. She touched them lightly, glancing up at him as she heard his sharp intake of breath and felt his nipples pebble against her fingertips. ‘You like that?’
‘Yes.’
Gregorio had no idea what Lia’s sexual experience had been before tonight, and he didn’t want to know either. Here and now, the two of them together, it was so highly charged, so intensely pleasurable, that everything and every other woman he had ever known before Lia faded into insignificance. Forgotten. All he could see and feel was narrowed down to this woman. To seeing and feeling only Lia.
Her orgasm a few minutes ago had come as a complete surprise to him. He had barely touched her before she’d found her release.
He could only hope that quicksilver response was uniquely for him.
He sucked in a breath as Lia scraped her nails lightly over the hardness of his nipples, a slight smile curving her lips as she watched and obviously enjoyed seeing his response to her touch.
She could pleasure and torment him for hours if it meant he could see that smile on her lips while she did it.
Her eyes glowed dark grey, her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were curved into that seductive smile, slightly swollen from their earlier kisses.
‘Dios!’ Gregorio’s back arched off the bed as Lia’s tongue rasped moistly across one sensitised nipple, his fingers becoming entangled in the auburn hair draped across his chest as her lips completely engulfed his nipple with the heat of her mouth and she suckled deeply.
Gregorio was used to being the lover, the aggressor, and while women always responded with kisses and caresses he had never had one take charge of him in quite this way before. It felt strange, and yet somehow liberating at the same time—a measure of the trust that was slowly building between the two of them. Fragile as yet, but growing stronger the more time they spent together.
The things Lia was doing to him with her mouth and tongue made Gregorio’s body throb and ache.
Lia lifted her head to smile at him, her eyes sultry as her hands moved down to unfasten the top button of his jeans, quickly followed by the other three. Gregorio sighed his relief as his desire was no longer constricted by material, only to suck his breath in again as Lia’s hand caressed the length of him outlined against his black boxers.
‘I want to feel your lips and your hands on my bared flesh,’ he encouraged huskily. ‘Please...’ He lifted himself up and pushed his jeans and boxers down to his thighs.
Lia’s breath caught in her throat as her gaze feasted on his fully naked body. She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.
‘You’re—No...!’ she cried as the ringing of the doorbell sounded, shrill and intrusive. ‘God, no...’ she groaned as she buried her face against Gregorio’s chest.
‘Ignore it—’ A second loud ring, longer this time, cut across Gregorio’s protest.
‘It’s probably one of the neighbours, come to say hello to the new tenant.’ She sighed as she sat up.
‘That has never been my experience.’ He frowned.
‘That’s probably because you live in a hotel. I have to answer that,’ Lia snapped with impatience as the bell rang for a third time. Whoever was on the other side of that door was not going to receive a warm welcome from her—that was for certain. ‘Stay exactly where and how you are,’ she instructed Gregorio as she got up from the bed.
‘Sí, señorita.’ Dark eyes glittered with humour.
Lia cast one last, longing look at the lean and muscular length of Gregorio’s body before turning to hurry from the bedroom, straightening her clothes as she went.
The doorbell rang for a fourth time just as she wrenched the door open.
‘Oh, thank goodness!’ A relieved Cathy stood outside in the hallway, Rick at her side. ‘I was so worried about you.’ She gave Lia a hug.
‘I’m fine,’ Lia assured her, her mind racing as she wondered what she was going to do about Cathy and Rick standing on her doorstep when Gregorio was half naked in her bedroom.
No immediate answer came to mind.
‘You seemed so down at lunch,’ Cathy said. ‘I was worried about you, and Rick and I just had to come over and see if you were okay.’
‘I’m really fine,’ Lia repeated distractedly, her mind racing as she tried to find a solution to this dilemma.
There was no way she could get out of inviting Cathy and Rick inside her apartment. Not when they were giving up their evening to visit her. But, conversely, she couldn’t expect Gregorio to spend all evening hiding out in her bedroom.
As if that was really an option! Gregorio went where he wanted and did what he wanted. It went without saying that hiding in a woman’s bedroom would not be what he wanted.
‘You look a little flushed.’ Cathy looked at her in concern. ‘Maybe you have the start of a cold?’
‘Er... Cat...’ Rick said hesitantly beside her.
‘Or maybe it’s the flu?’ His wife continued to fuss. ‘There’s a lot of it about at the moment, and—’
‘Cat!’
‘What is it, Rick?’ Cathy turned to her husband impatiently.
Lia winced as Rick ignored his wife and continued to look past Lia into the hallway beyond. She knew without looking that Gregorio had left her bedroom, after all, and was now standing behind her.
She just hoped he had put his clothes back on first!
‘PERHAPS I SHOULD introduce myself?’
A fully dressed Gregorio—thank goodness—looked at Lia as the four of them stood awkwardly in the sitting room of her apartment. Lia really hadn’t had any choice but to invite the other couple inside.
‘Fine.’ It was the only word she’d seemed able to say since she had opened her apartment door and found Cathy and Rick standing