Her lashes lowered. She felt excited, which was far more disturbing. ‘I am shocked that I’m doing this.’
Her breath came in short painful gasps as he leaned forward and bent his dark head to hers. This close she could see the gold tips on his long dark lashes and the fine texture of his golden skin. As he got closer still things went out of focus like a kaleidoscope and the wild beating of her heart became louder and faster.
Anticipation tightened like a fist low in her belly as her lips parted under the gentle but insistent pressure of his mouth.
As his tongue slid into her mouth Dervla moaned low in her throat and grabbed his shoulders, plastering herself up against his lean, hard, vital body as she kissed him back with an eagerness that was close to desperation.
‘Dio Mio!’ He drew a ragged breath and angled his head to look into her face as they finally broke apart. ‘You are everything I imagined and much, much more.’
The glow of dark desire she could see shimmering in his eyes took her breath away and made her head spin even before his lips began to move once more with sensual teasing persuasion against her soft mouth. His hand moved to the curve of her breast and Dervla’s knees turned to water.
‘Not enough!’ she moaned after a few minutes of this torture.
Gianfranco dragged his mouth away from hers fractionally and, breathing hard, he studied her flushed, aroused features. ‘Not enough of what?’ he asked thickly.
Dervla sighed and ran the tip of her tongue across the sensual curve of his upper lip. ‘You,’ she confided.
‘You want more of me?’
Eyes dilated, she tilted her head back to bring his dark features into focus. ‘No, I want all of you.’
Gianfranco sucked in a deep breath through flared nostrils and, winding his fingers into her bright hair, pulled her head farther back, exposing the long graceful curve of her pale throat.
Dervla’s lids drifted closed as he pressed his lips to the hollow at the base of her throat and then made his way by means of a series of erotic kisses up to her mouth.
She gave a startled little cry as he suddenly swung her up into his arms. ‘What are you doing?’
He strode towards the door and kicked it open. ‘I don’t want the first time to be on the kitchen table.’
‘I don’t mind where it is so long as it happens.’ Did I just say that?
CHAPTER NINE
BREATHING hard, but not, it would seem, from the exertion of running up two flights of stairs carrying her—Gianfranco had taken them two at a time and not shown any signs of fatigue—he kicked open the door to this huge bedroom dominated by a large four-poster.
Probably the rest of the furnishings were just as impressive but Dervla was not actually interested in the décor. Her entire attention was focused on the man who laid her down carefully in the middle of the vast bed, before switching on a lamp.
He was still breathing hard as, kneeling on the bed, he tugged his shirt from his trousers and fought his way out of it.
Dervla’s gasp was audible. Desire clutched low in her belly as she stared at him in silent awe.
He was hard and sleek, his golden streamlined body carrying not an ounce of flesh to blur the perfection of the muscle definition in his chest and ridged, hair-roughened stomach.
She wanted to touch him, feel his bare skin against her own; she wanted to taste him, and feel his hands on her body. She wasn’t aware that she had expressed her growing desperation to fulfil these ambitions until he slipped the buckle on his belt and promised in a throaty drawl, ‘You will, cara, you will …’ His eyes didn’t leave her face for a second as he slid his trousers down over his narrow hips and kicked them away. He stood there for a moment wearing just a pair of boxers that did little to disguise the strength of his arousal.
Propped up on one elbow, he arranged his long lean length alongside her. He trailed a line of kisses down the curve of her jaw as he reached for the hem of her top.
Dervla gave a sensuous little wriggle to assist him as he lifted it over her head and flung it across the room.
Feeling the air on her overheated skin and enjoying the sensation, she laid her hands flat on his belly and felt the convulsive contraction of muscles underneath his silky, hair-roughened skin.
‘You have bruises,’ she whispered, her eyes darkening as she traced the uneven outline of one of the livid areas of discolouration along the crest of his right hipbone. ‘It must have been agony!’ she accused, thinking of how he had maintained his silent vigil.
‘No,’ he said, taking her hand in his and moving it lower. ‘This was agony,’ he contradicted thickly. ‘This is agony,’ he rasped throatily as he pulsed hard and hot against the constraints of her hand.
He didn’t just fill her hand but her mind and soul, stretching her emotional capacity to the limit and onto a new, mind-expanding level.
‘You’re the only medicine I needed, or wanted. I knew that I would find the comfort I needed in your body.’
There was dark colour scoring his jutting cheekbones as he held himself above her, staring with hot, hungry eyes at the rapid rise and fall of her straining breasts inside their lacy covering.
‘Virginal white,’ he murmured, his smile inviting her to share the joke as he reached for the front-fastening clasp.
Some joke!
The unintentional reminder made Dervla tense, but then his hands were cupping her bare breasts, weighing them in his big hands. The incredible sensation left little room in her pleasure-soaked brain for misgivings.
Her eyes drifted closed as she listened to his accented voice, telling her she was perfect and sounding flatteringly shaken about the discovery.
Any residual qualms totally vaporised when his thumb began to tease first one straining peak and then the other into burning life before he applied his lips and tongue to the same task.
Convulsed with pleasure, her entire body responding to his lightest touch and caress, she was barely aware of his stripping away first her jeans and then her lacy-edged pants until she felt his fingers slide into the bright curls at the apex of her legs, searching for the slick, hot centre of her.
Dervla shuddered with a nameless need as he pressed soft kisses to her closed eyelids and touched the tight, throbbing, sensitised flesh at her centre. The shockingly intimate invasion drew a keening cry of startled pleasure from her tight, aching throat. His caresses took her to the brink of something outside her experience but he pulled back quite literally before she crested the peak.
‘Oh, God, I’m …’
‘You’re perfect; we’re perfect,’ he told her before he slid down her body, kissing his way down the gentle curve of her stomach. ‘This,’ he added, kneeling between her parted thighs, ‘will be perfect too.’
Dervla sighed as she stared greedily at his magnificent glistening naked body. She didn’t doubt for a moment his ability to deliver perfect in many forms. It was only her doubts concerning her ability to fulfil his apparently pretty high expectations of her that brought a faint frown to her damp brow.
‘I have to have you … Dervla, you are driving me out of my mind.’
She responded by looping her arms around his neck, arching her back and pressing her bare breasts provocatively to his chest.
She was conscious of his breath hot on her neck as he pushed his way past the swollen lips of her resisting flesh and into her.
Her body arched under him and a sigh of amazement was wrenched from the very depths of her being.
‘Per