his mouth round one of her breasts. They were so perfect, two plump pearly-white mounds of womanly softness, with pink super-sensitive tips protruding from their rose-circled peaks. His fingers toyed with one while his tongue toyed with the other. She groaned and arched and gasped and quivered and tried to pay him back with the hungry nip of her teeth. Her hands were everywhere on him now, exploring and stroking, sometimes sending him into paroxysms of shudders when she decided to score her nails into his flesh.
By the time he covered her, she was nothing more than a shimmer of sensation and he took her face between his fingers, then urged, ‘Look at me,’ in a dark husky voice that made her tremble as she lifted her heavy eyelids and showed him dark blue passion-drugged eyes.
He was so very beautiful, she thought hazily. A dark passionate lover with the face of a fallen angel. Rachel held his gaze as he eased himself between her slender thighs and made that first slow silken thrust inside, surprise widening her eyes as she felt his girth and length. She was no virgin, but he was big so maybe experience had taught him caution with a new lover because she could see his fight not to give her all of him gripping the perfect mould of his face.
‘Okay?’ he asked huskily.
She nodded, her tongue making a circle of her lips as she willed her inner muscles to relax. With an erotic slowness that fanned the flames flickering between them, he followed her circling tongue with his own. Her fingers were clutching at the bunched muscles in his shoulders, her breathing reduced to short gasps of air as he pushed deeper still. She could feel the roughness of his thighs pressing along the length of her silkier thighs and the way his lean buttocks clenched as the first sense-shattering ripple of her muscles played along his length.
It was a slow, slow merging like she’d never experienced—a careful all-consuming invasion that sent her mind spinning off somewhere and her senses taking on a singing bright will of their own. She moved restlessly beneath him, wanting all of him—needing all of him—but where her hands clutched his shoulders she could feel their bulging taut muscles were trembling with stress as he held himself back. Impatiently she lifted her hips, closed her eyes, then let her muscles draw him in deep.
Nothing had ever felt like this, Raffaelle thought on a lusty groan as the full pressure of his hips sent her thighs spreading wider apart and she took him into that hot tight tunnel with a gripping greed which sent shots of sensation rippling down his full length.
He claimed her mouth with a devouring kiss and she kissed him back so desperately that he flung caution aside and allowed the powerful flow to take him over. Half expecting protest, he received eager encouragement instead as the tactile muscle play of her pleasure surrounded him in moist muscle-livened heat.
She was amazing, a pearly-white sylph with the moves of a siren. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, her fingernails scoring deep into his flesh. He moved with increasingly harder strokes and she moved with him, taking each driving plunge from his flanks with an exquisite contraction which rewarded each exquisite thrust.
Energizing heat poured into both of them, driving the whole thing right out there into a different world. The real excess began to build like an electrifying life-force that fine-tuned itself between agony and ecstasy, liquidising the senses and shutting down the brain. The white heat of her orgasm took her over, lifting her whole body from the bed in a quivering arch and holding it there while he thrust and shuddered and ground out hoarse words as she pulsed all around him and brought him to a shattering climax that carried them on and on.
AFTERWARDS they lay in a tangle of slack limbs, racing hearts and heated flesh. His face was pressed into the pillow next to her head as he fought for breath and Rachel lay pale as death with her eyes closed, trying desperately to block out the wildly wanton way she had just behaved.
Hot sex with a stranger. Her insides turned over.
She had never done anything like this before in her life.
Which did not make her feel any better about any of it.
Nothing, she suspected, was ever going to make her feel good about it. This was Raffaelle Villani spread heavy on top of her. The man with a notorious reputation for getting off with long-legged blondes.
Now she knew what it felt like to be just one of a large crowd. Self-contempt engulfed her, followed quickly by hot suffocating shame.
Maybe she moved or maybe she even groaned. She didn’t think she’d done anything but he suddenly shifted, levering up his torso so he could withdraw that all-powerful proof of his prowess from inside her, and the worst shame of all came when she was unable to still her damning quivering response.
At least the way he shuddered told her that he was experiencing the same thing.
Pushing up on to his forearms, he lifted his dark head off the pillow and looked at her. One of those thick silences seized the next few seconds while Rachel tried hard not to burst into tears. Her heart was still pounding, the desire to duck and hide away almost impossible to fight. It didn’t help that his expression was so sensuously slumberous, like a man who was feeling very—very satisfied.
‘I…’
It was the only word Rachel managed to drag free from the tension in her throat.
‘You—what?’ he prompted huskily, reaching up with a long, warm, gentle finger to run it along the trembling fullness of her pulsing lower lip.
‘I th-think we got carried away…’ She breathed the words out over his finger because he had not lifted it out of the way.
‘Well, you carried me away,’ he said with an odd half smile that did not seem to know whether to be cynical or just rueful about the whole thing. ‘You were—special.’
‘Th-thank you,’ she mumbled unhappily.
‘Quite an unexpected…gift to come out of this mess tonight, which makes me so glad I did not turn away from it when I had the chance…’
A gift—he saw her as a gift?
Cynical, Rachel named his half smile, and tensed as the warmth still sandwiched between their two bodies began to chill.
‘Well, turn away now, Mr Villani,’ she responded frozenly. ‘Because it’s the last gift you are going to get from me!’
She gave a push at his wide shoulders and obligingly he rolled away to lie on his side, watching as she scrambled off the bed, then began hunting the littered floor for something to wear to cover up her nakedness. Catching sight of her dress lying there on the floor in a brazen swirl, she shuddered, hating the sight of it, and made a wild grab for his shirt instead.
‘You sound very certain about that.’
‘I am.’ Rachel had to fight with the shirt sleeves, which had become tangled inside out.
‘We were really great together…’
‘Well, you’re such a great lover,’ she flicked back. ‘Better than most, if that gives your ego a boost.’
‘Grazie.’
Get lost! she wanted to scream at him. A gift—a gift!
The shirt slithered over her now shivering body and she dragged the two sides together with fingers clutching at the fine cloth like tense claws.
Flushed, angry, and aware that any second now she was going to explode on a flood of wild, uncontrollable I-hate-myself! tears, ‘Is there another bedroom I can use?’ she asked, chin up, blue eyes refusing to do anything other than look directly at his smooth, sardonic, lazily curious face because she was determined to get away with at least some small part of pride intact.
‘You don’t need one. This bed is easily big enough for the two of us.’ He was supremely content in his languid pose.
Refusing to get into an argument with