manipulative, si, but it doesn’t mean he’s not worried.”
Shaking her head, she backed away. “But I don’t like—”
Before she could utter another word, Raphael caught her upper arms, tugged her toward him. “I told you what I would do if you did that,” he said with a growl before he touched his lips to hers in a soft buss.
He only meant to shock her, he told himself. To show her that being attracted to him wasn’t the end of the world. That her idea was indeed the perfect solution for now.
Except all his reasons flew away the minute her mouth stilled under his.
Her hands caught on his chest. The long lashes cast crescent shadows on her cheeks. But it was her wide eyes that snagged Raphael. The slumberous desire in them. The soft mewl of pleasure that fell from her mouth as her palms moved and settled over his chest. His heart thundered like a wild beast under her palms, her body’s warmth slowly infiltrating his.
One kiss... All he wanted was one kiss.
One taste of the tantalizing lushness of her mouth. One taste to see if she was as sweet as she sounded.
One moment with the woman who stared at him like no other did. As if he were her deepest fantasy.
“Raphael...” Her entreaty incensed him. How dare she walk into his domain and turn him upside down?
Fingers curled around her nape, he tilted her face and slid his tongue over her trembling lower lip.
She moaned into his mouth—a tremulous whimper that heated his blood. And shuddered. Her body softened and his hardened. Fitting his mouth flush against hers, he moved it this way and that. Heat stirred from that soft friction and her fingers became stiff against his chest. Digging and pressing. Grasping.
He kissed her mouth again and again, a soft slide, a hard press, teasing and taunting, somehow controlling the feral hunger blooming in his blood. “Open your mouth, tesoro,” he pleaded, every muscle curling in heated anticipation.
Her body arched into his touch even as she said, “They’re watching...please...”
And yet, she pressed closer, until her small breasts were plastered against his chest. Until her thigh was encased between his own. He stroked his hands up and down her back, soothing those infinite tremors, willing her to take the leap. Mindless hunger consumed him. “Give in, bella. Kiss me.”
And merciful God above, she did.
Slowly. Softly.
Like a whisper of a butterfly’s wing, she pressed a tentative kiss at the corner of his mouth, flicked his lower lip with the tip of her tongue. From one corner of his mouth to the other, she kept kissing him until it felt like there was a hot poker inside of his own body. Until the control he was exercising spewed hot shivers all through him.
Again and again, standing on her toes, sinking her hands into his hair, pulling him down... All he’d done was touch a spark to dry tinder and she’d exploded. His body’s hunger deepened. His need deepened.
With a growl, Raphael stopped her explorations. Holding her still, he plunged his tongue into her mouth, again and again, the kiss turning instantly carnal. He licked the warm cavern of her mouth, curled the tip of his tongue against hers, begging her with his caresses.
He was pleading her for surrender, for he instinctively knew only sweet entreaty would do with Pia. She wasn’t delicate inside, only outwardly. That sweet innocence of her spirit, he would do anything to keep it intact.
Shuddering, she returned the pressure, her tongue touching his in tentative strokes. His moan imploded, reverberated through his own body as the kiss grew urgent. He kissed her hard and fast, his need only increasing the more he took. Sweet and hot, she was like a drug he’d never known.
Christo, she was responsive, ravenous as he was.
He dug his teeth into her lower lip and tugged. She whimpered. The sound was so soft, so much of submission and surrender.
His erection, already incredibly hard, lengthened against the cushion of her soft thigh. Flipping them, he held her against the wall, pulled her leg up until it was wrapped around his hip. Groaning at the indescribable sensation, he cupped her behind with his hands and pressed her against him tighter. Rocked himself into her groin gently.
Pleasure balled at the base of his spine, warmth seeping through her clothes to touch his skin. God, he wanted to be inside her before he took another breath; he wanted to move inside her while she stared at him with those wide eyes...
There was the sound of a cough, a whispered snarl from Gio. Raphael backed away as if burned. A curse flew from his mouth. His breath burned in his lungs, his body raging to finish what they’d started.
Dio mio, when had he been so aroused from just a kiss? With his daughter in the other room, with his mother and sisters and half of bloody Milan watching? When had his hunger ever betrayed him like that?
Breathing hard, he counted to ten, his erection no less painful at the end.
Eyes big in her gamine face, Pia remained flat against the wall where he’d pinned her with his body. Hair wild from his fingers, mouth bruised from his kisses, eyes wide.
A fierce satisfaction filled him to see the marks of his passion on her. To see her—He cursed again.
Damn it, this wasn’t one of his sophisticated lovers who knew the rules. This wasn’t a woman who wanted Raphael for one quick screw or even a short affair. By her own admission, she didn’t even know her own sexuality, as explosive as it was.
She looked so bewildered and so innocently seductive that it doused the heat running through his veins and replaced it with a strange unsettling feeling. As if he’d opened a door to something much more complex than a kiss.
“Pia?”
She ran a tentative finger over her lower lip and a groan vibrated in his chest. “I feel...as if...” She wrapped a trembling hand around her nape, moved it forward over her neck, placed her palm over her heart. “My heart is thundering. Frank never kissed me like that. No, he tried. It just never felt like that. As if I were sinking and flying at the same time.”
He fisted his hands, her words balling into pleasure at the base of his spine.
“Why did you stop?”
Christo! That was the question she asked? “Because I was this close to taking you against the wall. And I heard Gio—”
“Taking me...” Her gaze took in his balled fists, the muscle jumping under his jaw, moved to his groin and noted the evidence... “Oh.” Liquid longing peered out of her gaze.
He closed the door with a slam on prying ears, his temper getting the better of him. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Look at you like what?” Slowly she pushed up from the wall, a faint tremble to her movements. The passion cleared from her face, her jaw lifting in that stubborn way. “Why are you looking at me like that? As if I’ve done something wrong?”
“It was just a kiss, Pia.” It hadn’t been just a kiss. In thirty-four years, he had never lost his mind like that. He’d never wanted to take a woman against a wall, propriety be damned. He’d never been so desperate to protect and possess someone as if his breath depended on it.
“Was it? Because it feels—”
“Si, it was just a kiss.” He bit out the words so forcefully she flinched. “A show for Gio and my mother and all of Milan.” Ignoring her pale face, he continued on, the ruthless bastard that he was. “I have kissed a hundred women just like that and done a lot more besides. It’s lust, nothing more, nothing to be upset about. Nothing to weave dreams about.
“Just because you react like dynamite to a spark when I touch you, it doesn’t mean we would suit,” he added for good measure.
Color fled her cheeks and he fisted