know you, Raphael, and I want you,” she said simply.
With rigid movements that spoke of his control, he picked her up.
Pia wrapped her hands around his neck, touching the base of his head with the tips of her fingers. Every inch of him was a pleasure point to her seeking, searching fingers.
She hid her face in his chest. Heat from his skin filtered through his shirt, and warmed her cheek. The thundering beat of his heart matched hers and calmed something inside of her.
Her breath fled her body afresh when he crossed into his bedroom to Raphael’s vast bed and laid her down. Dark gray sheets and curtains made the room utterly masculine. His gaze drinking her in, he pulled his shirt off in one smooth movement.
The strong column of his throat and the width of his shoulders made her chest rise and fall. Taut, gleaming olive skin stretched tight over lean musculature greeted her. Sparse hair covered his defined chest, arrowing down over his abdomen and disappearing into his jeans.
Low-slung, those pants revealed narrow, defined hips.
But it was the front of his pants, showing unmistakable evidence of his desire, that caught Pia’s rabid attention. His shape and size was clearly identifiable even like that.
A rush of wetness slid between the folds of her sex. Pia crossed and uncrossed her legs, a restless slithering in her skin as she heard his rough exhale.
“What does looking at me do to you?”
She jerked her head up. Heat built in her chest and began flowing up her neck and cheeks. His fingers fluttered over the waistband of his jeans and intense curiosity thrummed in her blood.
She was about to work up the courage to touch him when he spread her legs shamefully wide and stepped between them. The naked glory of his chest muted any words Pia was capable of uttering.
With a hard pressure, Raphael pulled at the base of her neck. “What happened when you looked at my arousal, Pia?” He breathed the question into the crook where her neck met her shoulder.
Wrapping her hands around his midriff, she hid her face in his chest again. Everything she was feeling, everything he said, this moment so thick with desire, it was such a profusion of sensations like she had never imagined. “Please, Raphael... I can’t speak it. I can’t...”
With a hard laugh that sent shivers down her spine, he took her mouth in a ravishing kiss that plundered beyond just her lips. It was as if with every kiss, he was stealing away parts of her.
Pulling away from the languorous weight of his kiss, she tilted his head down so she could look at his face. His lips were swollen this time. His nostrils flared, his jaw so rigid that Pia caressed it tenderly.
She drank him in, from the small scar on his upper lip to the small mole near his eyebrow.
“I’m sorry I... I can’t give words to what I feel. I...”
“Nessuno.” A forbidding look descended in his eyes. “Never be sorry for what you are, Pia. Not with me. Never with me. I forbid it.”
His thunderous expression made her smile. His arrogance that he could just forbid her from feeling stuff! “But I heard that men like women to be adventurous in bed.” She loved being with him in this moment. The promise of their near-naked bodies was heady, her desire for him thrilling. But it was the peek inside of Raphael’s head, this insight she was getting into the core of the man that Pia relished the most.
His fingers gripped the collared edges of her shirt, “I do not care what you heard or were told, Pia. Your diffidence only makes me realize how much you must want to let me do this.”
She frowned. “Do what, Raphael?”
The ripping of the buttons on her shirt was the answer to her question.
She gasped at the coldness of his palms as they cupped her small breasts. He pushed her and she bowed back, her trust in him complete. His mouth buried between her breasts, Raphael punctuated his kisses with words. “What I want from you, what will pleasure me, I will teach you, si?”
“I want to please you,” she whispered softly.
His eyes flared hotter. “You will.” Pursing his mouth, he nipped her flesh, leaving a wet trail. “And what will pleasure you, what will send you over the edge, we will discover it together.”
“Si,” she said, floating on a cloud of sensation and never wanting to come down.
In return for her surrender—or was it reward?—he separated the edges of the shirt and pushed it off her shoulders. It hung at her elbows, baring her to his drinking eyes.
They darkened impossibly as he stared at her small breasts with their plump nipples painfully distended.
No man had ever seen her like that and Pia couldn’t bear the potency of the moment, of things that she hadn’t even considered. Of things she had already given over to Raphael by giving him this intimacy.
He pressed a reverent kiss to her midriff, his large hands easily spanning her waist, then a trail of hot, wet kisses up and down, from her navel to her pubic bone.
The cool sheets were a welcome contrast against her burning skin as he busied his fingers with her breasts.
He licked the aching tips as if he were testing their rigidness, their plumpness. Soft flicks, long, leisurely flicks, his gaze telling her without words how much he liked the taste of her. Gauging with those piercing eyes what she liked.
Pia arched her chest into his mouth, pressed her fingers into his nape to keep his mouth at her breast, and then flushed at her own shameless abandon. Eyes dark, Raphael noted it. She closed her eyes.
Every sensation was magnified a million times. A running kaleidoscope of colors burst behind her closed lids, as if her every sense was on the verge of explosion, of new birth.
The rough, sucking sounds he made with his lips, the Italian that emerged from his mouth drove Pia wilder, hotter, wetter between her thighs.
And suddenly his mouth was gone, leaving her desolate.
Her eyes flew open, her breath serrated.
His eyes gleamed with possessive wickedness, a feral satisfaction. “I wish I could show your face to you now, mia cara. Your eyes are so wide that they drown your face, your mouth is pink and swollen from my kisses, your skin is trembling and marred already with my attentions...
“Shall I carry you to the mirror, Pia?” His eyes held hers, a thousand unsaid desires in them, dark fantasies she could see them both drowning in. There would be nothing of her that he didn’t touch, that he didn’t take. Nothing he didn’t own. “Shall I show you what I see? How beautiful you are?”
She opened her eyes, saw his nostrils flare. And blushed hot when she sensed the scent of her arousal thick in the air. A muscled leg thrown over her thighs, he leaned over on an elbow.
“There is nothing shameful about what you feel for me, tesoro. About what you need from me.” His mouth closed over the turgid nipple and pulled, and Pia jerked. She clutched her thighs tight as sensations zoomed and coalesced there. As if there was a direct connection between her nipples and the shockingly wet place between her thighs.
His broad palm descended between her thighs and when Pia squeezed them again under another pull of his wicked mouth over her nipple, he was there, giving her the pressure she craved.
His fingers opened her up, a wicked smile curving his lips. Holding her gaze captive, his sculpted mouth blew on her hot, wet nipple, and his fingers drew mesmerizing circles over her folds, stroking, petting, spreading the dampness.
And then his finger was inside her, stretching her.
Spine bucking off the bed, Pia gasped at the sudden invasion.
“You’ve never done this before?” he asked softly, as if he was afraid to scare her off.
Pia