Then he was surging up to his full towering height again, tearing off his own clothes, and she silently exulted in his wild haste, her eyes feasting on the magnificent maleness being revealed: satin-smooth olive skin, stretched tightly over perfect muscles, his whole physique in pleasing and heart-pummelling proportion. She could barely wait to run her hands over him, to feel his nakedness against hers. He was a beautiful man—his face, his body, the aggressive energy emanating from him, flooding her with an intense sense of being the weaker sex.
Which probably should have frightened her, but it didn’t. It made her feel very female, meltingly soft, her whole being yearning for his hard strength to envelop her, fill her, take her to places she had never been, places she’d read about but never experienced in the few unsatisfying sexual encounters she’d had in the past. This man was different. She knew it in her bones, knew it from the uncontrollable responses he drew from her, knew it from the most basic of basic instincts.
He picked her up and carried her to the bed like a caveman claiming his woman. Her arms were around his neck, hands wantonly kneading the taut muscles in his back, her breasts crushed to the heaving wall of his chest, glorying in the silky heat of his naked skin. He knelt between her legs as he lowered her onto the bed, hovering over her like some dark beast of prey intent on devouring her, and she laughed at her own wild imagination, laughed with a mad joy in his ravenous desire for her.
He choked off her laugh with a long, driving kiss that turned her joy to a feverish passion. She wound her legs around his hips, her feet stroking his legs, pushing at them, goading him to act. The kiss was not enough. It promised. It incited. It tantalised. But it didn’t deliver what she wanted, needed, her whole body screaming to feel him deep inside her, deeper than the kiss, much deeper.
She arched in sheer ecstacy when he finally entered her, plunging hard and fast to the place that had been waiting to welcome him, the place that pulsed with intense pleasure at his filling of the void, so brilliantly intense she could hardly bear it. He retreated from it, then came again, and again, and again, building an exquisite tension that splintered into sweet chaos, bringing wave after wave of euphoria crashing through her entire body.
And still he came, stroking through the waves, riding the crests, sucked into the honeyed heart of her, until he, too, spiralled beyond all control, spilling himself in great spasms, a stream of life eddying and swirling, hot, urgent, gloriously fulfilling her wish to possess some of him…if only for a little while.
She held him to her, filling all her senses with him, smelling the musky scent of after-sex, listening to his ragged breathing, feeling the thumping beat of his heart, seeing the glisten of sweat on his skin, loving the intimacy of it all. He rolled onto his back, carrying her with him, his arms holding her just as tightly, tucking her head under his chin, making her feel like his cherished possession.
It was as though they were cocooned together in a silent world of their own, content to be as one in it. She knew it had to end soon, knew they had to be parted, but not yet…
Please…not yet.
Let this night be long.
One night…before tomorrow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DANTE stretched his legs over hers, squeezed the lush roundness of her bottom, entwined the tangled curls of her hair around his fingers, holding her tightly in his grasp. No way was he about to let her slip away from him. She was something else…this woman.
Apart from stirring the animal in him, she had one hell of a strong pull on his mind. He was used to women in the Anya mould—women who counted the score, knowing how to work the wealthy social scene, giving enough to get what they wanted. Despite Jenny Kent’s different background, he’d still assumed she’d fall in with his plan. It was in her best interests to do so. Yet she was bucking his judgement at every turn.
She cared about deceiving his grandfather.
She cared about deceiving Lucia.
She cared about taking what wasn’t rightly hers to take, though she had taken over Bella’s identity. As a short-term survival measure, she’d told him. Reasonable enough in the circumstances when she’d believed it wouldn’t hurt anyone.
And now she didn’t want to hurt him—the man who’d forced her into this situation—prepared to shoulder the whole fraudulent conspiracy herself rather than take him down with her.
Amazing that she cared so much for others.
But she didn’t realise her confession would not serve any good whatsoever. Lucia would go on being a spoilt brat, making as much capital as she could out of the mistake, crowing over Nonno’s disappointment instead of trying to assuage it by being the kind of grand-daughter that gave him what he wanted given to him. Impossible anyway. Only Bella could do that—Jenny being Bella.
The status quo had to be maintained.
Besides, he wanted more of this woman.
Much more.
Right now she lay passively in his embrace. Physically passive. Passion spent. He wondered what had driven such wild passion in her. This hadn’t been an act of seduction, though he’d meant it to be whatever was needed to keep her on track. From the moment he kissed her…it had to have been a wilful decision or an irresistible impulse on her part to embrace the strong chemistry between them, give it free expression. There’d been no inhibitions to overcome.
Maybe for her it was a release from all the tension he’d put her through this past week—a physical venting of all the feelings she’d kept bottled up behind her wall of silence. And, of course, he was the focus of those feelings, having forced her into this high-pressure situation.
No matter. The sex had been unbelievably fantastic. Which was all to the good. Except…he suspected that sex, however fantastic it was, would not hold her against her will. It could be that she’d let herself have it—taking it from him—because tomorrow she would be gone.
Dante gritted his teeth in determination.
One way or another, he had to make her stay.
He’d try pushing the sex first.
He unclenched his jaw, forced himself to relax, then slowly and languorously rolled her onto her back, propped himself on his side, and gently stroked her hair back from her face, smiling into the eyes that fluttered open, looking at him with an expression of anxious wariness.
‘Tell me why you laughed,’ he invited, using a tone of indulgent curiosity.
It surprised her into a reminiscent smile. ‘It’s so mad…you and me.’
‘But right at that moment you didn’t care.’