His Virgin Bride: The Fiorenza Forced Marriage / Bought: For His Convenience or Pleasure? / A Night With Consequences. Margaret Mayo
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compressed her lips. ‘That’s a choice you make,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be that way. Lots of people have tragic backgrounds and yet manage to move on without letting it ruin their life and all their relationships.’
‘I have not let it ruin my life,’ he said. ‘And as for my relationships, that is my business and my business alone.’
‘I think you have let it ruin your life,’ Emma countered. ‘You lock yourself away from feeling. I suspect you’ve done it for years. You’re doing it now. As soon as anyone gets close you put up a wall of resistance. You let your guard down with me last night and now you’re regretting it. That’s why you’re being so cutting and unfriendly towards me now.’
He gave a mocking laugh. ‘So little Emma now wants to be friends with me, does she?’
She tightened her mouth without answering.
He stepped closer and, capturing her chin between his finger and thumb, tipped her gaze to meet his. ‘How far are you prepared to take this offer of friendship?’ he asked. ‘All the way upstairs to my bed?’
Emma felt her stomach go hollow as he brought his hard male body even closer. Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips, her heart beginning to ram against her ribcage as she felt his arrant maleness springing to turgid life against her. He placed a hand in the small of her back, pressing her even closer so she felt the pounding of his blood against her softness.
And then his head came down…
The kiss was explosive. Their tongues wrestled and tangled, darted and dived and submitted and conquered simultaneously. Emma became breathless with growing excitement, her body on fire as his mouth commandeered hers with bruising passion. Her lips throbbed with the pressure, she even thought she could taste blood at one point, but wasn’t sure if it was hers or his, as she had nipped at his bottom lip with just as much fervour as he had hers.
His mouth was still locked on hers as he shoved aside the thin straps of her top and bra, his hands cupping the slight weight of her breasts, her pert nipples driving into the moist heat of his palm. The tingling pleasure wasn’t nearly enough. Emma wanted more of his touch and leaned into him, whimpering her need into the hot cavern of his mouth.
Her breathing came to a screeching halt as he lifted his mouth off hers to suckle on each breast in turn. She arched her back as the rasp of his tongue laved her tender flesh, her fingers grasping him by the shoulders to anchor herself as sensation after sensation coursed through her.
He brought his mouth back to hers, his tongue a thrusting force she welcomed with the shy dart of her own. She heard him make a sound at the back of his throat and her skin lifted in goose-bumps of feverish excitement at how she was affecting him. She could feel the heat and weight of his arousal pressing against her and reached boldly between their locked bodies to explore it with her fingers. He groaned again as she brushed her fingertips over the summer-weight linen of his shorts, the proud bulge of his body making her feel heady with feminine power. She wanted to touch him intimately, she wanted to feel the satin of his flesh in her hands, to shape him, to feel the surge of his blood, to tantalise him the way he was tantalising her.
‘God, I want you,’ he said against her mouth. ‘I am going crazy with you touching me like that.’
His feverish confession incited Emma to slide down the zipper on his shorts, her searching fingers moving aside the final barrier of his underwear. Her breath caught as she felt his body leap against her hand, the smoothness and strength of him rising out of the springy masculine hair making her belly crawl with desire. She looked down at him, her eyes going wide at the size of him as he quivered against her tentative feather-light touch.
‘Harder, Emma,’ he said on a gasping breath. ‘Touch me harder and faster.’
She did as he said, her own body quaking with the need to feel him fill her and explode with the banked-up energy she could feel throbbing against the pads of her fingertips.
He placed his hand over hers, stilling the movement. ‘Stop,’ he said, giving a little shudder. ‘I am going to come right here and now if you do not stop.’
‘Would that be a problem?’ Emma asked on an impulse too strong to withstand. The desire to pleasure him was suddenly irresistible. She wanted to see how much he wanted her, to witness the way his body responded to her caressing touch.
His eyes were so dark she couldn’t see his pupils. ‘I am in the habit of abiding by the principle ladies come first,’ he said.
Emma quickly made a token effort to locate her reasons for not sleeping with him, but not one of them was at the forefront of her brain. All she could think of was the thousands of reasons she wanted to be in his arms: the passion, the excitement, the pleasure and the thrill of experiencing the rapture of his possession.
But if her mind was her traitor, so too was her body. It was already pressing against him insistently as his mouth came down to hers, her arms going around his neck, not even a sound of resistance escaping from her throat as he lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her into the house.
He didn’t take her as far as his bedroom. The largest sitting room was the closest, and, letting her slowly slide down the length of his aroused body to stand on the carpeted floor in front of him, he looked down at her with that scorching gaze of his.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he commanded.
That should have been Emma’s cue to stop this madness, but somehow her hands went to the bottom of her top and pulled it over her head, dropping it to the floor at her feet. She hesitated for the briefest moment before taking off her shorts, leaving her standing before him in her pink lace bra and knickers.
‘And the rest,’ he said, his dark eyes feasting on her hungrily.
Emma felt her belly give two hard kicks of desire. ‘You first,’ she said with a little hitch of her chin.
His lips twitched slightly, but then he wrenched his T-shirt over his head before stepping out of his shorts and underwear, his legs apart, his arms folded across his broad chest.
Emma swallowed as she looked at him. He looked magnificent, lean and tanned and toned and devastatingly virile. His erection was bobbing slightly, as if eager to get on with business. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Had she done that to him?
‘Come here,’ he said with a glittering look.
She took one shaky step towards him. ‘Rafaele…I—’
He placed the end of his fingertip against her lips. ‘You talk too much,’ he said. ‘Right now I want you to feel.’
Emma was awash with feeling; her entire body was tingling and leaping with excitement at what was ahead. She felt as if she had waited her whole life for this moment. He was her nemesis—the one man who had tempted her out of her sensual stasis.
It was a shock to her how much she wanted him. It pulsed through her with such force it almost frightened her. She had been so very determined not to succumb to his potent sexual allure and yet here she was quivering to feel him thrust inside her.
She put her hands behind her back to unhook her bra, her breathing ragged as he watched her reveal her nakedness. His eyes darkened and his throat moved up and down as she tugged her lacy knickers down. She saw his eyes flare as he took in her feminine form, a pulse leaping in his jaw as he fought for control.
‘You are beautiful,’ he said huskily.
Emma felt her heart swell at the compliment. She had never considered herself anything other than average, and yet somehow now in front of him she felt as if she were the most exquisite creature on earth. Her natural shyness fell away, her desire to pleasure him knowing no bounds as she stepped up against him, her softness against his hardness. ‘So are you,’ she said in a breathless whisper as her hands skated over his chest before going lower.
He sucked in a breath as her fingers trailed through the dark hair that arrowed downwards, his erection thick and hard against the