The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance. Annie West
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your body.’
‘Honestly?’ Billie prompted, loathing herself for pressing the point.
‘I can’t keep my hands off you, Billie,’ Gio groaned, flipping open the catch on her bra and filling his hands with the bounty he had been admiring. ‘I never could...’
Her wretched brain was still shooting in directions she didn’t want it to. It was urging her to ask why he had then chosen to marry a woman like Calisto and suddenly she couldn’t restrain that need to know any longer and she asked, ‘Then why did you marry a woman half my size?’
There was a sudden deathly silence. His head bent while he toyed with the warm soft curves he had bared, Gio glanced up at her from below his ridiculously long lashes. ‘For all the wrong reasons...and I paid the price,’ he admitted in a roughened undertone.
Billie wanted to dig deeper into the topic but she also knew that she didn’t want to spoil their wedding night with the shadow of past pain and loss. With an almighty effort she cleared her head of such morbid reflections and said nothing at all because regret had coloured every syllable he spoke. Regret was enough to satisfy her, wasn’t it? How much of a pint of blood did she need to satisfy her damaged ego? Enough blood to cause ructions in their shiny new marriage when Gio had already mentioned a desire for another child? She thought not, decided it was better to leave the past where it belonged and look to a brighter future.
Gio captured a turgid nipple in his mouth and toyed with it until it was throbbing. Billie rested back, letting the heat flow through her, warming and moistening ever more sensitive parts. Her hips shifted, her fingers raked through his short hair, eyes sliding shut as she held him to her with a deep sense of happiness. Another baby? What a sign of optimism on his part! He was a child of a broken marriage and she was convinced he would not risk bringing a second child into the mix if he believed their relationship was likely to break down.
‘Tomorrow’s going to come too soon for me,’ Gio complained huskily as he tugged up her knees and peeled down her knickers in one smooth operation. ‘But if I make love to you all night, you’ll be too tired to meet my family in the morning.’
‘You’ve got every night with me that you want now,’ Billie whispered as he shifted to trace the moist cleft between her legs with a roving forefinger and she quivered instantaneously, every tingling nerve ending instantly clamouring for more.
‘And I’m going to make the most of every opportunity. I’m sex-starved,’ Gio confided, working a trail of lusty nipping and sucking across the upper slope of her breasts to her throat. ‘I never could get enough of you. Now I’ve finally got you round the clock, I’ll be very demanding.’
‘Promises...promises,’ Billie quipped, warmed by that threat, for the more Gio expressed his desire for her, the more secure she felt.
As excitement began to claim Billie, conversation died because she couldn’t think straight for long enough to vocalise. He touched her with the unerring skill of an expert and she writhed, hands digging into his cropped black hair as he used his mouth to bring her to a shattering climax.
Weak with satiation in the aftermath, she loosed a startled gasp as Gio flipped her over onto her stomach. ‘What—?’
‘I’m in a very dominant mood, moro mou,’ Gio growled, gripping her hips and driving hard into her passion-moistened depths, stretching her to the limit with his length and girth and sending a renewed and arousing wash of hunger through her.
And Billie had always secretly liked it when Gio was forcefully passionate in bed. Then as now, his dominance somehow made her feel irresistible. A helpless shudder of response snaked through her quivering body, her breath rasping in her throat, her heart hammering as he plunged into her with pounding erotic urgency. It went on and on and on, igniting the bittersweet torment of need inside her again. A carnal finger stroked and encircled her clitoris and the tightening knot of tension in her womb started up a chain reaction. A string of tiny inner convulsions pulsed along her inner channel and finally merged into a rapturous explosion of soul-destroying pleasure.
‘That’s something you’re very, very good at,’ Billie mumbled unsteadily just as Gio began to pull away from her and she grabbed his arm, eyes flying wide in the candlelight. ‘No, don’t, don’t move away. I hate it when you do that.’
‘It’s just the way I am,’ Gio framed, frowning.
Billie brought up another hand to grip his shoulder. ‘But it doesn’t have to be like that. You can hug Theo.’
‘That’s different.’
Billie knew she was hitting barriers and that possibly she hadn’t chosen the best time to complain, but his habit of shifting away from all contact in the immediate aftermath of intimacy had always hurt her feelings. ‘You’ve never had a problem with hugging me if I’m upset about anything, have you?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘So, pretend I’m upset,’ Billie urged with all the enthusiasm of a woman who believed she had found the perfect solution to his lack in the affection department.
Gio settled dazed eyes on her. ‘What?’ he breathed in disbelief.
‘After sex,’ Billie told him bluntly. ‘Just think. She’s upset, now I have to hug her.’
‘I don’t want to think of you being upset after we make love.’
‘Have you got an argument against absolutely everything?’ Billie asked him in a pained tone. ‘I was trying to work out a strategy which would suit us both.’
‘Forget the strategy,’ Gio advised, anchoring both arms firmly round her and hauling her back against him with gritted teeth. ‘I’ll work on it...OK?’
‘OK,’ Billie agreed, satisfied, running an exploring hand down over his hair-roughened torso and then teasingly lower in an operation destined to prove to him there would be advantages to a change of behaviour that brought him physically closer.
‘OK,’ Gio said again but in a deep husky purr. ‘Very OK...’
An hour later they were outdoors, lying relaxed on the huge upholstered recliner on the deck and watching the flames from the brazier shooting up against the night sky. Discarded dishes from the packed fridge were scattered around, evidence of the substantial meal they had contrived to eat. Billie laced her fingers round the stem of her champagne flute and heaved a contented sigh. ‘It’s incredibly peaceful here with just the sound of the sea in the background.’
‘I always loved that sound when I was a kid. My parents used to bring us down here and...’ Gio’s voice trailed away into silence.
Billie glanced up at him, aware of the tension now stiffening his long, lean length against her. ‘And...what?’ she pressed. ‘It’s great that you’ve got some good memories of your childhood.’
‘My sisters and I were very young then. It was long before my parents broke up...before my father met the love of his life.’ Gio voiced that emphasis with biting derision.
‘Oh...and she was?’ Billie jumped straight into the opening he had given her because he had always avoided the subject of his parents’ divorce.
‘An English fashion model called Marianne. She was his mistress and when she became accidentally pregnant—with the boy who later turned out not to be my father’s—he decided that he couldn’t live without her.’
‘Oh,’ Billie said in quite another tone, discomfited by the similarities she saw to their own previous relationship, wondering if she was at last learning the reason why Gio had always maintained an emotional distance in their relationship.
‘My sisters and I returned from boarding school for our summer break and learned that our whole lives had changed. My father had divorced my mother and stuck her in an Athens apartment. Suddenly we weren’t welcome on Letsos or in our childhood home any more because my