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On the brink of fighting loose again, Sophie paused and fixed huge anxious green eyes on his lean, strong face. ‘Truthfully?’
He spread long brown fingers to frame her cheekbones and his hands were not quite steady. ‘I’m burning for you, querida.’
She felt the truth of it in his raw urgency and she trembled. ‘Then stop playing games—’
‘I’m not playing.’ Antonio claimed a long, hard, potent kiss that made her grip his arms for support and left her head swimming. ‘Believ
e me, I didn’t bargain on this—’
‘You can’t plan everything—’
‘But I do,’ he growled in frustration, coming back for another fierce and hungry taste of her. ‘This shouldn’t be happening—’
Her small fingers delved into his luxuriant black hair to pull his head back. ‘Then…stop!’
His smouldering golden gaze struck sparks from hers. ‘I can’t…I wanted you the first time I saw you nearly three years ago. Now I want you even more.’
At that admission, her troubled eyes shone like stars and she screened them. But she still wanted to shout her joy from the rooftops. What he felt wasn’t love, but then she had never hoped for love from Antonio. His desire was enough to satisfy her deep, desperate need for some kind of response from him. It wouldn’t last, naturally it wouldn’t, she thought feverishly. But a desire to match her own was there for the taking now and she was not too proud to seize the moment.
He crushed her lush lips beneath his again. The sweet, stabbing invasion of his tongue in the tender reaches of her mouth made her gasp out loud. He lifted her effortlessly up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. His strength left her breathless. Resting her down on the bed, he undid the towel. Unprepared for that instant unveiling, she crossed her arms over her nakedness in an instinctive movement.
Antonio surveyed her startled eyes and hot cheeks in surprise. ‘You can’t be shy with me…’
‘I’m not shy,’ Sophie denied to the best of her ability, taking advantage of his momentary stasis to shimmy away. Pulling back the bedding, she slid speedily under it with more than a suggestion of a crab scuttling below a rock for cover. ‘Not the slightest bit shy,’ she added with determined emphasis, and she sat up to embark on the buttons on his shirt in an effort to distract him.
‘Let me look at you, then.’ Antonio closed long fingers into the sheet she had wrapped below her arms and tugged it down before she could even guess his intent. The tantalising jut of her pert breasts provoked a ragged groan of appreciation from him. He caught her to him with one powerful arm, bent her back against him and explored the firm creamy swells with unashamed expertise. His slightest touch set her tender flesh on fire. Her teeth clenched, her hips shifting on the sheet beneath her. When he toyed with the rosy crests that were swollen and sensitised by his attention, she was unable to suppress the moan rising in her throat.
‘You’re even more beautiful than I thought you would be, querida,’ Antonio breathed thickly, hungry dark golden eyes welded with all-male admiration to the ripe, rounded curves he had revealed. ‘And a hundred times more responsive.’
Straightening up to his full height, he finished unbuttoning his shirt and peeled it off. As he shifted position sleek, strong muscles flexed in his strong brown torso and accentuated the powerful breadth of his chest and the rock-hard flatness of his abdomen. Ebony curls liberally shaded his pectorals. She pulled in a sudden gulp of air to her starved lungs. Her heartbeat had quickened to a pulsing thump behind her breastbone: he was spectacularly male. She couldn’t drag her mesmerised attention from him until he unzipped his trousers and embarrassment claimed her, forcing her to drop her gaze.
‘Come here,’ Antonio urged softly.
She scrambled up on her knees, glancing up at him from below her curling lashes, her face burning from the awareness of her nudity. With a husky groan, he just reached for her as though she were a doll. With his hands spread across the feminine swell of her hips, he raised her higher and clamped her hard up against his lean muscular frame. Warm and silky smooth and interestingly rough, his body was an electrifying mix of different textures against her softer skin. She was insanely aware of the hot, hard thrust of his erection and of her own feverish yearning for his touch. She felt programmed, enslaved by the wanton promise of the pleasure he had already given her.
‘Touch me,’ she mumbled shakily.
‘Until you beg me to stop.’ He tumbled her back across the bed and came down to her, strong and bronzed and pagan in his sexual intensity. He lowered his proud dark head to the prominent pink buds of her breasts and let his tongue lash the straining tips. She arched her spine and cried out when he intensified that sensation with the graze of his teeth and his knowing mouth. Heat burned low in her pelvis.
‘Don’t stop,’ she whispered urgently, shifting her hips in a restive movement against the sheet, wildly, wickedly conscious of the growing ache at the very heart of her.
Golden eyes molten with desire, Antonio parted her thighs. With sure skill he parted the cluster of curls crowning her womanhood and touched her where she had never been touched before. That intimacy smashed her tenuous control to pieces. He found the most sensitive spot in her entire body and a burning, drowning sweetness of sensation took hold of her and blanked out all other awareness. As the twisting spiral of pleasure tightened to the edge of near pain inside her, she writhed.
‘Antonio…’ His name was like a prayer on her lips. She could no longer contain the wildness sweeping over her in potent waves. Her hips squirmed up in a sinuous rhythm as old as time, tiny whimpers breaking low in her throat.
‘Enamorada…you intoxicate me,’ he confessed fiercely as he came over her. ‘I intend to give you more pleasure than anyone has ever given you.’
When he drove into the slick, wet depths of her, excitement roared through her every skin cell with the ferocity of a forest fire. The sudden sharp pain induced by that bold invasion took her entirely by surprise. Her eyes widened in shock and she muffled her involuntary cry against his shoulder.
Antonio stilled and looked down at her. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No…’
He stared down at the luminous clarity of her beautiful eyes. ‘I know I hurt you,’ he breathed huskily. ‘Was I too rough?’
Hot pink washed her hairline, for she was mortified but far too proud and cautious to admit that he was her first lover. ‘Of course not—’
‘You excite me beyond all control,’ Antonio confessed thickly, sinking by slow, skilled degrees into her now more receptive body. ‘I forgot how small you are, how fragile.’
His every subtle movement engulfed her in hot, sweet pleasure. The tempo stepped up. Passion gripped her in a flashing surge of high-voltage sensation. He sank his hands below her hips and tipped her up to him, plunging back into her with raw, demanding urgency. Her heart hammered and she fought to breathe in short little spurts. Need and excitement had combined and the ache for fulfilment was a torment. Her hunger peaked in a shattering release. Losing herself in the voluptuous shock waves of convulsive pleasure, she cried out in joy and amazement.
In the aftermath, Antonio curved her round him, kissed the top of her head and studied the ornate ceiling with brilliant golden eyes. He had both arms wrapped round her in a possessive hold. He had never had such fantastic sex. And she was his, signed, sealed, delivered, even ringed. He wanted to punch the air and shout. Indeed he felt hugely satisfied with life in general. He had ditched a mistress who had been downright boring and, if truth be told, a whiner, only to discover that his bride had a magnificent gift for passion. And unless he was very much mistaken his bride had brought him a very special gift that he had never dreamt he might receive on his wedding night: she had been a virgin. He thought that was absolutely amazing. He thought it was fate that she had miraculously conserved her perfect body for him. He did indeed owe her a humble apology for assuming the worst that night he had seen her coming off the beach. At about that point he remembered their agreement and he was stunned that he could have forgotten it…
Sophie was happy. In fact she could never recall feeling quite so happy except of course in those dreams she sometimes recalled when she first wakened. Wonderful dreams in which she wandered hand in hand through sunlit places with Antonio. Antonio had had a starring role in her best dreams for so long that he was almost a fixture there. And now she had learned that he lived up to every secret fantasy she had ever had about what he might be like in bed. His future in her d
reams was now assured for a lifetime, she conceded buoyantly and snuggled closer.
For the first time in almost three years she was letting herself recall the fact that she loved Antonio. Although he was destined never to know it, he had stolen her heart at their first meeting. She had yet to decide what she found most attractive about him. His cleverness, his looks, his wonderful manners, his fabulous smile? Whatever, even though she had known even then that loving him was stupid, no rival had managed to supplant him. That was why she was so oversensitive and prone to losing her temper around Antonio, she acknowledged ruefully. He could hurt her so easily and when it came to him she lost all common sense. Did that explain why she had just given her virginity to a male who had announced up front that he wanted to be a womaniser at the same time as he pretended to be a husband? So what was he pretending to be now? Her happy feelings dive-bombed faster than the speed of the light.
Antonio decided that he was doing far too much thinking. Why complicate things? Why look for trouble that wasn’t there? He rolled Sophie off his chest, confined her beneath one powerful arm and kissed her breathless. ‘You should have warned me that you were a virgin, querida,’ he told her softly. ‘I could have made it less painful.’
Emerging from a kiss that made her head swim and her toes curl, Sophie was aghast at that comment, for it meant that he had noticed what she had assumed he would not. ‘What gives you the idea that I was a virgin?’ She forced a laugh, for she was convinced that there was no way he could know for sure. ‘I mean, how likely is that at my age?’
‘Very unlikely,’ Antonio agreed silkily, pinning her against the pillows and rearranging her into a rather more intimate position. ‘But please don’t get the idea that I’m complaining about your lack of form in the bedroom—’
‘No?’ Sophie’s interruption was a little jerky because her teeth were gritted. That reference to ‘form’ which was normally applied to a horse and its racing performance, struck her as the ultimate in humiliation. Any minute now he’d be slapping her on the rump and offering her extra oats.
