How could her father not have warned them of the threat Elio had grown into? He must have known.Musthave. So why the hell hadn’t he stopped him?
The bathroom door opened. She snapped her eyes shut and clung tighter to the sheets around her.
“If you’re pretending to be asleep, you need more practice,” he said in that mocking tone she’d already come to loathe.
“Fuck off,” she muttered.
He laughed. “That’s not very wifely, is it, wife?”
“Stop calling me that.”
The sheets rustled as he climbed in beside her. There was no time for her to even freeze when a large, warm hand clasped her hip and a hard, warm body pressed into her back. The breath that danced into her ear was hot. “But you are my wife, Siena.” He’d twisted her onto her back and climbed between her legs before she had time to catch a breath let alone protest.
“What are you doing?” she demanded tightly. Hoarsely.
Palms either side of her head, he lifted his chest and smiled down at her. He was naked, a hard length jabbing into the top of her thigh clearly definable through the silk of her pyjama bottoms. “Getting a goodnight kiss from my beautiful wife…”The dangerous silver eyes glittered. “Unless, of course, my wife is planning to seduce me now?”
Fisting her hands, she clamped her lips together mutinously and reflexively clamped the inner muscles between her legs shut too.
He lowered himself so his face was hovering only inches over hers, and threaded his fingers through her hair. “Oblige me with a goodnight kiss, and then I will let you sleep.”
She tried to cut her senses off again, but it was as impossible as swimming through treacle. The warmth of his hard body was permeating through the silk of her pyjamas, the scent of his minty breath and freshly showered skin already inhaled into her bloodstream. She hated that she found his scent appealing. She didn’t want to like anything about him, not even his smell.
His face lowered another inch. He was so close to her that she could see all the individual hairs of his beard. “One kiss, wife.”
She swallowed to clear her constricted throat. “One kiss and you’ll get off me and let me sleep?”
“You have my word.”
Not giving herself time to back out, she raised her head enough for her mouth to fleetingly connect to the corner of his lips. “There. You can get off me now.”
He shook his head. The face he pulled was almost sympathetic. “I meant a real kiss, not the kind of kiss you would give to one of your brothers.” He brought his face even lower, his mouth almost a whisper against hers. “Now, let’s try that again.”
His breath merged with hers a beat before his mouth pressed against hers.
Siena, her heart beating painfully hard, closed her eyes and clenched her fists even tighter, as determined to block him from her senses as she’d been earlier. More so.
When Elio had attempted to kiss her earlier, they’d both been fully dressed. Now, he was fully naked, and she had only thinpyjamas on. Earlier, she’d been on her feet, in his power, but with a slim chance of fighting him off if she’d needed to. She hadn’t been pinned beneath him. Hadn’t felt the most essentially male part of him stabbing so close to her sex.
Just lie like a mannequin as he’d so cruelly teased, she told herself, trying harder than ever to block him out. Let him take his kiss. Block it all out.
And maybe she would have succeeded if he’d kissed her with the firm determination of earlier, but this kiss was gentle. Insidiously gentle. Elio’s lips moved in a slow, featherlight caress over hers, so insidious and so gentle that she was barely aware he’d coaxed her lips apart and that her mouth had moulded to his, barely aware that the new taste in her mouth was his breath until she felt the probe of his silken tongue against hers and sensation like nothing she’d ever felt before lanced through her.
Her eyes shot open, and she would have wrenched her mouth away if he hadn’t deepened the kiss. His tongue was no longer probing but exploring, their faces meshed so tight together that the soft stubble of his beard was scratching her skin, his bare chest compressed tight against her breasts, and suddenly she was fisting her hands to stop them from touching him. The tingling warmth in the pit of her stomach had flickered back to life, and now sensation was everywhere, seeping into every little crevice of her body, the inner muscles between her thighs no longer clenched, but pulsing...
He pulled his mouth away from hers and lifted his head to gaze back down at her.
With her heart a burr and heat licking her skin, it took all the courage Siena possessed to meet his silver stare. The corners of his mouth twitched. “Much better,” he said evenly. “You can go to sleep now.”
And then he rolled off her, and the heat and weight of his body were gone.
For the longest time, Siena lay there paralysed. While Elio made himself comfortable beneath the sheets, the sensations still flickering through her were too strong for her to dare move even an inch.
What the hell had just happened, she wondered dazedly.
When she was finally able to get her body to turn over, she could still taste him in her mouth.
* * *
