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But she would not be ignored. Not in this. Not now and not ever again.
She picked up her skirts, stepped over the threshold of the shower fully clothed, and ducked beneath one powerful arm, to bring herself in between them, facing him. He yanked his head back, finally unable to escape or deny her.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded, but left his arms where they were, still braced against the wall, encasing her, as if perhaps teasing or testing himself, she couldn’t tell.
The water soaked
into the dress, making it impossibly heavy, but she didn’t care. It turned her hair into thick ropes that broke free from the pins that had held them in place and fell around her shoulders and down her back. But all she wanted, all she could think of was his hands on her skin, the feel of him beneath her tongue, and touch. She reached up and cupped his jaw, running her thumb over the rich dark beard that was surprising in its softness. She gazed up at him as rivers of water poured over them both, each now breathing as hard as if they’d run a marathon.
‘You need this. I need this,’ she said before sweeping her hand around his neck and pulling him down to meet her lips, just as she said, ‘We need this.’
* * *
The moment his lips pressed against hers, Matthieu’s mind and heart were consumed with need. She might have offered an alternative vision of how the press viewed him, but how he had viewed her had not once changed. She was irresistible. Her soft, wet slicked skin, the plumpness of her lips, he wanted it all. He braced himself against the cool concrete of the shower enclosure and devoured her, his tongue plunging deep, teeth gently scraping against the softness of her. Her hands were wrapped around his neck, clinging to him as much as he wanted to cling to her, her breasts moulded against his chest, bump against abdomen. He held himself back, bridged against the wall, yet consumed everything she could offer him with her mouth, her touch. He could have sworn he was shaking with the effort of fighting the need for restraint and the desire for more.
For an entire month he had avoided this, avoided her. Not because he hadn’t wanted her. But because he had. Because he’d wanted her with such a raw need that it had threatened to undo him. But after tonight, after all the emotions dredged up from where he had kept them locked and hidden away, by both the press and the painting, he wasn’t strong enough to deny him, them, this. And damn him, but he was going to take everything she had to give.
‘The baby?’ he said, the last barrier to lifting the leash on his desires completely.
‘Will be absolutely fine,’ she assured him, pressing another kiss to his lips. And it was the sweetest thing he thought he’d ever heard.
Leaning back and pulling one hand from the wall, he wrapped it around her back, bringing her closer to him, pressing her against the length of him, bringing a half laugh from deep within his chest. ‘You’re still wearing your dress.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’ she demanded, not full of coquettish intonation. More of a challenge—a challenge and a silent demand.
He wanted to growl and beat his chest, not like the beast she denied that he was, but the animal she was turning him into being. He wanted to tear it from her body. As the water cascaded down from above, he loosened his hold on the wall and reached down to fist the layers of material by her thigh. The soaking wet bundle leached more water, pooling over his hand and down his arm. He released his hold on the material and reached for what he really wanted. Her.
‘Turn around,’ he commanded and, casting him a look of sheer unwarranted trust, she did, turning her head to the side and exposing the long thin column of her neck to the hot sprays, causing her hair to dip and fall over one shoulder. Between her shoulder blades where each side of the dress gathered was the top of the zip. His fingers went to it and slowly, oh, so slowly, drew the tab down from the top, the weight of the waterlogged silks pulling the dress apart, exposing the length of her spine, the curve just beneath his fingertips so that he was unable to stop himself from tracing the progress with his thumb. She shivered beneath his touch and he wanted more. So he pressed open-mouthed kisses across the skin of her back, delighting and devouring in each inch that was revealed to him.
With one arm wrapped around her, covering her breasts, and the other drawing the zip down to the base of her spine, he felt as if he held the most precious thing in the world in his arms and that he was not, and never could be, worthy of such a thing.
She arched into his touch, as if desperate to feel more, and he could not deny her any longer. Slowly, he turned her in his arms, gazing into the dark brown orbs that studied him with an intensity he felt deep within him. He watched as she lifted a hand and brushed the material of the dress off her shoulders, fascinated as it poured from her skin, and she was left standing before him in nothing more than her panties, rivulets of water glistening trails of silver across creamy skin that he wanted to trace with his tongue.
She reached for his hands and pulled them gently around her belly and his thoughts splintered between the firmness of the slightly strange shapes beneath his palms and the fact that their child was within her, protected by her, loved by them both. He worried about his hands, so large, and Maria and their child so small. And she smiled up at him as if sharing the same thought.
‘Surrounded by us both,’ she whispered to him above the pounding of the water around them. Was it wrong to want such carnal things from his wife when she was pregnant with his child? he wondered. Ever since Clara, he’d always believed that intimacy needed to be emotionless, no expectation of hope or betrayal, desires simply and easily requested or refused—no judgement or pressure. But this? This sense of attachment to his wife was threatening to cut him off at the knees.
Because suddenly his needs and wants didn’t matter—all that mattered was Maria and what she wanted and desired and how he could give them to her. When she had come into his shower, all he had wanted was to erase the night, to delve into sensual satisfaction that would rob him of thought and want, but now? Now he didn’t care if he lived on a rack of his emotions for the next twenty years of his life. All he wanted was her to have every indulgence, every desire, want and need met and exceeded.
He hooked a thumb into the side of her panties, slowly drawing the material down over her hips and thighs, and pushing them to the floor. With one hand, he reached for her neck, pulling her into a kiss as he delved between her legs with the other, drawing a gasp from her lips, one that he immediately consumed, pulling her breath deep within him, wanting everything, her moans, her cries of pleasure. Almost instantly she bucked against his hand, quivering with unchecked arousal that matched his own. He felt the tremor run across her skin beneath the layer of slick water that poured down from above them. He cursed, so close she was to orgasm that he feared it would call forth his own. His hard erection jutted against the smooth firm curve of her abdomen, again and again as her moans grew sensually urgent and full with need.
Words, begging and pleading, fell from her lips and he wanted to give her everything. He dropped to his knees, supporting her with his hands around her backside, the glorious feel of it filling the palms of his hands, more exquisite than he could have imagined.
He followed the path of his thumb across her clitoris with his tongue and he preened beneath the stifled moan of pleasure that her hand blocked from leaving her mouth. Ruthlessly he drove her to the edge and back, over and over again, because he wanted, needed, her as lost in her passion as he was.
As her cries mounted, so did his need, but he held himself firmly in check, because it was no longer about him and his wants, but her. She came apart in his hands and mouth and he had never experienced anything more magnificent or beautiful in his life.
* * *
Maria was shaking and she didn’t care, clinging to Matthieu’s shoulders as if it were the only way she could remain standing. Standing. She had come to him for his needs and he had seen only to her own, but couldn’t find it within herself to feel regret and instead focused on the soaring pleasure shimmering through her body.
She had thought that she’d imagined it, misremembered the dizzying heights Matthieu had taken her to that night almost five months ago now. But she hadn’t. Instead, she wondered whether time had in fact dulled her memory because every touch, kiss, caress rang through her body like a song—the melody both familiar and yet strangely new and wonderful.
She let her head fall back as warm water cascaded over her. Matthieu rose and took her
in his arms in a way she’d only dreamed of.
‘You look like a mermaid,’ he said, the honey-coloured glint in his eye highlighted by the surrounding emerald green.
