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I think I moaned, and that was probably uncool but there was no way to keep the sound inside while he was touching me the way he was touching me. His fingers were knowing and clever, sliding over me and into me in exactly the right way and I knew from the way he was looking at me, at the way he kissed me, that this was just the beginning of what we were going to do together. I was about to tell him I couldn’t stand it any longer when he eased away from me and worked his way down my body. He started at my neck and then moved lower and by the time he’d teased and toyed with my nipples I was squirming with desperation. It was almost too much to bear.
When he moved lower, I shifted restlessly but he clamped his hands on my hips and pushed my legs apart, giving himself full access. The first stroke of his tongue made me gasp and I soon discovered he was as talented with that part of himself as he was with his fingers. Each skilled flick of his tongue, each slow, delicious stroke was designed to drive me crazy and it did. I tried to move my hips, tried desperately to relieve the almost intolerable ache, but the hard grip of his hands were holding me still. Not that he was hurting me, but it was obvious there was no way I was moving until he was ready to let me go. I was totally at his mercy and I’d never known excitement this intense. I needed to come, but he wouldn’t let me. Deprived of any other outlet, I dug my fingers into the soft cushions of his sofa.
‘Please, please—’ I couldn’t believe I was begging. I’d never begged a man for anything in my life and I knew I was going to be horribly embarrassed later, but I seemed to spend my whole life in a state of embarrassment around this guy, so I figured at this point it wasn’t going to make much difference. ‘Nico, I really need—’ My words were disjointed, mostly because his tongue was inside me, licking me shamelessly, and now he was using his fingers, too, so that my body was a mass of delicious, shivering sensation hovering on the edge of the incredible. And I was on the edge. Right on the edge. If he hadn’t been holding me firmly I could have moved my hips and finished it myself. But instead of letting me do that, he eased away from me slightly, leaving me hovering between ecstasy and insanity.
‘Tell me what you need, dolcezza.’
As if I wasn’t already desperate enough, now he had to speak to me in Italian, the bastard. His Italian accent and the way he lingered over the word dolcezza almost finished me off.
‘You know what I need—’ I couldn’t believe he could be so cruel, but then he put his mouth on me again and I forgave him everything. Every provocative slide of his tongue was designed to torment me—only, this time he gave me what I wanted.
It was the most intense experience of my life. Everything inside me tightened and then orgasm crashed down on me, the rush of pleasure almost agonizing. And still he held my hips, controlling everything I was feeling until I lay limp and weak.
I thought I heard him murmur, ‘Merry Christmas, Hayley’, but I could have imagined it.
Then he reached down and pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. I’d thought I’d never want to see a condom again after the wedding, but it turned out I was wrong.
I lay dazed, watching as he sheathed himself and then came down over me. I was worried I’d be too sensitive, but just looking at him made me want him again and I wrapped my legs around him and felt his hand slide underneath my buttocks, lifting me. My breathing was shallow and my cheeks were burning, but I didn’t think the heat had anything to do with the flames flickering in the fireplace. It was him.
I was glad our first time was going to be this way because I wanted to look at him.
And he obviously wanted to look at me, too, because he kissed me again, holding my gaze as he shifted his position. I felt him against me, felt him hard and smooth against the slippery wetness he’d created and I held my breath. Still, he took his time. His mouth seduced mine, his hand was hard on my bottom and his gaze was locked with mine and finally he was inside me, sliding deep in a series of slow, expert thrusts. Oh, God. It felt incredible. I didn’t think I could feel like this again so soon. He was hard and thick and I could feel him pulse inside me, feel his own battle to hold back the primal, primitive desire that had sunk its teeth into both of us. He stopped for a moment, his breathing unsteady and I sort of understood because I wanted it to last, too, but I was also desperate. I dug my fingers into the smooth, solid bulk of his shoulders and rocked into him. I felt the tension and strain in his muscles increase.
‘Cristo, Hayley—’ His eyes were impossibly dark and then he gave a groan and surged into me, and I knew he was as out of control as I was. He was deep inside me, moving with a perfect rhythm and I cried out because I’d never felt anything like it. Never. Until a few days before we’d never touched each other, and yet somehow he knew my body. He knew just how to move, how to touch me, how to adjust the angle and the rhythm of his movements so that I felt every inch of him. With each expert thrust he drove me higher and higher and all the time I could feel him, all of him, strength, power, masculinity and I moved with him, my hands on his shoulders and then buried in his hair.
He’d dimmed the lights, but the room was lit by the dancing flames of the fire and the glow of the city at night. We were surrounded by glass and the London skyline. It was like having sex outdoors, only without the risk of frostbite. Afterwards I realized that anyone with a pair of binoculars might have been able to see us from the apartments on the other side of the river, but I didn’t even think about it at the time and neither did he. We were just too into each other.
The whole of me was trembling and held in a state of heightened suspension. I shouldn’t have been this desperate, but I was, and so was he. He said something to me in Italian, his lips dragging along my jaw and then lingering on my mouth. Presumably he didn’t expect me to answer him, which was a good thing because I wasn’t capable of speech. I didn’t know whether it was all the foreplay under the Christmas lunch table, whether this whole thing had been building since the wedding or whether this was sex Italian style (if so, I was emigrating), but I couldn’t hold anything back. Feelings and sensations spread through me. It started somewhere I couldn’t identify, deep in my soul, and then filtered and rippled through my body until I came in a glorious rush of pulsing pleasure. I felt myself tighten around him and heard him groan in his throat as he tried to hold on to control, but the ripples of my orgasm sent him over the edge.
I heard him curse, but he was lost just as I was, and in a way I was relieved his grip on control was as useless as mine. If he could have detached himself from pleasure this intense I would have been worried.
We didn’t stop kissing. Not once. Not as he thrust hard, or as my body gripped his—we just kept kissing and his tongue was in my mouth and mine in his and we just shared all of it. Everything. Every pulse, throb, flutter, moan and gasp.
One of my hands was jammed into his hair, the other clutching his shoulder, now slick with sweat, and I lay for a moment stunned and shaken, just staring up at him trying to make sense of it.
I didn’t know what was going to happen next. After all, this level of intimacy was new to both of us. I suppose part of me, the part responsible for self-protection, was braced for him to just roll away. And I suppose if he’d done that I would have said something like, ‘Well, I think “The Niccolò” is a product with a future,’ or something really glib that wouldn’t reveal how deeply the whole experience had affected me.
I thought that was probably what someone would say after emotionless sex.
But he didn’t roll away. He didn’t pull away. Instead he slowly, gently lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me again. But it was different now. This was a different type o
f intimacy. It was slow, sexy with a hint of gentleness that made my heart squeeze. I hadn’t expected tenderness. Even as I felt myself melt, I felt a faint flicker of panic. My heart was the one organ that wasn’t invited to this party.
This was where he was supposed to do that classic man thing and say and do the wrong thing so that I could flounce back to Notting Hill and spend the rest of the night curled up with Rosie agreeing that men weren’t just from Mars—most of them were from a galaxy far, far away. But he didn’t. He lingered over the kiss, pushed my hair gently back from my face and studied me for a moment and then rolled onto his side and pulled me against him. If he’d done that in my apartment we would have both ended up on the floor, but fortunately his sofa was bigger than ours. His arms held me in a possessive grip and it surprised me. I’d thought him cold and distant and had wrongly taken that to mean he wasn’t good at intimacy. On the other hand I hadn’t anticipated the tattoo either, which just proved I was clueless about this man.
Because I had no choice in the matter I stayed where I was, locked in the circle of his arms, my head on his chest. The differences between us fascinated me and I lay there, absorbing the contrast. My blonde hair draped itself all over him and mingled with the dark hairs on his chest. My skin looked creamy pale against the warmer tones of his. The inner skin of my thigh was soft against the hardness of his.
He lifted his hand and twisted a strand of my hair around his fingers and I wondered if he was noticing the differences, too.
I’d never been the sort to lean on a man, probably because when I was growing up I’d learned first-hand that leaning was a lethal sport that inevitably ended in serious injury. My Mum had leaned on my Dad and he hadn’t exactly proved himself to be a sturdy stake. I’d decided right from the start I was going to stand tall by myself, so I was surprised by how good it felt to be held like this. I had to confess it made me feel safe, which made no sense at all because why would I suddenly feel safe when I hadn’t ever felt unsafe?
He pushed my tousled hair away from my face and tilted my chin so that I was forced to look at him. What I saw there made my heart bump hard. I’d got so used to thinking of him as remote and cold that the warmth in his eyes wrecked me.
‘Bellissima,’ he murmured softly and I didn’t speak any Italian, but I knew he was telling me I was beautiful.
Sexual intimacy had turned into something else and nerves were jumping in my tummy when he lowered his head, delivered a lingering kiss to my mouth and then stood up. He picked up my discarded hair clip, handed it to me and then scooped me into his arms. I locked my arms round his neck because although he’d more than demonstrated how strong he was, I didn’t trust him not to drop me. I wasn’t used to being carried anywhere, but nothing about this night was normal.
‘Why are you giving me my hair clip? Where are we going?’
