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He could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘You know damned well it’s not.’
There was a pause. ‘Well, then.’
Deliberately, Rosie made her comment sound like an invitation, or an acceptance—it all depended on how you looked at it. But inside she was praying and hoping as she saw an agony of indecision distorting Corso’s carved features and she wondered which way he would go. Deep down she knew he didn’t really want this, and on one level neither did she. Because nothing but trouble was going to come from it. Instinctively, she recognised that. Every sensible atom of her body was urging her to send him away, and she had spent most of her life being sensible.
Yet tonight Corso Andrea da Vignola had ignited something in her. Something which was making her body ache with an unbearable kind of longing. It wasn’t so much about wanting him—it was more aboutneedinghim and feeling that the rest of her life would seem incomplete if she didn’t have him. She wanted him to douse the flames of desire which were threatening to consume her. To free her from the burden of never having tasted physical pleasure before—a burden which grew heavier with every year that passed.
But it was his call.
It had to be.
‘I don’t have any condoms with me,’ he said.
His words were the antithesis of romance and his brutal declaration should have been enough to kill Rosie’s passion stone-dead, but, ironically, they made her feel more comfortable. Because he wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t saying stuff he didn’t mean in order to get her into bed. He wasn’t talking about moonlight and roses, he was talking about contraception. It felt like a grown-up thing they were engaged in—a very adult way of approaching sex.
‘I do,’ she said.
She saw his look of surprise and, yes, disappointment—he didn’t manage to disguise that in time and she didn’t know whether to be pleased or insulted at his silent judgement. But it didn’t matter whether he thought she was being bold, or whether it wasn’t the ‘done thing’ for a woman to be quite so assertive. She wasn’t seeking his good opinion of her. She just wanted him so badly that she felt she might die if she couldn’t have him.
‘Where?’ he demanded.
She ought to fetch them herself, but the thought of getting up from this bed—exquisitely aroused as she was—to parade in front of him in her unfamiliar evening gown was more than she could bear. Better she was lying here if he changed his mind.
‘In the back of the wardrobe,’ she said breathlessly, ‘is my suitcase. They’re in a little red purse in the inside section.’
He found the suitcase and flipped it open, frowning for a moment as he saw the neat piles of clothes. ‘Why haven’t you unpacked?’
‘Because they’re my normal clothes. You know. The ones which were deemed redundant after your stylist provided me with a new wardrobe for the royal tour.’
For a moment Rosie wondered if she’d said too much. If her sarcastic words would reinforce the difference between them and remind him of how eminently unsuitable she was to be the King’s lover. But wasn’t she jumping the gun? She wasn’t his lover yet and she still might not be. Not when he was regarding the pack of condoms with an expression of bemusement.
‘Are these still in date?’
‘Of course.’ No way was she going to start explaining why she was carrying them around, because he had started to undress and every sane thought flew straight out of her mind. He took off his military jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Next came the long, polished boots—so that all he was left wearing were his dark trousers with the scarlet stripe down the sides and a close-fitting shirt of white silk. He came back to the bed and sat on the edge of it, his free hand stroking her cheek with a hypnotic movement, before tracing the outline of her lips so that they trembled beneath his touch.
‘Now,’ he said.
Too unsure of herself to know how to react, she suspected she was probably much too passive as he peeled the dress from her body, his gaze roving appreciatively over the delicate lace of her new push-up bra and matching French knickers, which he removed so slowly that she wanted to urge him to hurry up. But when he bent his head to lick at each exposed nipple he gave a groan which sounded almost helpless and Rosie began to feel a sense of her own power growing alongside her mounting excitement. Her inhibitions melted like butter in the midday sun and soon she was unbuttoning his silk shirt and spreading her fingers with glorious abandon over the warm, beating satin of his chest.
He made a little sound in the back of his throat as he began to unbutton his trousers, before briefly kicking them away. And it occurred to her—though only briefly—that the King’s military clothes really ought not to be lying in a crumpled heap on a bedroom floor, but by then Corso was back on the bed and pulling her in his arms and kissing her, and the concern flew straight out of her head.
Dimly, she was aware of him reaching for the protection he had retrieved from her suitcase but by then nothing else mattered other than thinking she would explode if he carried on stroking her like that. She thought that, compared to her own sense of wild abandon, his own movements seemed to be cloaked in an element of fierce control. His face was a shadowed mask she could not read and his lips were hard and tense.
He took her to the brink so many times before at last he entered her with one long, deep thrust and Rosie couldn’t hold back her small cry, which was more about rapture than pain. He stilled only fractionally, his narrowed eyes glinting, before continuing with those long and incredible thrusts.
It came upon her when she wasn’t expecting it. When she was so lost in the experience that she relaxed enough to let go. She’d read about it, of course. Descriptions of starbursts and fireworks she’d always considered slightly fanciful. But not any more. If anything, they were understatements. As she began to spasm around him, Rosie felt as if she were being sucked up in a warm jet stream to the top of the mountain, before tumbling blissfully back down to earth again. And that was when the King’s own movements became more rapid. She felt his powerful body jerk as his head fell back and the cry which erupted from his lips was like nothing she’d ever heard. But he drove his mouth down on hers in a hard kiss, as if he wanted to disguise the sound—and for the first time, Rosie wondered where his bodyguards were.
For a while everything felt perfect. She wrapped her arms tightly around his back, with her head resting against the broad width of his shoulder. Almost absently she dropped a kiss onto the satiny skin there and, almost immediately, she felt his body tense as he withdrew from her.
She tried to convince herself it was normal for a man to roll to the opposite side of the bed after having sex with a woman for the first time, but instinct was contradicting her because there was something about Corso’s body language which warned her that whatever was coming next was probably going to be unwelcome.
Because his expression had darkened, and he was actuallyscowling, and Rosie wondered what had caused him to look that way. Maybe she had been a disappointment. Maybe he was already regretting it. Until she told herself to stop being sowet. If she had been confident enough to point him into the direction of a packet of condoms, then surely it was pointless to shrink back into the shadows now.
She wriggled back against the pillows. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Wrong? Doesn’t that qualify for understatement of the year?’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘You mean, other than that it was your first time and you didn’t bother to tell me?’
