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CHAPTER NINE

‘YOUDON’TNEEDto carry me!’ Maya scolded as Raffaele scooped her into his arms to carry her out of the limousine into the lift Sal already had waiting for them.

‘Your skirt’s ripped. I don’t want you flashing those beautiful legs for anyone but me,’ Raffaele whispered, his mouth close to her ear and lingering to tug at her soft ear lobe and then settle against the quivering pulse point on her neck that sent her temperature rocketing.

Maya had forgotten about that ripping sound she had heard. She was still in shock at the confrontation she had dared to stage and even deeper in shock at its unexpected success. Of course, Raffaele liked bold, he liked honest, he liked straightforward and that was what she had been, telling him what she wanted upfront, leaving no room for misunderstandings, keeping it simple. But there were still some questions to be asked, she reminded herself firmly.

He carried her into the master bedroom where he had left her sleeping alone since their return to London.

‘Were you planning to sleep with another woman tonight?’ Maya asked bluntly.

‘No. I still feel way too married to consider any form of infidelity,’ Raffaele admitted with convincing cool. ‘I just couldn’t face staying in tonight, so close to you and yet not being free to touch you. It plays on my nerves.’

‘You’re the one who settled himself into a separate bedroom!’ Maya reminded him helplessly.

Raffaele settled her down on the bed. ‘I thought I was being considerate. I thought the last thing you would want was me anywhere near you!’

‘Why? It’s not your fault I miscarried,’ Maya countered gently. ‘It happened and it hit both of us hard but I’m ready to try again...but you’re not?’

‘Once we were in the separate bedrooms it just seemed to make better sense to continue that way and let it all go,’ Raffaele breathed in a raw undertone. ‘I made a mistake forcing you into this marriage. I was trying to put it right as much as I could for your benefit.’

‘I don’t want better sense,’ Maya whispered tremulously, welded to the scorching golden turbulence in his eyes and the amount of emotion he was struggling to contain, thinking yet again of how seriously she had underestimated him and his capacity for feeling and of how that could yet prove to be an insuperable barrier between them. Raffaele was feeling stuff again and he didn’t like it: his frustration was palpable. There was no guarantee that once he came to terms with what he was feeling he would still even be attracted to her, was there?

‘I don’t want sense,’ she said again. ‘I just want you.’

But that definitely wasn’t the truth, Raffaele thought grimly, gazing down into her anxious green eyes with a sharp inner pang: she didn’t want him for his own sake. She wanted him to get her pregnant and ultimately, hopefully give her another baby. It wasn’t that fine a distinction either, he reasoned, considering that any fertile man could have provided the same service. Even so, he would settle for it because he had never wanted any woman the way he wanted Maya and living with her without being intimate with her, he had decided, was an unbearable situation to be in on a daily basis.

And if he had Maya back in his bed again, life would feelnormalinstead of empty and confusing again, wouldn’t it? In reality he suspected that it was that sense of normality, occupation and focus that he craved even more than sex. And now he could stop agonising over such intangible responses because they would soon die away again. Sex was simply sex and Maya simply happened to be the sexiest woman alive. Of course, it was only sex with her that he was missing. Why did he persist in seeing complexity where there was none? She wanted a baby and, if he was honest with himself, he did too now. The child they had lost had marked him as well, creating a space where once there hadn’t been a space in his world. There was nothing complicated about any of that, was there?‘You’re exclusively mine,’she had said. That was what had stirred up all the weird feelings infiltrating him. He didn’t belong to her and she didn’t belong to him, regardless of the rings they wore. But if another man so much as looked at Maya, he would kill him. That went without saying. That was normal, sexually possessive behaviour, he told himself calmly.

With a renewed sense of purpose, Raffaele gently turned Maya over and unzipped her skirt. ‘I thought you didn’t like this outfit.’

‘I thought you did.’

‘Oh, you put it on for me, did you?’ Raffaele laughed softly as he unlaced the back of the leather top. ‘Your seduction outfit? I like it even more. But to be brutally frank, anything you wear has the same effect on me. With you, I’m sort of basic in that field,bellezza mia.’

Maya tensed as he turned her back round to face him again. She gazed up at him, feeling that wild feverish flutter of excitement burning through her like a brand. ‘Basic works for me.’

‘It shouldn’t. You deserve the flowers and the violins and the smooth stuff,’ Raffaele told her earnestly. ‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin with all that.’

‘You’re doing just fine,’ Maya breathed chokily.

‘In the club,’ Raffaele muttered raggedly, his nostrils flaring as he shaped his hands to the firm swell of her breasts, catching the straining peaks between his fingers, ‘I just wanted to smash you up against the nearest wall and get inside you again. I was so turned on, I felt like an animal. That’s what youdoto me.’

A little quiver snaked through Maya as her nipples tightened and sent a darting arrow of heat down into her pelvis, making her shift, achingly conscious of the damp heat between her thighs. ‘That’s OK.’

‘What would you know about it?’ He wrenched off his shirt, angled up his lean hips to unzip his pants, vaulting off the bed to remove them. ‘You’ve only had me...not the best introduction.’

‘I like how you make me feel,’ she told him confidently, determined not to hide from either him or herself when it came to that reality because he made her feel alive as nobody else ever had. It was as though she had gone through life sleeping until he came along, shattering her expectations but still somehow managing to steal her heart.

Raffaele closed his lips to a pouting pink nipple as he shimmied off her last garment, long fingers tracing the delicate folds between her thighs, and her head fell back and she gasped, hips rising in supplication, her whole body tingling with thrilling arousal. Slender fingers lacing into his black hair, she dragged him up to her and found his mouth again for herself, hungrily, urgently tasting him.

Arranging her beneath him, he drove into her hard and fast, stretching her with his length and girth. A rippling shockwave of delight convulsed her womb. It was electrifying, demanding, everything her desperate body craved. He delivered with every forceful thrust of his lean, powerful body until she was riding wave after wave of sensation. It was no gentle reintroduction to their intimacy; it was wild and elemental and incredibly exciting. He shot her to an explosive climax that sent pulsing paroxysms of pleasure rolling through her and she came back from that slowly with his name still on her parted lips.

Afterwards, Maya gazed up into his lean, breathtaking face, the line of faint colour accentuating his exotic high cheekbones, the stubble outlining his wide masculine mouth, and then she collided with his dark deep-set eyes, a scorching sunset gold with satisfaction and her every thought died away.

‘I feel better,’ Raffaele confided, smoothing her damp hair back from her brow and then momentarily lifting back from her to gather her tumbled hair off the pillow and push it out of her way so that she could cool down. A wolfish smile slashed his beautiful mouth as he held her possessively close. ‘Somuch better,bellezza mia. Maybe you’ll let me take you to visit your sister now.’

Maya tensed with discomfiture because it was far from being the first time that he had mentioned that ambition. ‘No,whenI’m pregnant again, not before. I can’t see Izzy and not tell her about the miscarriage, but I can’t upset her with that when she’s expecting herself. If I’m pregnant again, it’ll be OK.’

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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