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How infuriating that the first woman he’d been unable to read properly in his thirty-two years on this earth should be his wife.
There was movement behind the bathroom door.
Amadeo took a deep breath, stretched his neck and rolled his shoulders.
Elsbeth took one last deep breath for luck and opened the bathroom door.
Her heart slammed against her ribs to see Amadeo in bed waiting for her, a complete reversal of all the other nights they’d shared together. A half smile played on his sensual lips and he lifted the bedsheets off her side of the bed in invitation.
The short walk from bathroom to bed was the most excruciating taken in her life. With Amadeo’s gaze openly on her, she didn’t think she’d ever been so self-conscious, so aware of her naked breasts moving beneath the silk of the white nightdress.
She climbed onto the bed with all the elegance she could muster. No longer feeling she needed permission to turn her own bedside light off, she pressed the switch so only the dim light on Amadeo’s side illuminated the room, lowered herself under the sheets and held her breath.
Now Amadeo would turn his light off. He would climb on top of her. He would kiss her. His hands would roam her body. His fingers would slide up her nightdress, discover she was ready for him—her body was her brain’s ultimate betrayer—and then he would take her. He would hold his climax off until she’d had her climax—no one could say he wasn’t a gentleman—and then, when they were both done, he would roll off her. If she was lucky, he would leave immediately and let her get on with self-soothing the gap their tender-less coupling left in her heart with his still-warm pillow.
She knew she was being unfair and making it seem as if they were two robots following a script when, during the act itself, she felt so much, but she needed to be unfair otherwise her growing need for more would growtoobig and the rejection that underlay everything would bring her spiralling down.
Her brain accepted that Amadeo would never be her true lover. Their couplings had the sole purpose of making a baby. Now she just needed her body to accept it and stop responding to things that weren’t there.
Amadeo stretched himself out next to her and settled onto his side. Propping himself on an elbow, he gazed down at Elsbeth’s face. She was just so incredibly beautiful, from her big baby blue eyes to the snub nose and those lips that felt like marshmallow against his. He pressed a finger lightly to the centre of those lips and was rewarded with a widening of her eyes.
Gently, slowly, he trailed his finger to the edge of her mouth and then brushed it against the soft skin of her cheek. Not taking his eyes from hers, he brushed his fingers down the graceful neck to the shallow at the base he’d fantasised about touching earlier.
‘Why do you wear these nightdresses for me when you wear shorts and T-shirt for yourself?’ he murmured, now fingering the neck of her virgin nightdress, which skimmed across her collarbone.
Her eyes had darkened. Her breaths, when they came, were faint hitches he had to strain to hear. Her lips parted then pressed back together before she whispered, ‘To please you.’
He skimmed over the swell of her breasts and encircled a tip that had hardened and strained against the white silk. ‘Why would you think dressing like a sacrificial virgin would please me?’
She swallowed. ‘My mother.’
His finger drifted over her flat belly, feeling almost imperceptible quivers. ‘She told you that?’
She nodded. Colour flared across her delectable cheekbones.
Across her abdomen he drew to her hip, and down her thigh. ‘What else did she tell you?’
Her always quiet voice was barely audible. ‘Many things.’
He clasped the silk of her nightdress. ‘Things to do with pleasing me?’
Another nod.
He gathered more material, sliding it up her legs to the top of her thighs, stopping short of exposing her to him. ‘Do you want to know what would please me now?’
A nod so small it was hardly there.
‘What would please me most is if you took it off.’
CHAPTER NINE
ELSBETH’SHEARTSTOPPEDbeating at the impact of Amadeo’s lazily delivered words.
Eyes hooded, he lowered his face closer to hers and her heart kick-started back to life, the beats so loud and fast they were nothing but a deafening burr.
‘Will you let me see you the way I let you see me?’ he whispered before dipping his face lower still so the tip of his nose brushed against her cheek and his warm breath melted into her skin. Her nightdress was now bunched at the top of her hips.
She was helpless to stop the quiver that rippled through the whole of her body, and groped desperately for coherent thought.
