Castiglione's Pregnant Princess. Lynne GrahamЧитать онлайн книгу.
peering anxiously round the brightly lit kitchen.
‘All of them,’ Vitale stressed, but he strode back to the door to douse the strong overhead illumination, plunging them into a much more welcoming and more intimate space only softly lit by the lights below the cupboards.
Her hand slid back to his spine. His skin was hot, faintly damp but it was his eyes she was watching and thinking about, those beautiful black-fringed eyes singing a clear song of stress and bewilderment and the glorious liberating message that he wasn’t any more in charge of what was happening between them than she was.
‘I want you, bellezza mia,’ he growled all soft and rough, sending shimmying awareness right down her taut spine just as he reached down and lifted her tee shirt and whipped it off over her head.
Jazz loosed a startled yelp and almost whipped her hands up to cover her naked body, but in that same split second of dismay she asked herself if she wanted to be a virgin for ever and if she would ever have the chance to have such a skilled lover, as Vitale was almost certain to be, again. And the answer to both questions was no. He wasn’t going to want a shy woman, was he? And he had to know all the right moves to ensure the experience was good for her, hadn’t he?
‘You are so beautiful,’ Vitale almost crooned, his hands rising to cup her delicate little breasts, which were topped with taut rosy tips that he stroked appreciatively with his thumb.
And that fast, Jazz had no desire to either cover up or breathe because the fabulous joy and satisfaction of being deemed beautiful by Vitale overwhelmed her. In gratitude, she stretched up to find his mouth again for herself, nibbling at his lower lip, circling slowly with newly discovered sensuality while all the time he was stroking and rolling and squeezing the peaks of her breasts that she had never known could be so responsive to a man’s touch. Little fiery arrows were travelling down to the heart of her, making her hips shift and squirm on the table as the heat and tightness increased there. And then, with what felt like very little warning to her, a climax shot through her like an electric charge, making her cry out in surprise and pleasure.
‘And as responsive as my most erotic dream,’ Vitale husked, wrenching at the zip of his jeans.
A lean brown hand pried her legs apart while she was still in a sort of blissful cocoon of reaction. Vitale pulled her closer and tipped her back to facilitate his intentions. A long finger traced her entrance and eased inside. He uttered a hungry groan of appreciation because she was very wet and tight and then he froze. ‘I’ll have to take you upstairs to get a condom,’ he bit out in frustration.
‘I’m on birth control,’ Jazz muttered helpfully. ‘But are you...safe?’
‘Yes because I’ve never had sex without a condom,’ Vitale confided, but the temptation to try it without that barrier was huge. He tried to argue with himself but, poised between her legs, craving the welcome her slender, lithe body offered his raging arousal, he realised it was a lost battle for him before it even started.
With strong hands he eased her closer still and she felt him, hard and demanding against her most tender flesh, and both nerves and eagerness assailed her. Her whole body came alive with electrified longing as if that first redemptive taste of pleasure had ignited an unquenchable fire of need inside her. He sank into her by easy degrees, groaning something out loud in Italian as she buried her face against a satin-smooth brown shoulder, barely crediting she was making love with Vitale, every sense she possessed rioting with sensation, the very smell and taste of his skin thrilling her.
And then he slammed right to the heart of her and a stinging pain made her grit her teeth and jerk in reaction. Withdrawing a little, Vitale paused for an instant, pushing up her face and looking down at her with what appeared to be brazen incredulity, and she knew then that at the very least he suspected he had been her first lover and he wasn’t pleased. But she ignored that unwelcome suspicion and wriggled her hips with feminine encouragement, watching him react and groan with a newly learned sense of empowerment.
‘Don’t stop,’ she told him.
And for the very first time ever, Vitale did exactly as she told him. He sank deeper again, stretching the tender walls of her heated core with hungry thoroughness and, that instant of pain forgotten, Jazz craved his contact. He gave her more, picking up speed, hard and fast until he was pounding into her and her excitement climbed with his every fluid, forceful thrust. It was much wilder and infinitely more uninhibited than she had dimly expected from a man as reserved as Vitale; indeed it was passionately explosive. She reached another climax and her body convulsed around his, the whole world, it seemed, erupting around her as he shot her into a deeply erotic and exhilarating release. A faint ache pulled at her as he withdrew and zipped his jeans.
‘Diavolo!’ Vitale exclaimed, stepping back from her while she fumbled for her tee shirt and hurriedly pulled it on over her head with hands that felt clumsy and unable to do her bidding. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?’
Fixing her face to a determined blank, Jazz slid off the table, only just resisting a revealing moan as discomfort travelled through her lower body. ‘We’re not having a post-mortem,’ she parried sharply, mortification engulfing her in an unanticipated tide that threatened to drown her. ‘You’re not entitled to ask nosy questions.’
She had had sex on a kitchen table with Vitale and she couldn’t quite believe it but she certainly knew she didn’t intend to linger to discuss it!
For a split second of frustration, Vitale wanted to strangle her. Her hectically flushed face was mutinous and furious and she was pointedly avoiding looking at him, which annoyed the hell out of him even though he didn’t understand why. After all, he didn’t want a post-mortem either, didn’t have a clue why or how what they had just done had happened and could think of at least ten good reasons why it shouldn’t have happened.
He watched her limp across the tiled floor as if she had had a run-in with a bus instead of her first experience of sex and he felt hellishly guilty and responsible. He experienced a sudden, even more startling desire to scoop her up and sink her into a warm reviving bath...and then have sex with her again? As if that were likely to improve anything, he reflected sardonically, raking unsteady fingers through his tousled black hair. What the hell was wrong with him? His brain was all over the place and he couldn’t think straight but he knew he had just enjoyed the best sex of his life and that was downright terrifying...
* * *
Jazz had informed Vitale that there would be no post-mortem but, seated in a bath at three in the morning, Jazz was unhappily engaged in staging her own. Had she actually thought of what they had done as ‘making love’? Yes, she had and she was so ashamed of herself for that fanciful label because she really wasn’t that naïve. It had been sex, pure and simple, and she knew the difference because she wasn’t a dreamy teenager any longer, she was an adult. Or supposed to be, she thought with tears stinging the backs of her eyes and regret digging wires of steel through her shrinking body.
Of course, they would both pretend it hadn’t happened...a moment of madness, the mistake swiftly buried and forgotten. After all, this was Vitale she was dealing with and he wasn’t going to want to talk about it either. On that front, therefore, she was safe, she assured herself soothingly. It was his fault in any case—he had had no business parading around half-naked in jeans and tempting her into that insanity. She hugged her knees in the warm water and sighed. She had done a stupid, stupid thing and now she had to live with it and with Vitale for weeks and weeks, being all polite and standoffish, lest he think she was up for a repeat encounter. Running away or hiding wasn’t an option.
A knock sounded lightly on the door and she almost reared out of the bath in her horror because she abruptly appreciated that Vitale was not running true to form. In a blind panic she snatched at a towel and wrapped it round her, opening the door the merest chink to say discouragingly, ‘Yes?’
Vitale discovered that he was immediately possessed by an impossibly strong urge to smash the door down and he gritted his teeth on yet another unfamiliar prompting to act unreasonably and violently. ‘Will you please come out? You have been in there for ages.’