Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: February 2018 Books 5 - 8 - Kelly Hunter, Kate Walker - Страница 19

CHAPTER TEN

KNEES SHAKING, PIA drank him in. His black shirt unbuttoned to his chest, jeans hung low on his hips, he was a dark fantasy come to life. His rough hair stood up, thanks to her fingers, but it was his penetrating stare that took her breath away.

The depth of desire in it singed her skin.

His gaze was more questioning and combative than anything her imagination could have conjured.

But this was Raphael, so ruthless and yet so tender at times. There was nothing sweet and romantic about him. Nothing sensitive and cajoling about him.

His gaze swept over the naked length of her legs, the pulse skittering wildly at her neck. Her sex clenched, hard and sudden, at the masculine possessiveness written across every inch of his proud face. “No words, cara mia?”

And the truth of him as he stood there, as he stared at her with absolute desire etched into taut features, darkening those deep-seated eyes was more real, more telling than any sweet words he could have given her. She hadn’t felt a millionth of this wonder, this ever-present thrum before.

Months with Frank couldn’t measure up to a moment with Raphael.

“I know you, Raphael, and I want you,” she said simply.

With rigid movements that spoke of his control, he picked her up.

Pia wrapped her hands around his neck, touching the base of his head with the tips of her fingers. Every inch of him was a pleasure point to her seeking, searching fingers.

She hid her face in his chest. Heat from his skin filtered through his shirt, and warmed her cheek. The thundering beat of his heart matched hers and calmed something inside of her.

Her breath fled her body afresh when he crossed into his bedroom to Raphael’s vast bed and laid her down. Dark gray sheets and curtains made the room utterly masculine. His gaze drinking her in, he pulled his shirt off in one smooth movement.

The strong column of his throat and the width of his shoulders made her chest rise and fall. Taut, gleaming olive skin stretched tight over lean musculature greeted her. Sparse hair covered his defined chest, arrowing down over his abdomen and disappearing into his jeans.

Low-slung, those pants revealed narrow, defined hips.

But it was the front of his pants, showing unmistakable evidence of his desire, that caught Pia’s rabid attention. His shape and size was clearly identifiable even like that.

A rush of wetness slid between the folds of her sex. Pia crossed and uncrossed her legs, a restless slithering in her skin as she heard his rough exhale.

“What does looking at me do to you?”

She jerked her head up. Heat built in her chest and began flowing up her neck and cheeks. His fingers fluttered over the waistband of his jeans and intense curiosity thrummed in her blood.

She was about to work up the courage to touch him when he spread her legs shamefully wide and stepped between them. The naked glory of his chest muted any words Pia was capable of uttering.

With a hard pressure, Raphael pulled at the base of her neck. “What happened when you looked at my arousal, Pia?” He breathed the question into the crook where her neck met her shoulder.

Wrapping her hands around his midriff, she hid her face in his chest again. Everything she was feeling, everything he said, this moment so thick with desire, it was such a profusion of sensations like she had never imagined. “Please, Raphael... I can’t speak it. I can’t...”

With a hard laugh that sent shivers down her spine, he took her mouth in a ravishing kiss that plundered beyond just her lips. It was as if with every kiss, he was stealing away parts of her.

Pulling away from the languorous weight of his kiss, she tilted his head down so she could look at his face. His lips were swollen this time. His nostrils flared, his jaw so rigid that Pia caressed it tenderly.

She drank him in, from the small scar on his upper lip to the small mole near his eyebrow.

“I’m sorry I... I can’t give words to what I feel. I...”

“Nessuno.” A forbidding look descended in his eyes. “Never be sorry for what you are, Pia. Not with me. Never with me. I forbid it.”

His thunderous expression made her smile. His arrogance that he could just forbid her from feeling stuff! “But I heard that men like women to be adventurous in bed.” She loved being with him in this moment. The promise of their near-naked bodies was heady, her desire for him thrilling. But it was the peek inside of Raphael’s head, this insight she was getting into the core of the man that Pia relished the most.

His fingers gripped the collared edges of her shirt, “I do not care what you heard or were told, Pia. Your diffidence only makes me realize how much you must want to let me do this.”

She frowned. “Do what, Raphael?”

The ripping of the buttons on her shirt was the answer to her question.

She gasped at the coldness of his palms as they cupped her small breasts. He pushed her and she bowed back, her trust in him complete. His mouth buried between her breasts, Raphael punctuated his kisses with words. “What I want from you, what will pleasure me, I will teach you, si?”

“I want to please you,” she whispered softly.

His eyes flared hotter. “You will.” Pursing his mouth, he nipped her flesh, leaving a wet trail. “And what will pleasure you, what will send you over the edge, we will discover it together.”

“Si,” she said, floating on a cloud of sensation and never wanting to come down.

In return for her surrender—or was it reward?—he separated the edges of the shirt and pushed it off her shoulders. It hung at her elbows, baring her to his drinking eyes.

They darkened impossibly as he stared at her small breasts with their plump nipples painfully distended.

No man had ever seen her like that and Pia couldn’t bear the potency of the moment, of things that she hadn’t even considered. Of things she had already given over to Raphael by giving him this intimacy.

He pressed a reverent kiss to her midriff, his large hands easily spanning her waist, then a trail of hot, wet kisses up and down, from her navel to her pubic bone.

The cool sheets were a welcome contrast against her burning skin as he busied his fingers with her breasts.

He licked the aching tips as if he were testing their rigidness, their plumpness. Soft flicks, long, leisurely flicks, his gaze telling her without words how much he liked the taste of her. Gauging with those piercing eyes what she liked.

Pia arched her chest into his mouth, pressed her fingers into his nape to keep his mouth at her breast, and then flushed at her own shameless abandon. Eyes dark, Raphael noted it. She closed her eyes.

Every sensation was magnified a million times. A running kaleidoscope of colors burst behind her closed lids, as if her every sense was on the verge of explosion, of new birth.

The rough, sucking sounds he made with his lips, the Italian that emerged from his mouth drove Pia wilder, hotter, wetter between her thighs.

And suddenly his mouth was gone, leaving her desolate.

Her eyes flew open, her breath serrated.

His eyes gleamed with possessive wickedness, a feral satisfaction. “I wish I could show your face to you now, mia cara. Your eyes are so wide that they drown your face, your mouth is pink and swollen from my kisses, your skin is trembling and marred already with my attentions...

“Shall I carry you to the mirror, Pia?” His eyes held hers, a thousand unsaid desires in them, dark fantasies she could see them both drowning in. There would be nothing of her that he didn’t touch, that he didn’t take. Nothing he didn’t own. “Shall I show you what I see? How beautiful you are?”

She opened her eyes, saw his nostrils flare. And blushed hot when she sensed the scent of her arousal thick in the air. A muscled leg thrown over her thighs, he leaned over on an elbow.

“There is nothing shameful about what you feel for me, tesoro. About what you need from me.” His mouth closed over the turgid nipple and pulled, and Pia jerked. She clutched her thighs tight as sensations zoomed and coalesced there. As if there was a direct connection between her nipples and the shockingly wet place between her thighs.

His broad palm descended between her thighs and when Pia squeezed them again under another pull of his wicked mouth over her nipple, he was there, giving her the pressure she craved.

His fingers opened her up, a wicked smile curving his lips. Holding her gaze captive, his sculpted mouth blew on her hot, wet nipple, and his fingers drew mesmerizing circles over her folds, stroking, petting, spreading the dampness.

And then his finger was inside her, stretching her.

Spine bucking off the bed, Pia gasped at the sudden invasion.

“You’ve never done this before?” he asked softly, as if he was afraid to scare her off.

Pia couldn’t even answer, for every ounce of her brain’s rationale was busy processing the caresses of his thumb. Somehow, dear God, he’d found that spot that seemed like her entire being was centered there even as he pumped in and out with his other fingers.

Pressure drew her body tight, like a bow stretched too much. “I would like an answer, mia bella.”

Pia shook her head frantically chasing the speed she needed, arching her lower body into his hand. “No. Per favore, Raphael...”

“Anything you want, bella.”

And then his thumb settled there, pressing and stroking mindlessly until Pia writhed against that touch, frantic in her own skin.

It was science, it was hundreds of years of evolution and yet what Raphael did to her felt like magic. As if what happened between them couldn’t be explained away by a theory.

The world dissolved into pure sensation as he stroked her just the way her body needed it. Unbearable pleasure broke over her in cresting waves, building one over the other, throwing her out into the space and then gathering her back into herself, but a different version. And when she fell back to the ground, Raphael was there to catch her with his warmth, his endearments and praises, with his arms.

Desperate to keep touching him, desperate to keep the connection even as those powerful tremors in her lower belly ebbed, Pia pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen forward onto his forehead. Realizing the possessiveness of the action, she stilled.

“Touch me, bella. Anywhere you want.”

With a sigh, Pia greedily ran her fingers over his taut form.

He prowled over her on all fours and she reveled in the feral hunger stamped over every tight muscle, every jutting bone. She wanted to shatter his control. She wanted him as delirious with pleasure and need as she was. She slid her questing fingers over the rough silk of his bare back, loving the grooved line of his spine. He smiled against her neck, interrupting the kiss he’d been pressing there.

Dark eyes held hers captive, a stark honesty to them. “You wear everything on your face, you tell me in beautiful, honest words what I do to you, your body sings for me when I so much as brush the tip of my finger against it...” Slowly, as if he were a jungle cat, he shed his pants and boxers.

How had he known what she had needed to hear? How did he know that she wanted to please him, if it was the last thing she ever did?

He brought his body down over hers until they were flush from shoulder to thigh to foot.

Pia grasped his back with both hands, drowning in a surfeit of sensations—his angular hips cradling hers, muscular thighs pushing her into the bed, his hands kneading hips and cupping her buttocks. “Do you see how desperately I need you?”

In reply, she slid her hands to his hips. Hard muscles, velvet rough skin, hair-sprinkled limbs so different from her own and yet so perfectly complementary and then there was a litany of Italian from his mouth as she touched and stroked everything. She kneaded his buttocks shamelessly, traced his flank with questing fingers, touched and stroked every inch of tightly honed muscle.

And with each innocent touch of hers, he turned harder, and tighter, his rock-hard erection swelling in the groove of her thighs. The hard, velvet length, the sheer size of him made her mouth dry.

Her heart picked up pace as he kissed the rim of her ear and whispered, “Spread your legs for me, Pia.”

Head bowed into his chest, Pia did. A jolt of sensation spread outward when he rubbed his shaft along her sex. Her breathing hitched to a faster rhythm and soon Raphael’s joined hers. His one hand clasped both of hers above her head while with his other hand, he rubbed himself in her wetness.

“You’re so perfect for me, Pia.” Another slide, another shiver. Another sigh from her mouth. “As if you were made for me.”

Slow shivers built in her spine at the slick slide of him against her. Even oversensitized from her climax, a whisper of sensation pooled again at her sex. And then, suddenly, he was inside her in a hard yet somehow smooth, unsuspecting movement.

Her spine bucking, Pia gasped at the invasion. Nails digging into his shoulders, she tried to buck him off but he remained lodged inside her.

It was as if there was a hot poker inside her. His body incredibly rigid, his muscles tense, Raphael whispered words against her temple, her eyes, her nose. Fervent promises to make it better, feverish endearments as if he couldn’t bear to hurt her. “Look at me, cara mia. I promise you the worst is done.”

Pia opened her eyes, terrified of showing him what she was feeling. Of making him think she didn’t want this, didn’t want him. But such a warm smile dawned in his eyes that it drove away her misgivings. “You’re the science teacher, si?”

Her sex spasmed as if to remind her and he sank in a little more. “I’m sorry, Raphael. I... I didn’t mean to...”

“No sorries between us, Pia. Not when I’ve to hurt you a little more before I can give you pleasure.”

Tiny beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. His skin was like damp velvet under her fingers. He looked as if he was hewn from some rough stone, so stark were the bones of his face. He was exercising immense control, Pia realized, and felt like a big coward. “I don’t care how much it hurts, please move.”

“Kiss me, cara mia. Like you mean it,” he added with a taunt.

Unclenching her fists, Pia took his mouth in a soft kiss. Hands in his hair, she pulled him down, angling his mouth the way she wanted it. It was the first time he let her drive a kiss between them. Liking the way he growled under her touch, Pia slid her tongue inside his mouth in a silky sweep that made him groan deep in his throat.

She peppered his jaw with urgent kisses, licked his neck like a cat, and then dug her teeth into the groove of his shoulder. A timely epithet flew from his mouth even as his hip jerked, sending sensation spiraling down her spine.

And just like that, slowly, her body got used to his invasion inside of her. She softened and stretched around him, a slow pulse of pleasure spiraling out from there. When he moved within her in soft, slow strokes, it was as if there was a poem of pleasure being written inside her. As if she were being taken apart and remade again within Raphael’s hands.

Trusting some unknown instincts, Pia wrapped her legs around his back and he groaned his pleasure.

She’d always wondered at the raw intimacy, at the lack of inhibition that had to go hand in hand with sex, had always cringed at revealing herself like that. Yet nothing in the world felt more natural than being beneath Raphael, than meeting his eyes and sharing the pregnant moment, nothing more perfect than the sweaty shift and slide of their bodies against each other with pleasure billowing in their wake.

His hands under her buttocks, he lifted her until every hard stroke rubbed against her clitoris. Soon, the pressure built again until Pia came in a cataclysm of pleasure.

And he watched her, every nuance in her face, as if he owned her. With an intensity that sent aftershocks through her pelvis.

“You feel like heaven, tesoro, and I have to move,” he said in apology.

Pia touched her fingers to his forehead, and the lock of hair that was always falling down. “I’m yours, Raphael,” she whispered, her heart overflowing.

Her name on his lips, her body held down tight, Raphael thrust faster and deeper inside her. She felt his spine lock. With a guttural cry that she’d forever remember, he spent himself inside her.

With his hands tight on her hips, his heavy weight pressing onto her, her body felt as if it was being thrown around by a storm. Her breathing matching his rough rhythm, Pia couldn’t let go of him.

Morning light was beginning to seep in through the curtains, bathing their bodies in an orange glow. He was hard and heavy over her, but deliciously so. Hadn’t she heard some of her colleagues whisper that men always pulled away after they were done? That they didn’t like clingy women?

She very much wanted to cling to Raphael, to breathe in the musky scent they made together, to soak in the wonderful warmth of his body. But she didn’t want him to think she was getting all gooey and sentimental over what they had done,even though it was exactly what she was feeling.

Her heart dipped as he moved away from her. She scrunched her eyes tight and felt his eyes on her back. The sheets slithered around her, and she heard his soft tread on the floor. A sharp ache—one that rivaled the one in her body—filled her heart.

Raphael wasn’t given to tenderness or sweet words, she told herself.

She didn’t know how long it was—it felt like an eternity—before she felt him tugging the duvet from her tight fingers.

“Raphael, what are you—”

“Shh, let me.”

When his hand reached her thighs with a cold washcloth, Pia flushed. “Raphael you don’t have to—”

“Si, I do.” His gaze held hers, a wealth of words that he wouldn’t say in it.

Looking away from him, heat crawling over her cheeks, Pia gave herself over. With a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes, he finished cleaning her up. And then he was back in the bed before she could arm herself against the onslaught of emotions crowding her.

A warm glow fanned out in the regions of her heart. She ran her fingertips over the back of his hand, absently stroking the veins. The scent of their intimacy was a warm blanket around them.

The sudden realization that she could spend eternity like this hit her like an electric charge to the heart. He didn’t want eternity. God, he didn’t even want a few months.

“Turn around and face me.”

When she stiffened, he pressed until she was on her back. The smallest movement made her aware of the soreness between her thighs.

With his hawk-like gaze, Raphael caught it. A furrow came on between his brows. “Do you still hurt?”

Pia blushed, and then shook her head. Then she saw the uncharacteristic hesitation in his eyes. From everything she’d learned about him, she knew Raphael didn’t do intimacy.

He tipped his head and took her mouth in a soft, tender kiss that made her chest ache. She would never tire of his kisses or that look he got that said he wanted to kiss her. He pulled her closer to his naked body and tucked his arm neatly under her bare breasts. Pia stiffened and tried to pull the duvet up.

A tussle resulted. She huffed. He growled. They made a compromise and pulled the duvet up over his arm while his hand cupped her breast.

“I like having you in my bed like this, knowing that whatever everyone else sees, I know the real, passionate you, exploding like a firework.” He said it softly as if to let her get used to it. “Only me, cara mia.” A long sigh left her and Pia settled into his embrace.

“Raphael, we need to talk—”

“No, what you and I need is sleep. Hours and hours of it. We’ll only wake up when you’re not sore and I can be inside you again. Until then, sleep, tesoro.”

And just like that, Pia fell asleep.

* * *

The loud peal of Raphael’s cell phone startled Pia awake. It took her a few seconds to orient herself but the soreness between her legs brought back awareness of the previous night.

She felt Raphael’s kiss against her shoulder, and then his groan as the phone started again. The sheet held tightly with her fingers, she turned around to face him. Sleep mussed, he was even more gorgeous in the morning sunlight.

With a gentleness that stole her breath, he pressed his thumb against her lower lip. “You are good?”

She nodded, unable to find words that could sum up the glorious feeling in her chest. And then, because she knew he couldn’t ignore whoever it was indefinitely, and because she didn’t know when she’d get a chance again, she pressed a kiss at the hollow of his throat and licked his skin.

He groaned, kissed her hard, and then picked up the phone.

Within seconds, the gentle lover disappeared.

With two rapid-fire sentences he finished the call, whipped out of the bed and padded, utterly naked, into the bathroom.

Hearing the shower run, she quickly pulled his T-shirt on and sneaked down the corridor into the other bedroom. She’d barely finished her shower and pulled on another of his shirts when he walked in, a scowl on his face.

His jet-black hair was wet and dripping. Undone shorts hung low on his hips. Pia swallowed the jolt of lust that hit her low in her pelvis.

Before she could blink, he picked her up in his arms and dropped her on the bed in his own room. “I told you we’re going to sleep around the clock.”

Pia laughed and pushed her wet hair out of her face. She didn’t know whether to be mad or glad about his possessiveness. “I just... I’ve never been in a relationship like this before and with you everything’s muddied.” She smiled when he joined her on the bed and sat up with her tucked between his legs. “I didn’t want to assume.”

“This is not an affair, si? What it is, we’ll figure out later.”

Turning in his arms, she kissed his mouth full on. It was a good minute before she let him go and by then they were both breathing hard.

“Raphael, who was that on the phone?”

“My lawyer. He’s heard from Allegra now that she’s out of the clinic.”

“Your ex is out? How is she?”

“Apparently, she worked through the entire program, is certified to be drug-free and has her addictions under control, no boyfriends in tow, and is desperate to see Alyssa.”

Pia wanted to ask for more information, dying to know about the woman who had once worn his ring. She rubbed her finger, and then dropped it when she realized what she was doing. “I heard your mother say she was extremely beautiful.”

She cringed the moment the words were out but Raphael barely seemed to note the wistful tone in her voice.

“She’s extremely beautiful, the life of every party,” he replied with a faraway gaze, “and every man she knew wanted to possess her. I had the biggest bank account among the fools who pursued her and so she chose me.”

“You can’t believe she chose you just for that,” she said, shocked by the depth of his cynicism. “You’re a very—” He arched his brow and she flushed. “You know your appeal, Raphael. Modesty doesn’t suit you.”

“It was my pocket and my power that attracted Allegra. Not that my looks didn’t help. Actions speak louder than words however much she professed to love me. All her behavior, that I was too besotted to see then, proved how much she cared for the status of being Raphael Mastrantino’s wife and not at all for me and our marriage.”

“So you have no culpability at all for its failure?”

“Not everyone wants to shoulder blame when it’s not theirs. Frank took advantage of you. It’s not your fault.”

“But you loved her, didn’t you? When they think I can’t hear them, or maybe because they want me to hear it, people dissect your marriage. They talk about how you pursued Allegra for three years. They call it the match of the decade.”

Trust Pia to drill down to the matter.

There was never judgment in Pia’s tone. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tighter against him. He knew himself and yet every time Pia delved deeper, he found something new.

Not always good things, but things he hadn’t known.

* * *

Jaw tight, Raphael pored over her question. Had he loved Allegra?

Not that he’d had eyes for anyone but his stunning ex. He had been thinking with something other than his head.

Drunk on his success with Vito Automobiles, puffed up with power, he’d decided she was the perfect candidate long before she had set her sights upon him. He had pulled his family from scandalous ruin and bankruptcy and all that had been missing was the perfect society wife to complete his ascent.

“No, I didn’t love her. And in hindsight, I wreaked even more damage on her than her mother had done with her affairs and her neglect. I should have never married her. She needed someone softer, kinder and I...all I wanted from her was a trophy wife.”

He laid his head back against the headboard. Christo, of all the times to realize his faults. He couldn’t soften toward his ex now.

“Isn’t it good for Alyssa that her mother’s worked through the program?” came Pia’s tentative voice.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I forgave her when she had affairs behind my back. I forgave her when she lied to me about—”

A hard gleam entered his eyes. But Pia was beginning to see beneath that hardness. Beginning to understand that Raphael felt things deeply. More than even he understood. That he was just good at burying it all.

She pressed her face into his chest, feeling an overwhelming tenderness for him. And waited.

“I found her high at the house once with Alyssa barely a month old. Gio and her mother, even mine, they all pled her case. They said that addiction is like a sickness, that she didn’t know any better. But she’s an adult who’s responsible for her actions. I won’t forgive that. She’s not getting her hands on my daughter in this lifetime.”

“That sounds so final,” Pia said, before she could stop. “Are you protecting Alyssa? Or punishing Allegra? Is it even about Allegra, or is it about your father?”

He looked so furious then that Pia braced herself for a cutting reply. She’d gone too far. Worse, they both knew she’d unwittingly struck on the truth.

“Only you could look beneath my anger for a junkie ex, Pia.”

Something in his tone tugged at her. She longed to wrap her arms around him and hold him. To tell him that caring for someone was not weakness. That he wasn’t invincible, whatever the world led him to believe. “I just... I think you’ve never forgiven your father for what he did.”

He looked away but didn’t deny it. “He had been my hero for so long. And then suddenly, one day he was gone, without a word.”

And he’d left Raphael alone with a burden that would crush most seventeen-year-old boys. A burden he’d used to fuel his own ambition. A burden that his mother had continued to put on him.

“Raphael—”

“It’s all in the past, Pia.”

He took her mouth in a hard kiss that sent little waves of pleasure through her body. When he pulled her beneath him, when he rocked into her with the utmost tenderness because he was worried she’d be sore, when he kissed her mouth with warm languorous strokes, she gave herself over to him.

He loved her slowly, gently this time, as if she were breakable in his rough hands. He told her in sweet Italian what she did to him. But as their climaxes hurled them into ecstasy, as he tucked her under his arm, an ache unlike any she’d ever known settled in her chest.

Raphael might think it was in the past, but the mark was still there.

The anger, the hurt, were both still there buried under a hard shell.

He would never let himself weaken, never care again.

Pia knew it as surely as she did that she felt something more than attraction for him. Something more than admiration. And the scariest part was that she didn’t know how to stop it.