“Shh, cuore mio, don’t wake up.”
She nestled deeper into his hold, her lips moving against his thundering heart as she spoke. “I was just dreaming of you...as usual.”
“Then continue dreaming, mi amore.”
He carried her to his bed, their bed now, wondering again that he was using Italian.
He’d learned the language in The Organization, perfecting it before he had English. They always taught every child his mother tongue, so they’d use him in missions involving his country or countrymen. But he’d never spoken it outside of those times.
Liliana made him speak it. He wanted to lavish on her the passionate endearments unique to the language he should have grown up speaking. Somehow, only they felt right to express what he felt for her.
Reaching his bed, he placed her lovingly on it before remotely parting the drapes, letting the moonlight in. He started to undress her, and she stirred again. She caught his hands, embarrassment staining her cheeks in the silver light.
He kissed her, pushed her back gently, crooning encouragement and praise to her as his hands roamed her body, and she melted back again, letting him do anything he pleased. And it did please him, beyond words, to get rid of every barrier, to finally see that body that had inflamed his though it had always been obscured.
And she was divine. Smooth and strong and sinuous, in the exact proportions he’d just discovered translated into his personal definition of perfection.
She watched him throughout, hanging on his reactions. He didn’t leave it to her deductions. He told her exactly what he thought. Then he started undressing himself, reveling in the awed, voracious look that possessed her face. If there was ever a reward for the years he’d spent training and maintaining his physique, it was that look. He was already addicted to it. Then he removed the last of his clothing, letting her see just how hard her beauty and her hunger made him.
At the sight of his erection, she gasped and sank back deeper in the bed, as if she already felt it invading her, pinning her to the mattress. She licked her lips, those lips he wanted nothing more than to feel around his hardness.
But that would come later. Now he needed to reassure himself that she was safe with him. That she was his to cherish, to protect.
Getting into bed beside her, he pulled her into his burning body. He groaned in unison with her long moan, aching and relieved, as their flesh touched without barriers for the first time. Then, gradually, he felt her tension dissipate in the serenity of deep sleep.
He watched her, at peace in his arms, for as long as he could, before he too succumbed. To the first true rest of his life.
* * *
He woke up to unknown yet breathtaking sensations. Silk and velvet sweeping all over his body.
Liliana was trailing her hands and hair and lips over him, caressing and kissing and delighting in him.
The light beyond his closed lids said it was around sunset. He’d never slept that long. Nor had he ever slept with anyone present except his brothers. He’d certainly never fallen asleep with a woman in the same bed. Not once in his life.
He kept his eyes closed for as long as he could bear, to savor her worshipping, his heart drumming to a slow, hungry rhythm.
Then he couldn’t take it anymore. In the same second he opened his eyes, he reached for her, swept her around and beneath him. This time, there would be no stopping him.
“Antonio.”
The way she made his name sound like an aching plea. For him. For everything with him.
He took her lips. A thousand volts crackled between them, unleashing everything inside him in a tidal wave.
Maddened by the immediacy of her surrender, he captured her lower lip in a growling bite, stilling its tremors, attempting to moderate his passion. But she made it impossible when she parted her lips wider for his invasion, and her taste inundated him.
Such unimaginable sweetness. And the perfume of her breath, the sensory overload of her feel. Everything about her was a hallucinogen that pounded through his system, snapping the tethers of his sanity.
Her whimpers urged him to intensify his possession. His hands shook with urgency as he wrapped her legs around his hips, rose to revel in the overpowering sight she made trembling in his arms.
“Tell me, mi amore. Tell me you need me to take you.”
Her answer was only squeezing her eyes in languorous acquiescence.
“I will take everything you have, Liliana, devour everything you are and give you all of me. Is this what you want? What you need? Now? And from now on?”
* * *
Lili heard Antonio as if from the depths of a dream.
Everything that had happened since he’d come to her yesterday making his offer of himself, on her terms, felt like one.
But in her wildest fantasies, she wouldn’t have dared hope for Antonio to feel the same sweeping desire for her, or to succumb to it, let alone as quickly as she had.