And kept on banging until the door flew open.
Antonia was already walking away from it even as it swung back on itself. Her hair rippled about her naked shoulders and his body almost screamed as it responded to the carelessly sensual sway of hers. And it was the turn of the red silk wrap to lie in a discarded blot on the floor.
‘Don’t ever lock me out of a room in my own home again,’ he ground out as he strode forward.
‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she replied in a voice meant to freeze a man’s nether parts.
A willingness to grovel was forgotten—ousted by a much more satisfying desire to remind her just who called the tune around here.
Arriving at the bed, she prepared to climb back into it. In two long strides he stopped her, by the economical act of scooping her off her feet. Her protesting shriek was ignored, as were her wriggling attempts to get herself free. Without a single word from his tightly clamped lips, he turned and began carrying her out of this bedroom and down the hall to his bedroom.
‘You are such a primitive underneath the layers of breeding,’ she sliced at him disgustedly.
He stopped dead and kissed her—so hot and so hard she was gasping for breath by the time he lifted his head again.
‘Is that primitive enough?’ he asked, not in the least bit insulted she’d called him that. In fact he liked the whole scenario, since he was feeling very primitively aroused right now.
Marco shut the door behind them with a very satisfyingly primitive kick. The bed waited. He dumped her on its pale blue cover, then followed with the long hard length of his body in a very primitive man-on-top-of-woman pinning down.
Her angry eyes shot amber bright warnings at him. Her beautiful hair streamed out above her head, and her clenched fists made a puny but determined effort to do him some damage. ‘Get off me,’ she insisted. ‘You’re just a big brute—and you taste of whisky!’
‘And you taste of champagne and woman—my woman,’ Marco growled back, enjoying this new primitive role that allowed him the rare luxury to completely dominate.
Her breasts heaved against the solid wall of his chest and her slender hips writhed delightfully beneath the pressure of his. She felt the rise of his passion and spat her utter contempt at him, while the mocking arch of his eyebrows asked her who was to blame.
She hit back with more than her fists, ‘Stefan was right about you,’ she lashed. ‘You are a—’
Ducking between the flailing fists, he stopped the words with his mouth. Discussing Kranst was not going to happen in his bed! he grimly determined, and kept on kissing her until her hands stopped punching and began to anxiously knead his shoulders instead.
Triumph sizzled through his system; the red-hot heat of desire spun through his blood. He made love to her as if there was no tomorrow and, because there was still the heat of an angry fear burning behind the passion, he drove her to the edge more than once before ruthlessly drawing back again.
‘I hate it when you do this to me,’ she sobbed in frustration.
‘You would hate it more if I didn’t do it at all,’ he threw back.
Her breath broke on a whimper because she knew he was right. The helpless little sound did things to him no woman could ever begin to understand. He thrust into her with the force of absolute possession.
‘You belong to me. Just remember that next time you feel like wrapping yourself around another man.’
If he’d expected her to respond at all, it was not the way she did. With the slick roll of her body he suddenly found he was the one pinned down and she the one most definitely on top. For the next few minutes he experienced what it was like to be utterly seduced by a woman hell-bent on making him embarrass himself.
It didn’t happen. He was no one’s easy victim. But Antonia in this mood was irresistible. She was the true sensualist born to pleasure man. She kissed him and stroked him and rode him towards heaven. And when his body began to tighten and his heart began to pound, she gave him back a taste of his own medicine by pulling away to rise up and stand over him.
Feet planted either side of his body, hands resting in the delicious groove of her slender waist, and her wonderful long golden hair spiralling around the face of an absolute wanton, she asked, ‘And who do you belong to, Marco?’
The little minx. The beautiful, outrageous little minx! he thought, and, with a laugh of appreciation, he jack-knifed into a sitting position, clamped his hands to her hips—and gave his mouth the pleasure of bringing her to heel again.
The battle progressed to a different level. She gasped and protested and tugged at handfuls of his hair in an effort to dislodge him, and eventually lost the ability to stand. She was groaning and trembling but still in there fighting, matching him kiss for kiss, caress for caress, intimacy for exquisite tortuous intimacy, which had them crossing a few boundaries they’d never attempted to cross before in their quest to get the better of the other.