Lying there naked, with her arms in an abandoned arc above her head, she was waiting for him to join her.
Temptation mocking him, it took every gram of his self-control not to do so immediately, not to give in to his driving urges and take them where they both wanted to go. However, it was worth the agony of waiting to watch the way her lovely eyes darkened and closed as he moved to unsheathe her beautiful legs and, with a subtle sleight of hand, just managed to skim the warm apex of her femininity as he peeled back each lacy stocking top in turn.
‘Andreas...’
She was wet with desire. He could feel her moist heat against his hand.
‘What is it, darling?’ His own arousal was so hot and intense he could scarcely speak as she writhed against him. He needed to be naked with her, to feel every part of her lovely body beneath his.
Now, with a swift shedding of his own clothes, and taking responsibility for her protection, he came back to join her, lowering himself onto her in a meeting of pulsing flesh that made her gasp and strain urgently towards him as he groaned his satisfaction deep in his throat.
Her hands on his heated flesh were a pleasure he had never forgotten, but he revelled in the mind-blowing experience now as if it was the very first time. He wanted her like he had never wanted any woman—before or since—but he couldn’t just take what he wanted like some callow youth. Whatever this woman had done to him she needed to be treated with kid gloves, and with all the consideration and care his maturity demanded.
He’d once thought he had been put on this earth solely to pleasure Magenta James, and he did so now with all the skill of his acquired experience. Taking his time, he reacquainted himself with every secret path and byway of her body, remembering her likes, what drove her craziest, as though the last six years didn’t exist. As though there hadn’t been other lovers—or at least one that he knew of—who had come after him. For now he wanted to forget that—and he did.
A long time later, when she was sobbing for the one thing he was withholding, he slid his hands under her buttocks and lifted her body to accommodate his length. As soon as he started to enter her he felt her recoil almost imperceptibly, and he held himself there for a few seconds, finding her not quite as he had anticipated.
Heavens! She was tight.
* * *
Magenta gave a shuddering gasp as he moved to sink further into her softness—a sound of unbelievable pleasure after her surprising initial discomfort.
‘Am I hurting you?’ Andreas asked, his breathing ragged, as if he was on the brink of losing control.
She made a small murmured negation and through the waves of sensation that were washing over her wondered whether, if she had had a normal childbirth, he would even have needed to ask. But she hadn’t. And it had been so long since she had done this...
Oh, but he felt so good!
As her body lifted to his he pushed more confidently inside her, deeper and deeper, until he was filling her, completing her, and then there was nothing between them and the earth-shattering pleasure of their straining flesh and their bodies locked together as one.
He started to move and she was moving with him, in a rhythm that was as natural as breathing. Each breath-catching thrust of his body was taking her with him, upwards and outwards, to scale heights of rapture such as Magenta had never conceived possible. She felt whole again for the first time since they had been together, and she clung to him as he took her to the outer edges of another universe until she was crying out from the shockwaves of pure pleasure ripping not just through her body but reaching down and opening up her mind and her soul as well.
She was his for eternity and knew she always had been, even when she had been young and foolish and fighting her attraction to him in a reckless, desperate desire to be free. As she acknowledged that fact, opening her heart to the realisation that she was and always had been hopelessly in love with him, the past rushed up on her like a tidal wave out of nowhere, bursting her defences wide open, and she saw the truth in all its shocking clarity.
At nineteen she’d believed the world was hers by right, that her face and figure were sure to get her the fame and fortune she craved. She remembered craving it to the exclusion of everything else. Her four-month affair with Andreas. His feelings for her. Even her self-respect.
She groaned inwardly as her brain reacquainted her with the selfish, mercenary creature she had been. She didn’t want to remember, but the shattering experience of making love with him had severed the chains of her amnesia, and whether she was ready for it or not the last barriers of her resistance were finally caving in.
She’d been ambitious—ruthlessly so—and she hadn’t planned on a man like Andreas Visconti coming into her life so soon.