And she was in his arms, singed in the inferno of his ardor. “Don’t walk away, bellissima. I’m the knee-jerk jerk here.”
“Let me go and no one will get hurt, Your Royal Jerkness.”
“It’s too late. I would have gotten hurt if I’d let you go before I laughed with you, caused your tears, tasted your hunger.”
“Durante…” Her voice broke as she put her fear into words. “You’re way out of my league.”
“You’re the only one I want in mine. Say you want me, too.”
She squeezed her eyes, shuddered. “You know I do.”
“Then forgive me, Gabriella mia. And don’t be afraid, I won’t consider this license to forgive myself.” She succumbed, nodded, buried her face in his neck. He groaned in relief, branded her forehead in a convulsive kiss. “Grazie molto, bellissima.”
She burrowed deeper into his neck. This was inevitable. He was inexorable. She craved him with such intensity that she no longer cared if it all ended horribly tomorrow. She had to have now.
“Now tell me…” He swept her up in his arms. “Would you mind if I took you fast and ferocious the first couple of times?”
Chapter Nine
“The first couple of times?”
Durante lips spread at the squeak in Gabrielle’s voice, the disbelief in her eyes. At having her precious weight and surrender filling his arms after almost losing her, in so many ways.
And he had almost lost her. In the one way he wouldn’t have been able to live with. Through his own actions.
She was everything he’d felt she was from the first moment, everything that captured his imagination and commanded his appreciation, roused his soul and aroused his senses. Proud and fierce, sharp and quick, pure of heart, rich in soul, as vulnerable as she was indomitable. He’d read her as accurately as she’d read him. He was certain now. No more doubts. He’d never let the outside world come between them again.
This time, and from now on, there would be no holding back. There’d be only holding on. He’d never let her go.
He gathered her tighter in his arms, filled his eyes and senses with her beauty as she clung to him, answered her incredulity. “Maybe after the second time I’ll be able to slow down a bit. I can guarantee slow, though, so slow until you beg, until you faint with pleasure, after the third time.”
“The third time?”
“Do you hear an echo?” He smiled into the eyes he could swear were emitting silver heat and hunger and…anxiety?
He wanted to kick himself. With what she’d suffered at a man’s hand, she could be totally misinterpreting his words.
He stopped in the massive vestibule separating reception and living quarters. Even though everything in him screamed not to lose contact with her, he gently put her down. She swayed, clung to him, her eyes a mixture of drugged arousal, confusion and alarm.
“What are you thinking, bellissima?”
She blinked at him. “Thinking? You think I can think now?”
“You look…anxious.” She bit a lip that trembled her confession. He cupped her face, freed that lip with a caressing thumb. “Is there anything you want me to know? Anything you don’t want me to do? Anything that might trigger distasteful memories?”
Understanding crept over her face, followed by urgency. “No! No, Durante, don’t think that, please. If I’m anxious it’s because I don’t know if I can…you see, I-I’ve never…you know…”
Suspicion rose in him at her embarrassment, became certainty in a heartbeat. “You never enjoyed sex.”
“I-I know I can, since I-I…”
“You pleasure yourself. But you never climax with a partner.”
Her color became dangerous. “Do you know everything? Or are you reading my mind?” She shut her eyes in mortification.
He brushed her eyes open with both thumbs. “And I told you I’ll take you fast and ferocious and you thought I’d take my pleasure and leave you feeling used and frustrated.”
“No, no…I know you wouldn’t…it’s me…I’m having…”
His lips twisted. “Performance anxiety.”
“You do know everything!” She buried her face in her hands, before dropping them, exhaling, eyes downcast. “Way to go, huh? Telling you that now, ruining everything.”
“You told someone before, probably your ex, and he used it to blame you for his shortcomings,” he growled. Giving that piece of trash a taste of his own medicine was fast becoming an emergency. “And of course he told you how he never failed to please other women, women who miraculously attain orgasm through their own feminine normalcy, even with a fumbling, repulsive, self-seeking, two-minute scumbag who thinks all he has to do to be a great lover is get an erection, insert and ejaculate.”
She coughed a distressed laugh. “Basically…yeah. Apart from that description of him, which he of course didn’t say, but was and did. This is uncanny. How do you know that? Do you know men like that?”
“There are no men like that. He’s not a man, he’s one of a breed of inferiority-ridden, ugliness-infested bastards who feel nothing but the urge to relieve their pathetic itches, who know no higher motivation than to grab, use, and when confronted with their own deficiencies, abuse.”
She nodded, averted her eyes. “I agree.”
He frowned. She didn’t look as if she did, not fully. “But?”
She looked as if she hoped the parquet floor would become an ocean she could plunge into and never resurface. “But in this case, it wasn’t his fault alone. I-I tried with others…many others…”
Images charred imprints on his mind. Of her, in other men’s beds, her body open to their exploitation, at their mercy…
A wave of nausea rose until it tinged his sight with yellowed bile, something monstrous, grotesque ripping him open from the gut outward, fang and talon.
Jealousy. Something he’d never imagined feeling before.
Next moment, it subsided. It had no soil to take root in. The past meant nothing, not hers, not his. Or hers did only in terms that he must adjust his approach, from the freedom of taking by storm the woman he’d thought experienced, holding nothing back in his certainty that she could match his ferocity, know her preferences and demand them from him, to the care of taking the woman who’d experienced nothing but abuse and dissatisfaction.
“You were a virgin when you married him?” She nodded, her unease bordering on pain. “And we know how you felt about him. And those others—how did you feel about them?”