This time she screamed with the first crashing chord of the climax, her muscles squeezing the hardness and girth pistoning satisfaction into her, convulsing around it, drenching it with wave after wave of pleasure.
He rose above her, muscles taught, eyes tempestuous, face seizing with the pleasure of possessing her, pleasuring her, his beauty supernatural in the extreme. Then he threw his head back and roared as every muscle in his body locked, his erection pressing to her womb, gushing his own release to mingle with hers, long, hard jets that ignited her nerves into one more conflagration.
The last thing she knew was that aftershocks could hit a level of excitement all their own, that they were more draining than the peaks of pleasure…
Gabrielle stirred in cottony bliss, opened her eyes.
The gibbous moon came into focus. It hung in the piece of sky framed in the skylight above. She was being stroked like a cat from face to thigh. She was purring.
Durante purred, too, the deep rumbles of the sated, triumphant lion that he was. He had a right to be. She’d thought he’d given her the orgasms of her life, that she’d never recharge enough to want sex ever again. But he’d aroused her to weeping again, before showing her that, a) she had buttons that only he knew how to push to give her shattering orgasms in succession, b) she recharged in record time and c) so did he.
“You were saying? This thing about being frigid?” he rumbled against her neck, his smile tickling her.
“Uh…it was clearly a case of misdiagnosis.” She sounded like what she was. A woman who’d been savagely pleasured, had screamed herself hoarse in appreciation.
“One of vast proportions. You’re the most sensuous, responsive creature imaginable, and your capacity for pleasure is limitless. But then, capacity is just a potential. It means nothing without the right touch to release it. Your body is a complex, extremely selective instrument of sensual delights. It responds only when everything satisfies you. As I do.”
As only you will ever do, she almost blurted out. She bit it back.
It felt as if he were the first and only man she’d ever been with. Really been with. No man had ever taken her like that. She’d never accepted a man inside her like that. Beside his phenomenal size, stamina and rebound time, the things he’d done to her had been undreamed of. The way she’d responded, the way she’d opened herself to whatever he wished to do, had been something she hadn’t imagined herself capable of.
But that was probably more info than he’d want to know. She’d better keep it light.
“You’re in a league of your own, bellissima.”
“Look who’s talking. You weren’t kidding. Or bragging.”
He chuckled, consumed her in a leisurely mating of mouths, smiling into the warmth and intimacy of the meld, soothing the soreness he’d inflicted, before moving down her body and performing the same healing ritual to the nipples she’d begged him to devour in the throes of ecstasy.
“Far from kidding or bragging, I actually downplayed things. I didn’t want you to think you’d fallen into the clutches of a sex maniac and run off screaming.”
“So you misled me about the nature of what awaited me, conned me onto my back, uh—among other positions—and made me scream there instead?”
“And how you scream. Every scream was like an intravenous shot of aphrodisiac, shooting through my system to deluge my brain. I almost blew an artery.”
“Good thing you have a safety valve.”
“And it’s going to come to my rescue constantly. Like now.”
He pressed between the thighs that trembled apart for him, unable to bear those last moments as desire became pain before his hardness and heat filled her again, stretching her into mindlessness, thrusting her to oblivion.
Pangs started to throb, dragging Gabrielle back from the void. She didn’t want to float up from the realm of bliss, wanted to remain suspended there forever.
But the ache mounted, pushed against the lethargy, advancing awareness through her body, until she realized.
Durante. She was wrapped up in him, virility made solid gold muscles, power and hunger and satisfaction made man. Her head was resting on his biceps; her lips were buried in his chiseled chest. Every inch of her was imprinted with his sleek, slightly hair-roughened silk-over-steel body.
The ache rose, changed texture to something she hadn’t felt the many times she’d woken up to more lovemaking. This time it was different. This was the morning after the transfiguring night.
She had nothing to compare to what she’d shared with him. She hadn’t even had morning-afters with her disappointments.
She couldn’t leave this time. And it wasn’t because she was in the middle of the ocean with no way to go home unless he took her. She wanted to stay, for as long as it was possible to stay, wanted to experience everything again, and more, with him.
He rumbled something deep and unbearably sexy as he threw one leg over both of hers, his arms sliding into the deep curve of her waist to her buttocks, hauling her against him, his erection, intact as ever. She was so ready again, or rather, still, it was embarrassing.
He took her mouth, took her breath and will away.
When he relinquished her lips to nibble his way down her face, her neck, she gasped, “Buon giorno to you, too.”
His fingers probed her, slipped into her, circled her bud. She thrust her hips into his pleasuring, needing, desperate, just like that.
“It isn’t a good morning, Gabriella mia. It’s a magnifico giorno, the most magnificent morning in history.” He turned her onto her back, looked at her as if he couldn’t decide which part of her to ravish first. “And do you know what your magnificence did to me, besides the loud and obvious? I dreamed all night. And I remember each second of every dream.” He quickened his fondling. “Now I’m going to reenact each and every one.”
She gasped as he drove her over the edge. And she knew. Her anxiety had no root in reality. There could never be a letdown with Durante. Only soaring.
And if a voice rasped that a fall from such heights could be far more devastating, she stifled it as she gave all of herself up to the wonder of him, of what they’d found together.
Chapter Eleven
Gabrielle watched Giancarlo close the door behind him, a smile hovering on her lips.
For the past two weeks it had become a ritual. She’d arrive at Durante’s penthouse, he’d open the door for her and disappear.
She’d torn through her work like she’d been doing every day, the work for which she’d found her passion and enthusiasm miraculously resurrected, to hurtle back to Durante.