This, him, was what she’d waited for for six years. And for all her life before she’d ever seen him, when she must have known on some level that he existed. Finding him had been like finding the answer to the incompleteness she’d suffered. Losing him, the hope and endless possibilities of him, had been a loss she dedicated herself to recovering from, to living with.
She’d been deluded. She’d thought what he made her feel yesterday and this morning was all she could feel. Now she knew what he could do to her every time his hands glided over her, his lips and teeth owned her, his potency filled and rode her. She knew the meaning of yearning.
It went far beyond the physical. After what they’d shared before they made love, then the way he let her have him before he had her, it spanned everything she was capable of feeling.
She’d long escaped admitting it. She could run no more.
She loved him.
How she loved him. With everything in her.
And it changed nothing. She was just a convenience for him.
Or was she? The things he’d said, the way he’d treated her, taken her…could he possibly feel more for her than she believed?
“That was some persuasion.” Her heart lurched at the tone of his voice. The passion and sincerity were gone. He rose above her, and his eyes were filled with lust untouched by anything softer or higher. “But I already feel the need to be persuaded some more. I’ll need constant persuasion from now on.”
She plummeted from heaven to crash into cold reality. His.
Here was her answer. She was another victory. A strategic one, guaranteed to put so many pieces of his plan into place.
He found her secrets, her triggers, disintegrating her body into pleasure even as he smashed her heart into smaller pieces. And she did the only thing she could to ward off the pain. She matched his nonchalance, his coldness.
“I assume you’re satisfied with my test drive? You must be extra pleased to find me in brand-new condition.”
He gave a cruel chuckle. “You have no idea. Let me demonstrate the level of my pleasure on your own made-for-pleasure body.”
He rose from the bed and carried her to his bathroom, where he’d prepared a bubbling bath. He took her into the soothing waters, bathed her and healed her. His hands glided over her, possessing her, possessing the ability to dissolve her shackles, release her potential. He made her feel both vulnerable and all-powerful. Savored and devoured. He had her writhing, pleading. He made her watch his hand delve between her thighs. His fingers knew just where and how hard or gentle or fast to touch, plunging and withdrawing, stroking, stoking until he had her heaving with a screeching orgasm.
His mouth milked hers for each last shriek as his fingers changed rhythm, desensitizing her, infusing her with renewed desperation. He growled satisfaction at her resurrected hunger, as he raised her onto the marble platform by the tub, laid her there on her back, her legs parted and bent at its edge. He tormented his way down her heaving body, took her legs over his shoulders, came to lie where it all converged. “Open for me, amore. I’m hungry.”
Incoherent under the pressure mushrooming in her loins, she opened wide for him. Legs and heart and abandon.
He bent to her quivering flesh, swept her in a long lick that knocked her internal lights out before he fused his tongue and teeth there and suckled and flicked until she thought something inside her was charring, until her body gushed molten agony, trembled with detonation after detonation of satisfaction. He sucked every spasm out of her in a tongue-thrusting kiss that went on until he again had her climbing, clawing, crazed. Ready for him again.
Her eyes clung to his as he lifted her from the platform where she lay in a pool of sweat, bathwater and condensed steam, dried her, carried her back to the bedroom and laid her down on the bed. Candlelight and moonlight cast flickering gold and steady silver over his rugged planes as he came over her, intersecting at arcane shadows. He bore down on her, opened her around his hips, raised hers and held them in one hand, the other supporting him as he rose halfway on both knees. Then he plunged.
He knew. Knew that she was suffocating to have his flesh in hers, the razing friction, the beyond-her-limits expansion. And he gave it all to her. Impaled her to her womb, her gut, her heart.
He slammed into her and she screamed for more. Then the tidal wave was cresting again. She pleaded his name, begging him to join her in oblivion. He did, in jets of completion, roars of surrender.
He came down beside her, tenderness back in his eyes, his hands, the coldness burned away in the inferno of what they’d shared.
And through the night, though he wouldn’t take her again, said he shouldn’t have taken her again so soon, he pleasured her in so many ways. And in every touch, every word, he confessed his pleasure, his inability to get enough. As did she.
Midday sun poured through the open windows when she next woke up. She was alone in bed.
She jerked up, looking for Ferruccio.
He found him standing on the other side of the bed, fully dressed, hands in pockets, looking down at her broodingly.
Her heart sank. In this insanity-inducing game of hot and cold that he played, were they back to cold?
His eyes said they were. Then his words completed the frost. “Now that your ‘test drive’ has proved so mutually and mindblowingly pleasurable, I’m moving to the next logical step. Marriage.”
Chapter Seven
Clarissa rose cautiously.
The soreness between her legs forced the carefulness. That, plus feeling as if she’d frozen and might shatter at any sudden move. She scooped up her clothes without looking at him, went to the bathroom.
She remained there for an hour, trying to regain some composure.
She came out to find him at the far end of the room, at his reading table. She walked over to him, running the words she’d decided to say through her head one more time.
She stopped before him, recited them. “I want to thank you for the tremendous initiation, but now I demand that you keep up your end of the deal, become crown prince and leave me alone.”
Ferruccio gave her a bored smile. “This is getting old. When will you think before you talk? You now, more than ever, have no option but to fall in with my plans. I have no option but to marry you, either. That you were in ‘brand-new-condition’ is exactly why neither of us has another option.”
“Taking my virginity doesn’t mean we have to get married.”
“Taking you twice, without protection, does,” he retorted. “You could already be pregnant.”
Everything stilled as the blow registered. A quick calculation told her he could be right. She felt she was falling into an abyss. “Even if I am, it isn’t your responsibility. I’m way over the age of consent, and I consented to everything that happened. If I’m pregnant, I’ll handle it on my own.”