The Trophy Husband. LYNNE GRAHAM
He peeled the nightdress out of his determined path, slowly shaped the quivering thrust of her achingly sensitive flesh with expert hands and then imprisoned a throbbing pink nipple in his mouth, suckling hungrily at the tender bud. Her whole body jerked in the surge of scorching heat that he evoked, the sudden, shattering, first-time pull of nerve-endings awakening to sexual passion taking her over. What remained of her control vanished simultaneously.
She heard a voice moaning, didn’t recognise it as her own, her fingers tightly gripping the hot, sleek smoothness of his shoulders as her back arched. Pleasure she had never dreamt of was shooting through her in agonising waves and there was hardly a pause between one peak and the next. She twisted beneath him, couldn’t stay still, wanting, needing, her thighs trembling, tightening on the ache building inside her.
He said something caressing in Italian, and the last thought that she would afterwards recall was that Italian was definitely the language of love in that incredibly rich, deep voice of his, and then he skimmed a hand through the damp curls at the base of her taut stomach and the world became a delirious, multicoloured shower of lights behind her lowered eyelids as he discovered the moist heat at the very heart of her. She cried out, gasped, shuddered. The hungry ache fired higher and higher, the strength of her own need biting so deep that it hurt, driving her to the edge of torment and making her plant desperate little kisses over any part of him that she could reach, her tongue tasting him, her teeth grazing him as her slender hips rose pleadingly against his most intimate caresses.
‘Wait…’ Alex groaned raggedly.
A split second after he drew back from her Sara tugged him back again with insistent hands and covered his mouth wildly, feverishly with her own, automatically utilising everything that he had taught her to keep him in the circle of her arms. He stiffened and then with an earthy groan surrendered with raw enthusiasm, his long, muscular length shuddering as his hands settled on her thighs and he moved against her, freeing her swollen lips, gazing down at her with ferocious hunger. ‘If this is a dream, I don’t ever want to wake up,’ he confessed with passionate conviction.
‘Alex…’ she gasped tautly, her entire quivering body reaching up to his in helpless need, reacting with liquidhoney-enticement to the tantalising, hot, hard probe of his flesh against hers.
The surge of pain caught her on the crest of tortured anticipation. She gasped in shock, eyes flying wide to meet similar shock in his startled gaze. ‘Cristo cara…’ he said in hoarse disbelief, but the momentary frown etched between his ebony brows was swiftly wiped away and the dark eyes glittered more golden than ever.
And then he moved again lithely, powerfully deepening his penetration, and a truly stunning wave of breathtaking sensation swept her back into that wild oblivion where only the demands of her own hungry body held sway. With every driving thrust he took her with him, made the fire burning inside her flame ever higher, ever more unbearably, until her teeth clenched and her heartbeat thundered and her nails raked fiercely down his damp back because the wild, hot pleasure that went on and on only made her more desperate. The explosive burst of her own climax was electrifying. It blew her apart, left her trembling in devastated aftershock from a sheer overload of pleasure.
‘I feel better in my bed.’ Alex was sweeping her up, letting his mouth caress hers again tenderly, then there was movement. That was all her punch-drunk senses could recognise. She felt the faint chill of colder air and then a cool sheet against her back before the heat and muscularity of Alex connected with her again.
‘Don’t go to sleep,’ he instructed her, his dark drawl impossibly vibrant and wide awake as he wrapped his arms around her possessively and vented a deeply satisfied sigh of slumberous relaxation.
Not waves on shores so much as a golden sun of glory around which she had revolved, she conceded sleepily. So much effort to think…so much easier simply to feel, and she felt wonderfully at peace.
‘We spend the weekend on the yacht. I’m in Paris on Monday…you’ll love Paris, cara. What do you think?’ he probed.
What did she think? Sara struggled valiantly to think. She thought that he sounded as if he had closed a tremendously difficult and lucrative business deal which had lost some poor fool a fortune and made him another mountain of money that he didn’t need: immensely, shamelessly self-satisfied. At that point her brain switched off and she shifted with positive contentment into the warm, comforting solidarity of him.
Her nose twitched on the heady scent of flowers. She lifted heavy eyelids slowly, focused on a giant, beribboned basket of flowers and then another basket…and then another. Her mouth went dry. She woke up in a hurry, jerking upright in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar bedroom and gaped at all the flowers surrounding her. Her attention lodged on a man’s silk tie lying in a tiny splash of crimson on top of a dense, creamy carpet and her heart plunged as if she had gone down at supersonic speed in a lift.
She nearly fell out of the bed in her haste to vacate it. Memory took her back and then forward. She turned as white as a sheet and suddenly knew without any prompting what being sober really felt like. A case she recognised as her own was sitting by the window. With a pained groan of disbelief, she stared at it. He had somehow got her clothes out of the flat? Oh, dear Lord, what had she done? What had she done?
With frantic hands she tore into the case. Taped to the inner lid was a big piece of paper, slashed with Antonia’s untidy scrawl. ‘What the hell is going on?’ it said.
Sara grabbed up a handful of clothes and dived into the en suite bathroom. She studied herself in the mirror-red, swollen mouth, shadowed eyes, wildly tousled black hair. Trollop, tart, she castigated herself with tears of rage and shame burning her eyes. How could she have behaved like that with Alex Rossini? She wanted to sink into a great black hole—no, she wanted to put him into a great black hole and pour tons of concrete over him so that he could never escape and she would never have to meet his eyes again!
Thankfully he had already left for the office…Oh, dear heaven, the office! It was already after nine. She would say that she had missed the bus. Nobody would think anything of that; nobody need ever know…but if she had had any choice she wouldn’t have walked into Rossini Industries ever again. However, there would certainly be talk if she suddenly disappeared and failed to work out the last ten days of her notice—much better to grit her teeth and finish her time there. In any case, she conceded bitterly, she badly needed her month’s salary because her bank account was almost empty.
Fumbling, with little of her usual dexterity, she contrived to confine her hair into a murderously tight bun at the nape of her neck.
She crept out of the bedroom, her arm nearly falling off from the weight of the case she was hauling with her. Tight-mouthed, she dragged it along to the landing at the top of the stairs. With every movement, she was more and more aware of the complaint of newly discovered muscles in unmentionable places and the undeniable ache in the least mentionable place of all, and her rage thundered higher with very step.
‘Buon giorno, cara…’
Her throat thickened. Slowly she straightened, stricken eyes flying to the tall, devastatingly attractive male standing at the head of the staircase.
‘I was coming up to see if you wanted to join me for breakfast…but we can do without the luggage,’ Alex assured her very softly, measuring dark eyes speeding over her furiously flushed face and lingering with incipient shrewdness. ‘Don’t do it—don’t say what’s brimming on your lips…Don’t disappoint me, cara.’
She wanted to kick him down the stairs. A temper that she had never had any trouble controlling until now was suddenly threatening to explode. She sucked in air, freezing her facial muscles. ‘I happen to be late for work, Mr Rossini.’ Ice dripped from every syllable.
She hit her lowest ebb as she watched his sensual mouth twist and then compress. She didn’t need to be told how ridiculous she had sounded. Then his strong dark face tautened. Brilliant dark eyes rested on her. ‘Sara…I want you to count to ten and think about