Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals: Castelli's Virgin Widow / Expecting a Royal Scandal / The Guardian's Virgin Ward

He moved his hands to her hips to hold her right where he wanted her. He tucked his mouth against her neck, where he could taste her, salt and need.

And then finally, finally, he thrust his way home.

* * *

It hurt.

God, did it hurt.

Kathryn felt something tear, felt a shriek of agony sear through her like a burn, and then there was nothing but the hugeness of him. Deep, deep inside her. So deep she found she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but freeze there over him, that harsh thrust of his possession like a throbbing brand within her.

Luca swore.

Then again, in both Italian and English, and she scrunched up her face so she wouldn’t cry and kept it buried in the crook of his shoulder as if she could hide from this. As if that might make the shuddering, aching heaviness go away.

But it didn’t work.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Kathryn. Sit up.”

“I don’t want to.”

He was still buried deep inside her, though he didn’t move. Then the car bumped over a dip in the road and thrust him deeper into her, and she felt the way he braced himself. Heard the small exhalation he made, as if this was no easier for him than it was for her. And that heavy sharpness radiated out from where the length of him was still inside her, making even her breasts feel stung with it.

As if the whole of her body was one giant ache.

“Sit up, cucciola mia,” he said, in a voice she’d never heard him use before, something far warmer and indulgent than any she associated with him. He nudged her with his jaw. “Now, please.”

And it seemed the hardest thing she’d ever done, to ease herself back, knowing he could see the panic and the pain and the leftover heat all over her face. To feel him lodged inside her as she carefully shifted position. To look into his dark eyes, so close to hers, aware that he knew things about her now she hadn’t wanted to share.

Too many things.

It had all happened too fast. She’d been lost in another bone-deep, impossible shattering, torn apart into a million little pieces and unable to breathe, and then it had been too late.

Too late, she thought again.

She wasn’t sure what that thing was that crept over her, deep in her chest and her gut, a raw sort of hollow. She was terribly afraid it might be a sob.

Luca reached up and smoothed her hair back from her still-flushed face. She squirmed against that thick, hard intrusion that connected them so intimately, and he only watched her do it. He didn’t move—though she thought that steel line of his jaw hardened.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice the quietest she’d ever heard it, and she didn’t know what to make of that. She didn’t know how to feel.

She moved her hips and didn’t understand how people did this, or why, when there was no comfortable position and too much of that heavy, aching heat. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“Kathryn,” he said, that low voice at odds, somehow, with the very nearly tender way his thumbs brushed over her temples, and her name in his mouth a kind of poetry that made that hollow thing inside her seem to hum. “You went from pleasure to pain in an instant. How could I not notice that?”

She shifted again, still trying to find a way to sit on his lap when he was inside her, and this time his eyes darkened. She caught her breath.

The car bumped again and this time, the sensations that spun out from that involuntary thrust were more of a deep spark than anything sharp or painful. The ache inside her...changed. The spark seemed to light it up, infusing it with something else besides the pain. She shifted experimentally, then tugged her bottom lip between her teeth when that something else bloomed into something better, and watched that slow hunger burn in his dark eyes.

She felt an answering echo of it in her, as if the heaviness and the stretched ache were connected to all that delicious heat she thought of as his, that she could feel easing back into her the longer they sat like this.

“I wasn’t aware that it would matter to you whether or not you hurt me,” she said, without meaning to speak.

Luca’s hands moved to cup her cheeks, and his dark eyes met hers, nearly grim in the shadows of this car slipping through the California night.

“It matters,” he said gruffly. “You should have told me.”

And that hollow thing inside her swelled, crashing over her like a terrible tide. She didn’t know what it was. She only felt the sting of tears in her eyes and the throb of something far heavier in her chest.

And Luca deep inside her, hot and still.

“Tell you?” she whispered, because her voice had deserted her. “How could I tell you? You don’t just think I’m a whore, Luca. You know it. You’ve never had the slightest doubt.”

“Kathryn.”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.” She only realized that her tears had spilled out when he wiped them away with his thumbs, more gentle with her than made any sense. “You would have laughed in my face.”

He didn’t deny that, though his gaze darkened even further.

He pulled her face to his and kissed her, and it was almost too much. The thrust of him deep inside her body and the impossible sweetness of his lips on hers. It made her brain short out. It made that great rawness inside her glow.

“Ah, cucciola mia,” he murmured, pulling back from her mouth, still holding her face in his hands—almost as if he found her somehow precious. “I’m not laughing now.”

And then he began to move.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#u5aee10b1-8172-5b5f-a3e6-9e51a22fc8dd)

KATHRYN TENSED, BUT Luca only pulled out slowly and then pressed back in, far more gently this time.

It didn’t hurt. It felt...strange, but that was better than the pain.

“Breathe,” he told her, in that bossy way of his that shouldn’t have made something ignite inside her. But she did it anyway.

She pulled in a deep breath and let it out, and still he moved inside her. Lazy. Relaxed. An easy sort of rocking.

Slowly, almost despite herself, Kathryn began to anticipate him. She met him when he thrust in, moving her hips in a way that made a low, shimmering thing dance inside her.

His mouth curved, and she thought that later—much later—she would have to examine why it was that it made her flush with so much pleasure.

He maintained that same lazy pace, and let his hands wander where they pleased. He smoothed his way up her back. He tested the thrust of her breasts through the dress that was still bunched around her waist. He reached beneath it and drew patterns on the soft skin of her belly, on the outsides of her thighs.

Kathryn found herself moving more, rolling her hips and testing the depth of his stroke. This dragged the center of her against him, and it made everything inside her wind up tight. That made a sweet shudder work its way up her spine. She tried different movements, wriggling against him and rocking into him, and he let her, only that heavy-lidded heat in his dark eyes and the faint flush high on his cheekbones a hint that he felt the same fire she did.

And slowly, surely, inevitably, she forgot that anything had ever hurt her. There was nothing but the glide, the pull. The bright heat that expanded the deeper he went into her and the more she met each thrust.

There was a coiling thing inside her, huge and terrifying, and Kathryn didn’t know which she wanted more—to hide from it or throw herself straight into its center. And in any case, it didn’t matter. Because Luca let out a delicious little laugh as if he knew exactly what she felt, and took control.

He pulled her hips flush with his. He took her mouth in a deep, dark, endless kiss. And he began to move within her in earnest, each slick thrust making that coil wind tighter, making it bigger and wilder and that much more intense.