‘I want this dress off...’ Dominic gasped, but it was impossible because they could not move their mouths for more than a second from each other.
They wanted nakedness and hours to explore, but their bodies would only give them minutes.
He took the condom and began sheathing himself, while she was pulling up her dress, and when he was done, he lifted her thigh and placed her leg around his hip.
And they were not dancing!
She balanced on one stiletto but his grip of her was firm and the wall behind her solid. Then her hips angled and both were just as urgent as the other as Dominic thrust and took her.
Victoria had never felt anything so powerful. He was rough and delicious and she felt matched for the first time in her life, because he held nothing back.
Everything he delivered.
Dominic’s hand was behind her back and he could feel the scratch of stone on his knuckles but that was so far from his mind that it barely registered.
‘There...’ she said in a voice that was both demanding and urgent.
He met that demand and heightened it too.
She felt amazing. Dominic was rather more used to holding back, but Victoria invited intensity. It had been ages for Dominic, and he had wanted her for a very long time.
There was almost anger in him for how much she made him want her, so he thrust hard and fast and then harder still to the sound of her pleasurable moans, and then he lifted her.
Victoria had never had both feet off the ground like this; she had never been so consumed. His fingers were digging into her bottom as he took her hard against the wall.
Their faces were side by side and she wanted to find his mouth, but there was no time for that as she was starting to come. Never had she climaxed so deeply, and if she were not wrapped around him she would have folded in two at the pleasure.
He released to her deep shudder and together they hit high, and finally she found his mouth, tasted the cool of his tongue as she drank in his kiss. They rested their foreheads together, sharing those last beats of pleasure and breathing the same air until gently he lowered her down.
With long slow kisses he moved them away from the wall now. She pulled down her dress and then they broke contact and she moved out of the shadows.
Victoria picked up her discarded knickers but had to lean on the ledge, not just so she could put them on, but because her legs were shaky and she was still breathless.
She had never let herself go like that, she had never come so hard and she had certainly never been made love to so thoroughly.
When Dominic emerged from the shadows he, too, was dressed, though his hair was rumpled. It should have been really awkward between them, yet it was not.
‘I look like I’ve been in a fight,’ he said as he examined his hands in the moonlight. Victoria took his fingers and looked at them, and made him smile with what she said.
‘You’re going to have some trouble explaining those injuries, Doctor,’ she teased, because it really did look, to her trained eyes, as if he had punched the walls.
Yes, it should have been really awkward but instead he came and sat beside her on the ledge.
‘Victoria...’ he started, but really he did not know what to say. Dominic was in no position to start anything. And what had just taken place was very far removed from his usual nature.
He felt amazing though, as if on the top of a high mountain.
And she saw him struggle with what to say, so she said it for him.
‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ Victoria said. She was not referring to his knuckles, but still she smiled.
‘You’re sure?’ he checked.
‘Yes.’
What had happened was something she could never have imagined, something so far removed from her usual wary approach to intimacy, but he did not need to know all of that.
She felt liberated.
And feminine.
With him she felt she had found herself.
So, instead of an awkward parting they shared a kiss that was deep, long and slow, and ended by her.
‘I’m going to go,’ Victoria said, and stood.
And still she waited for awkwardness, even as she walked to the door.
So did he, yet awkward did not exist in this room.
‘So, if you don’t like diamonds,’ Dominic called. ‘What do you like?’
And she opened the door and laughed as he went back to the original question.
‘Pearls.’
He sat in the room and looked around. The moon shone through the window and the air was still stirred and seductive from them; his knuckles were grazed and he was somewhat reeling.
Dominic had never really given pearls any thought before.
They were just something his mother or grandmother wore for weddings and such occasions.
Certainly he had never considered them sexy.
He did now.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_735efd4a-aef5-5aa1-9bce-c0dc8ba3b211)
‘PREGNANT?’
Victoria watched as her father took off his glasses and cleaned them. And, as he did so, she remembered the time she had got her first period and it had been almost an identical reaction—slight bemusement, mild irritation, though more at the intrusion of conversation rather than what was actually being said.
Victoria sat in her father’s office at Riverside Hospital and waited. For what, she didn’t know.
She had read somewhere that some terrible parents made the most wonderful grandparents. That without the responsibility of parenthood, they enjoyed the experience. And she had hoped, truly hoped, that it might be the case here. That this might breathe some life into her relationship with her father.
Apparently not, if his cool reaction was anything to go by.