Bound By My Scandalous Pregnancy / Redemption Of The Untamed Italian

Storm-tossed eyes traced every inch of my face, lingering longest and fiercest on my mouth.

‘Yes. Here you are,’ he replied.

His warm, cognac-tinged breath washed over my lips, causing them to tingle wildly.

Desperately, I slicked my tongue over them, then again when his sizzling gaze followed the wet path. His next breath emerged a touch harsher, his sculpted chest straining against his pristine shirt. The tingling flashed to my fingers, where the need to explore that mouth-watering expanse lashed harder and faster.

‘The invitation still stands, Sadie,’ he breathed.

Stay. Explore. Indulge.

I lifted my hand until it hovered mere inches from his skin. Until his heat caressed my palm, its gravitational pull tugging me with unrelenting force.

Was I really doing this? Baiting a predator to avoid my own reality?

Snatching a jagged breath, I hesitated.

Eyes even fiercer, Neo shifted. My hand met the hard wall of his chest, rested on the powerful thundering heartbeat. Lust burst through like a hot ray of sunshine through fog, melting away the last of my reservations. I slid my fingers up superbly well-defined pecs, over the tie he’d loosened during dinner, to glide around his neck.

The thought that I was headed in the wrong direction, going up when I should be heading down, evaporated as I explored him. He’d invited this. And I wanted to make sure my investigation was…thorough.

His eyes grew hooded when my fingers speared the hair at his nape. Lustrous strands slid through my fingers, and that small act fired up the tempest coursing through me. Enthralled by the sensation, I repeated the caress.

A gruff sound left his throat. His Adam’s apple moved in a strong swallow. Had he moved closer or had I? My gaze fell to his full lower lip, so temptingly close. Promising a heady reprieve from chaos, despair and uncertainty.

One tiny, tiny taste.

I strained another inch closer, watched his eyes turn darker, felt his chest expand with a heavy inhalation.

One second ticked by. Two.

Then, with a rush of breath and a growl of impatience, he breached the gap between us, fused his lips to mine in white-hot possession.

Indecent. Heavenly.

Outrageous and masculine and, oh, so powerful.

Neo took control of the kiss, brazenly swept his tongue along the ultrasensitive flesh of my bottom lip before delving in between to taste me. With a whimper of urgent need, I parted my lips wider, welcoming him with the eagerness of a starving woman granted a feast.

But even while his lips clung to mine, his hands remained where they were, maddeningly removed from my body. The challenge was too much to resist. Crawling closer, I wrapped both hands around his neck, drew him deeper into the kiss. Dared to meet his tongue with mine on the next sweep.

His body jerked and another growl left his throat as our tongues found a unique dance of decadent delight, of thrilling desire that built with each ferocious second.

Dear God, he could kiss. Even when he wasn’t putting his complete effort into it, even when he wasn’t touching me, I was nearly driven out of my mind.

In another heartbeat that was all I wanted. Neo Xenakis’s hands on me.

Then I would stop.

Because this was getting out of control.

As if he’d heard my silent plea, he finally dropped his hands from the back of the sofa. They glided over my shoulders, down my ribcage, in slow, sensuous exploration to my waist. After the merest hesitation, he wrapped his large hands around my hips and pulled me with supreme masculine ease into his lap.

No need for any southern exploration.

The unmistakable evidence of his proud manhood was imprinted, hot and thick, against my bottom.

At my muted gasp he broke the kiss and edged me back, long enough to deliver a smouldering look of arrogant confirmation.

‘Now you know,’ he breathed.

‘Y-yes…’

A look flickered through his eyes—one that seemed to ask and answer a question in the same heartbeat. Then he was tugging me back into his body, one hand spiked in my hair, the other on my hip, pinning me to his lower body. It was as if he wanted nothing but his powerful masculinity to occupy my mind now he’d provided the evidence.

As if I could think of anything else. Feel anything else.

With only one lover in my past, and a fleeting one at that, sex was still a mystery to me—a land whose borders I’d barely breached before retreating, first out of disappointment and then through the sheer strain of holding the tattered rags of my life together.

Now, presented with this tantalising feast, every past experience paled to nothing. My instinct warned that a man like Neo would have more experience in his little finger than I would in my whole body. That this brief taste was merely a drop in the ocean of what he could deliver to the right woman.

Except I wasn’t the right woman.

I was the woman he’d goaded into taking this risky, mind-altering challenge. A challenge whose fire blazed to heights I’d never encountered before.

You can stop. Now.

But his lips were intoxicating. And the way his tongue and teeth and lips commanded mine was intensifying that persistent, needy throb between my legs…

With another moan I locked my hands around his neck, strained even closer to that magnificent body. And gasped when he abruptly pulled back, his hooded eyes darting from my parted lips to clash with mine.

He let out a heavy, unsteady exhale. ‘This isn’t how I foresaw this meeting evolving,’ he rasped.

‘Me neither,’ I muttered.

He gave a short, jerky nod before his fierce gaze bored into mine. ‘Then perhaps it’s best if we draw a line under it,’ he invited.

But the slight clench of his fingers on my hip said that wasn’t what he really wanted. And when his hold loosened, when I sensed he was about to disengage, I clenched my gut against the lash of disappointment and loss.

‘Is that what you want? For me to leave?’

His jaw clenched and that hot gaze locked on my lips. ‘The more important question is, are you ready to let go, Sadie? I ask this because you’re clinging to me as if I’m the last piece of driftwood in your ocean.’

My arms unlocked from around his neck, slow with a helpless need to stay connected, moved down his chest. At his deep shudder a powerful sensation gripped me, along with a twinge of uncertainty barely born, before it was smashed beneath the colossal hunger clawing through me.

I’d never felt anything like this. And the voice inside telling me I never would again birthed a terrifying need to seize this unique experience.

Everything around me was slowly crumbling to dust. My mother’s spiralling gambling. Looming homelessness. The job I no longer had. My own shattered dreams…