Mediterranean Tycoons: The De Santis Marriage / The Greek Tycoon's Unwilling Wife / The Sicilian's Virgin Bride

The supper continued in near silence after that, his withdrawal from the sparring arena as obvious as the stern expression he wore on his face. And Lizzy had killed her own chances of managing light conversation when she’d let herself remember what was supposed to come next.

Her main problem being—she didn’t know what came next. She’d known on the flight over here. For the whole week before the flight over here she’d known exactly what was going to come next because Luc had spelt it out to her in cool, precise language.

Marriage, sex, babies—little De Santis cubs.

‘It’s late.’ She stood up, with no idea why she picked that precise moment to throw in the keeping-up-appearances towel. ‘I think I’ll—go to bed.’

She didn’t look at him, but she could feel his eyes on her, feel his sombre mood. And he didn’t say anything, just sat there lounging in his seat twisting a champagne flute between his fingers as he watched her make her retreat.

The pale blue curtains had been drawn across the window and the intimate table for two had been cleared. The bed had been turned down and the lights in the room had been reduced to a misty glow either side of the bed. As she stared at the bed Lizzy hugged herself and shivered as if she were standing in the coldest place on earth.

Slipping out of her clothes and into the smoothest white silk nightdress she’d ever run her fingers over, she tugged pins out of her hair until her scalp stung with the angry, frustrated violence she used.

She didn’t look in a mirror—she didn’t want to see what was written on her face. She just crawled between the cool linen sheets, punched the pillow with a clenched fist, then laid her head on it and willed herself to go to sleep.

It took hours—hours of lying there willing and wishing, and replaying the events of the day through a revolving door of spinning images and arguments and…waiting. At some point she must have accepted that her wedding night was going to be the same sterile event her wedding day had been because she finally managed to relax and drop into a deep, dark sleep.

She was warm and relaxed and beautifully comfortable dreaming about gentle waves rolling into a soft sandy shore, when the feel of a set of long fingers gently massaging the silk covering her stomach brought her awake.

She opened her eyes, felt the lazy moist warmth of a pair of lips taste the sensitive hollow by her ear—and tensed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘NO, BE STILL,’ Luc’s dark husky voice commanded.

But the vibrating rush of sensual panic made Lizzy’s heart beat a fast tattoo against her ribs and on a soft breath she flipped onto her back, eyes wide and staring up at him through the darkness.

‘I thought you—’

He kissed the words away, sealing his lips to her lips and gently teasing the tiny tremor with his tongue. ‘We are going to rescue our wedding night, amore,’ he told her, ‘and we will take it very slowly, so slowly you will not remember to be scared.’

Lizzy wanted to say that she wasn’t scared but she couldn’t, the hand at her stomach awakening her senses to the message being relayed to them by the slow, sensual caress his fingers made across the slippery silk. And she could feel the heat of him as he leant over her, feel that the full length of his body pressing intimately against hers was naked and aroused.

She closed her eyes and parted her lips for him, felt his sigh as he took the invitation and sank his tongue into her mouth, gently at first, then with deepening passion as she responded, catching the increasingly erotic rhythm of his tongue stroking against hers. Her hands lifted up to clutch at him, her fingernails digging into the muscles braced like stretched satin in his arms, her body arching upwards in a compulsive need to press against that massaging hand.

As if the telling movement triggered something inside him, he slid the hand lower, skimming over her hips and her thighs to reach for the edge of her nightgown, then with a smooth, swift, experienced efficiency stripped it all the way up to her throat.

The loss of his mouth and the slick, lithe way he removed the scrap of silk over her head set her shivering and gasping, then the kiss was deep and hungry again, the massaging hand gliding now, over her newly exposed flesh. He stroked her thighs, the gentle contours of her hip and the indentation of her waist. When she whispered something into his mouth, he rose up and looked down her length to watch as his fingers moved on over the flat of her stomach to skim across the top of one pale rounded breast.

Lizzy closed her eyes when she felt the possessive claim that hand made and was ready this time for the burning wave of pleasure that drenched her as he stroked, then cupped, then grazed the aching tip with the pad of his thumb. Her nipples sprang out in a blatant leap and she squirmed in embarrassment.

He wasn’t embarrassed. He just used his long fingers to shape the quivering globe in preparation to take that tight dark rosebud into his mouth. A piercing hot sting struck from the centre of her nipple and shot all the way down to her thighs, bending her body like a wand. Once again he lifted his dark head and looked at her, then strung a gentle line of slow, tender kisses along the line of her jaw. Lizzy closed her eyes and endured until at last he stopped teasing and gave her what she wanted—the warm, seductive pressure of his mouth on her own.

She kissed him as if she would die if she didn’t. She floated on a sexual high. When he tried to calm her, she ran her fingernails into his hair and scored them down his back.

‘Il virago inglese’ he accused on a rough shaken shudder.

Lizzy didn’t care. She wanted his touch, she wanted to toss herself back to where they’d been on that other bed, before she’d chickened out and called a stop. And she wanted to feel every sensual sensation she knew was still waiting for her to experience.

So the tense curse that left his chest meant nothing to her until he used the superior strength in his arms to bring her tumbling halfway back down to earth.

‘I said slowly,’ he husked at her. ‘I will not ravish you, Elizabeth.’

But she didn’t know the difference between fast and slow. Her own wild senses were ruling her actions; the sweet, tight pulse of desire was controlling the pace. The fingers she sent spearing into his neck so she could bring his mouth back to hers were fierce and urgent. ‘I want to be ravished,’ she whispered to him.

His kiss-heated lips twisted into a grim smile. ‘You don’t understand the concept and I will not give you an excuse to accuse me of ravishing you once it is done and your conscience decides to torment you.’

Her eyes widened in protest. ‘I w-wouldn’t do that—’

‘You would,’ he insisted. ‘You want me but you don’t want to want me, you have simply allowed yourself to forget that. In fact,’ he added, sending a sardonic gleam to her liquid green eyes, ‘I predict you will take great pleasure in accusing me of anything that might come to mind.’

‘How can you be so cold and detached that your mind can even think of these things right now?’ she threw at him helplessly.

‘I am not cold and detached.’ But his dark face clenched. ‘I am just trying to play this as fairly as I can for you!’

‘Me?’ Lizzy choked out a laugh, feeling the whole wretched, glorious wash of pleasure swirl into bitterness. ‘You haven’t been fair to me since you met me.’ Clenching her fists, she used them to try and push him away. ‘You’re a lousy lover, Luc,’ she added in thick frustration when she couldn’t budge him by even half an inch. ‘The kind that sounds like he wants me to sign another contract before he condescends to move this marriage on!’

Once again her tongue had outpaced her common sense. Lizzy knew it the moment the cutting accusation was out. Her breathing disappeared, her eyelashes flickering as she took in the look that had frozen his face. Teeth burying themselves into her full bottom lip, she waited, heart pounding, her foolish stubbornness refusing to let her take the words back before it was too late.

And she knew she should have done—his complete stillness told her that she should. Yet he didn’t move, didn’t speak, he didn’t make any really visible sign that she’d managed to cut into him at all. It was just there in the pulsating silence, in the way she was suddenly feeling the difference in their age and experience, and in the tiny quivers stinging her muscles in places they should not be doing at a tense moment like this.

‘S-say something,’ she breathed when she could stand it no longer.

He moved then, like a man who had just come to a grim decision. One of his arms snaked outwards and suddenly a light switched on, bathing them both in a soft golden glow that did nothing to lessen Lizzy’s tension one bit. She actually felt her eyes turn black. Yet he still just continued to look down at her, into her huge wary eyes and the silken tumble of chestnut curls rippling the pillow around her delicately featured very pale face.

And her heart wasn’t beating fast now, it was thumping slow and thick. His face, his beautiful, beautiful face was still so expressionless it just didn’t go with what he did next.

What he did was to spear his long fingers into her hair, then curve them around the back of her neck. As she gasped he tilted her head back so it arched her slender white throat, then lowered his dark head and buried his mouth in her taut, smooth flesh.

Nothing in her meagre experience with men helped to warn her as to what was coming. It was seduction at its most deep and determined level. It was the man of experience making no concessions for her foolishly defiant innocence. He made love to her with a grim and silent precision; he dragged each and every sensually erotic sensation to the stinging surface of her pale, smooth, receptive skin. He moved his mouth in hot, sensual glides until he reached her parted, trembling mouth, then he kissed her long and deep and without mercy until she was dizzy with it, throbbing and drunk. And he used his hands and his mouth and his tongue in ways and in places she hadn’t known could be so deliciously good.

The quiet command of his voice worked her like a puppet. She was trapped, enslaved by the string-pulling power of his knowledge and her own desire to feel whatever he decided to bestow on her too-responsive flesh. He caressed each curve and hollow and soft warm crevice of her body; he drew her taut with exquisite sensation with his hands and his mouth and his teeth. He kneaded the rounded, swollen fullness of her breasts and sent her teeth into his satin, taut shoulder when he teased and sucked their eager tips.

She even felt him tremble once or twice when her restless, untutored fingers scraped across his flesh. And when the downward glide of his trailing fingers finally took control of the pulsing ache between her legs she flailed in a morass of hot feeling, lost to reality because her own heady consciousness had locked onto the will of her body and the way he slowly, relentlessly brought her climbing and crawling and panting and needing to a whimpering, pleading peak.

No single part of her did not know what it was like to be caressed by him—no nerve-end, no muscle, no velvet dark place of intimacy, until she pulsed and throbbed and breathed out his name in a helpless, breathless, sensual chant.

She hadn’t opened her eyes in ages, not since she’d lowered her eyelids in surrender and let him do this to her. But as she felt his weight easing down on top of her and her thighs being urged apart her eyelids lifted, her eyes making deep, deep contact with the heavy gold darkness in his.

Everything about him was heavy gold darkness, the breadth of his shoulders blocking out most of the lamplight, the long, hard-muscled torso pressing down on her with his hips. She felt the presence and the power of his erection nudge against her carefully prepared warm and wet and swollen flesh. His mouth was still somber, but it was tender when he took her mouth in yet another deep, drugging kiss.

Then it was there. His hands cupped her bottom to lift her and he made that first smooth, blinding thrust with his hips. Her body throbbed and stretched to accommodate him; she felt him like a burning shaft of fire in the innocence of her sheath. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into his shoulders and sensation poured in a swirling wave of fear and anticipation down the pulsing length of where they had joined.

‘You are sure you want this?’ he husked at her.

The fact that he’d even asked the question after so much pulsing macho male domination made tears sting the back of her throat. The point surely was—did he want it?

Lizzy nodded, her mouth just a breath away from his mouth, her eyes clinging dark and vulnerable and helplessly needy to his. It was his eyes that closed when he made that final invasion, his mouth that quivered tautly as she tried to choke back a cry of pain. It was his hands that trembled as he pushed the hair away from her face, then kissed it, kissed it in soft, soothing touches until he felt the tension slowly seep out of her. Then she felt him go deeper, felt the singing dance of her nerve-ends clamour to his probing force. His hands were gliding down the silken thighs to her calves then, and lifting them until her legs circled his waist.