Her Passionate Italian: The Passion Bargain / A Sicilian Husband / The Italian's Marriage Bargain

They were, she realised as she tried to move her fingers, only to find they’d locked in two tension fists.

‘I will not make love to a sacrifice, cara. If you’re standing here like this, hoping to God I will wipe Batiste’s loving into oblivion, then you are wasting your time because neither do I play substitute for another man.’

The fact that she’d believed he’d understood, from what he’d overheard Angelo say to Sonya, that she had never been with Angelo like this made her frown as she stared fixedly at the crisp dark coils of hair on his chest. Now she knew he must have misunderstood, there was no way she was going to expose just how little Angelo had wanted her, by telling him the truth.

‘I w-wasn’t thinking anything of the kind,’ seemed a fair compromise.

‘Then why the tension?’

Her lips quivered; she tugged in a breath. ‘Y-you,’ she told him shakily. ‘You’re so…’ She ran the nervous tip of her tongue around her lips.

If she’d conjured up the excuse just to flatter him she could not have found a better one. He laughed, low and throatily, then moved against her in a way that left her in no doubt as to how her little confession was affecting him.

Then he wasn’t laughing, he was dipping his dark head, and suddenly the whole thing became intense again. The deep, drugging kisses, the caressing sweep of his hands. The gentle, pulsing movement of his hips that slowly—slowly began to draw answering movements from her. When he hooked an arm around her waist and used it so he could feed her onto the bed he did it with such smooth control that she wasn’t even aware of what was happening until she felt cool cotton beneath her and opened her eyes to stare in surprise.

The red coverlet had been tossed aside without her noticing, the rest of the covers folded back. And Carlo’s lean, dark golden length was caught by the fire again as he stretched out beside her, then came to lean above her, his dark eyes languid now, sensually engrossed as he sent a hand stroking the length of her body, then began touching light, soft, tantalising kisses in a delicate line along her mouth then across her cheek to her temple and down along her jaw line before returning to her mouth again. Her tongue made its first shy stab between his teeth, her fingers curling into his hair in an effort to hold him still. He let her keep him, he let her trace the moist inner recesses of his mouth and play with the kiss as she’d never played before.

His hand came to cup her breast, the pad of his thumb gently circling the dusky aureole in a slow, breathtaking caress. His mouth moved on again, planting soft kisses along her throat and across the pale slopes of her breast before it closed a tight pink rosebud nipple inside a warm, moist, gently sucking mouth. Sensation became a low deep throbbing ache that spread its sensual fingers to every part of her, quickening her pulses and dragging on her breath. He gave the other breast the same slow, sensual pleasure, his hand gently kneading in tune with his lips until she groaned in sweet agony to it all.

As if the little sound was a sign that stirred his blood his mouth suddenly was back on hers again, taking with driving, hungry passion at the same time his hand trailed a caressing passage down her ribcage to the flat of her stomach before moving on, smooth fingertips slipping beneath the flimsy triangle of raspberry silk and spearing through the dusky mound of curls on a seeking quest.

Shock turned her limbs to liquid, her shaken choke broke their kiss. She opened her eyes and found herself staring directly into naked desire burning molten in the fire glow as his fingers discovered the heart of her. Alien though it was, she squirmed on a wave of white-hot pleasure, her heart pounding at a thundering pace, her fingers clawing at his shoulders as he dipped, withdrew, caressed then dipped again with the smooth, sure touch of a man who knew exactly how to make a woman feel like this. Wild, she felt wild, caught in a slipstream of scintillating pleasure that flowed through her blood. She arched against him, quivering, her breathing reduced to tight, aching little gasps. He captured one of her breasts and she leapt, she shuddered, she sank beneath the rolling surface of shattering sensation and fought him like a mad woman but clung to him desperately at the same time.

And he was hot, his breathing thick and tense, each lithe movement of his body such a sensual act she didn’t know which part of him was going to inflame her next. He murmured something in Italian but she was way beyond being able to translate. The sensual, soothing sound of his voice impinged, though; the gentle brush of his hand across her cheek.

She opened her eyes to find he was frowning—at her naive lack of control no doubt. ‘I’m not…’ used to this, she was about to confess, but he hushed her into silence with the warm crush of his mouth.

Then she was losing herself again in a world made up of pure feeling. He trailed kisses across her breasts, catching each distended nipple and rolling it with his tongue. He kissed her all over. He explored her like a master and she responded with a writhing and whimpering then groaning in protest when his trailing mouth moved to the singing sensitivity of her groin. He kissed her hip, her waist and finally her breasts again, then recaptured her mouth at the same time as he reached for one of her hands and gently curled it around his sex.