Sliding another finger inside her, he casually… at least with an outward casual appearance… selected a pink treat for her to eat. “Open.”
She obeyed.
A slight adjustment of the hand between her legs allowed his palm to press against her swollen clitoris. A low moan she had no control of escaped from her lips.
God in heaven…
“Don’t forget to swallow,” he whispered, cupping her feminine heat and pressing with more strength against the nub of her pleasure.
She closed her eyes.
“Look at me,” he commanded again.
Her eyes flew back open and landed on his.
“Keep your eyes on me,” he said with quiet intensity as he subtly strengthened the pleasure of all he was doing between her legs. “That’s it. Just keep looking at me as if we’re engaged in conversation… and imagine everything we will do to each other when it’s just the two of us… all the things we’ve spent our marriage denying ourselves…”
Luisa had never concentrated so hard on keeping herselfstill in the whole of her life. It wasn’t possible to forget that they were in a crowded ballroom surrounded by hundreds of people but it had all become a distant blur. The only clarity she had was Gennaro and the glorious sensations he was evoking in her, stimulating the need for him that had lived beneath her skin for so long she couldn’t remember a time it hadn’t been there. Unable to move or speak, she was helpless to do anything but silently chase the approaching peak, and she gazed into his hooded eyes, the seductive words he was saying soaking through her skin with the same strength as the hand cupping her and the fingers moving inside her until the sensation exploded and all she could do was dig her nails into his thigh and ride the most powerful climax of her life without crying out or moving in any way.
It seemed like forever passed before the ballroom came back into focus.
All she could hear were the ragged beats of her thundering heart.
Trying her hardest to catch her breath, she swallowed and blinked to clear her vision. Although her gaze was still trapped in Gennaro’s swirling black stare… she was incapable of looking anywhere else… she had a growing awareness of life and movement around her. The singer who’d performed for them throughout the meal had disappeared, music playing out over the speakers as the live band performing next set themselves up. Many of the guests had moved from their seats, grouping on the edge of the dancefloor, talking, laughing, drinking.
Their gazes still locked so starkly together, the hand between her legs skimmed down her thigh before bunching the multitude of layers of her dress’s skirt.
His throat extended. “Let’s get out of here,” he said roughly.
“Now?” she whispered dazedly.
He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. The meaning in his eyes was clear. “Now.”
For a man who insisted his private life always be private, Gennaro should be furious with himself for allowing jealousy of a man making his wife laugh spur him into such proprietary behaviour. He should be furious, too, for daring to go so far as he just had with her, but he defied the most private person on God’s earth to experience what he’d just experienced and feel regret.
He’d never lived as a monk. He’d had his share of private, hedonistic experiences but in all his thirty-seven years, he’d never seen or experienced anything as erotic as Luisa’s still, silent climax.
Her stillness had been entirely external. Internally, she’d melted for him. Only her eyes and the stain of colour where her mask didn’t cover her face would have hinted at what had been happening beneath the table to anyone who happened to be observing them.
He could still feel the mark of her nails in his thigh.
Arousal of a kind he’d never known before coursed through his veins, and he held her hand tightly as they navigated their way out of the ballroom, blanking out the faces of everyone who tried to catch his eye and deafening himself to the voices of those who would try to strike up a conversation.
The only person his senses could focus on was the woman he was abandoning the ball for.
Chapter Eight
There was a breeze in the cool evening air that felt delicious against Luisa’s fevered skin.
Small clusters of people were standing outside, most of them enjoying a post-dinner cigarette.
Her head felt separated from her body and yet in complete connect, a paradox she couldn’t begin to make sense of any more than she could make sense of the paradox that she, a woman who’d never particularly enjoyed sex and had never wanted it for its own sake, had allowed a man to bring her to orgasm in a room filled with approximately five hundred people.
Not just any man but the man she hated. Her husband.
And now here she was, her hand gripped in his, abandoning the ball and sweeping past the smoking revellers to head to their suite to have sex for sex’s sake.
She felt like she was floating and yet didn’t think she’d ever walked with such purpose before.