If you want a man to seduce you with fluffy, meaningless words before fucking you then you only have to wait a few more days for that freedom to be yours.
She swallowed back the tears and staunchly told herself that there was no hurt; the tears were a side-effect of her anger because only a complete fool could spend two years living with the android who called himself Gennaro Martinelli and give him the slightest bit of power to hurt them…
A hand clasped her shoulder. In an instant she’d been spun around.
Gennaro’s was as tight and as twisted as she’d ever seen it, the only movement a pulse throbbing at the side of his jaw.
“If all I wanted was sexual release then believe me, you’re the last woman I would choose to have it with,” he said tautly, his hands gripping her upper arms, black eyes boring into hers. “I hate how you make me feel, don’t you understand that, Luisa? Idespiseit. I hate that I always have to fight to keep the shutters down around you. I hate that I can’t be in a room with you without fantasising about the taste and scent of your skin. I hate that I’m attuned to every word you say. I hate that every time you move your mouth to speak or eat, all I want is to feel your mouth on mine. I hate that whenever you leave a room I want to follow you. I hate that I’ve spent every night of the last two years fighting the craving to crawl into your bed and make you mine because that’s what I hate the most – that I don’t just want to fuck you. I want to imprint myself into you. I want to imprint myself so deeply that you become mine alone and never look at Dante or any other man again.”
A stunned silence fell between them. All Luisa could hear was the rapid tattoo of her heart pushing hot blood between her ears and Gennaro’s ragged breaths; all she could see the tortured desire etched in his stare.
After the longest time when it seemed like time itself had stopped moving, he breathed in deeply through his nose, his chest shuddering on the exhale.
“I’ve never wanted to feel like this, not with anyone but especially not with you,” he said starkly. He slid his hands up and over her shoulders and up the curve of her neck. “I’ve never regarded you as my family but I remember the ugly little girl who loved to draw and read and who glowed with love for her family… I envied your family, Luisa. I envied you and I hated you all too. I would see the way you interacted together and the bonds of love you shared and it made me sick with jealousy that those bonds would never be mine.” He speared her hair to cradle her head, his face closing in on hers. “You didn’t need to tell me that you’d only changed on the surface – I already knew it. You’re much tougher and feistier than you were as a child but there’s still that inherent glow of goodness shining out of you. All that’s in me is darkness. Everything I feel for you is dangerous and wrong, and I keep fighting it and fighting it, but now….” He breathed deeply, the pads of his fingers pressing even tighter into her skull. “I don’t know how to fight it anymore.”
It wasn’t just his words that filled her thrashing heart so completely: it was the raw honesty lacing it, Gennaro laying himself bare to her in a way she knew deep in her core he’d never done before.
“I hate how you make me feel too,” she admitted in a ragged whisper.
She’d always hated how he made her feel, how as a childhe’d walk into a room and her cheeks would go all hot and red and she’d lose any ability to string a sentence together. She’d always hidden behind her mother or a book or stuck her face even lower onto the pages she was drawing on, and prayed he wouldn’t see her or speak to her. Most of the time her prayers had been answered, but that one real time he’d instigated an interaction between them when he’d gifted her the expensive grown-up art equipment all those years ago – the kindest, most thoughtful and unexpected gift she’d ever received, given without any hope or expectation of reciprocation – she’d been too much of a tongue-tied, red-faced wreck to thank him properly for it.
She still had it. The watercolour pencils were reduced to stubs, the book filled with her colourful drawings, all kept safe in her childhood bedroom, and as her thoughts continued to swirl and she continued to gaze into Gennaro’s tortured black eyes, terror snaked its way through her veins and gripped hold of her heart.
Oh, God, no…
As if he could see right into her mind, his features convulsed and he muttered something incomprehensible before his sensuous mouth came down on hers.
The first brush of his lips sent a shockwave of sensation through her that was even headier than the first kiss they’d shared what felt like forever ago.
Sinking into his hard, almost primitive demands, their mouths moved together in a fusion of passion that incinerated her terror, and she gave herself to it, switched off her thoughts, cast aside her fears and gave herself to Gennaro, gave herself to his dark taste, his scent, his touch and the sensations flickering like lightning through her skin.
“God, Luisa,” he groaned into her mouth, his fingers dragging through her hair. “You taste like heaven.” And then his lips plundered her again with a kiss so hot and demandingthat if hadn’t wrapped his arms so tightly around her, her legs would have buckled. Scraping her fingers through his soft hair, she returned his kisses with the same passion, every sweep of his tongue against hers filling her with fizzes of sensation.
He lifted her into his arms as if she weighed nothing and carried her to the bed.
Breathing heavily, he lowered himself on top of her and gazed down at her for another long, suspended moment.
And then he kissed her with a hungry possessiveness she felt all the way into her marrow.
Where their first coupling… had it really only been just a few hours ago…? had been a desperate explosion of pent-up lust, this was an explosion of pent-up emotion.
Burying his face in her neck, his tongue trailed the sensitive hollow beneath her ear and down over the frantic pulse at the base of her throat. The scratching of his beard on her sensitive skin was as heavenly as the sensual assault of his lips and tongue.
The sensation in her breasts when he took them in his mouth, encircling the taut peaks with slow strokes of his tongue, was almost more than she could bear. She moaned softly at the untrammelled pleasure, the moans deepening when he answered her wordless plea for more with deeper sucks and licks and grazing bites until the pleasure became so acute it turned into a form of pain.
She’d ached for this for so long, she realised in the hazy recess of her mind. Ached for Gennaro.
All her life…
Gennaro had never tasted or smelt such exquisite, arousing flesh before. Never touched such exquisite softness, the hard the scrape of Luisa’s nails on his shoulders an exquisite contrast.
Everything about her was exquisite, the thrills ragingthrough him stronger even than that moment he’d first thrust into her against the wall.
They’d both lost control and taken each other selfishly, but even with that loss of control and in the heat of their passion, he’d managed to retain some detachment. That detachment had been ripped away. The urge to take Luisa again and lose himself in her slick tightness fought with the hunger to devour every delicious inch of her flesh and learn every last one of her erotic secrets. Not just her erotic secrets. He wanted to strip her back to her essence and learn every last thing there was to know about her.
God, she was beautiful. Every delicious inch. The weight and fullness of her breasts… it was like they’d been created especially for him and he slavered attention on them, fighting the very real need to consume them whole. Consumeherwhole. Crawl into her skin and taste her heart and then etch his name into it.
He’d never known such greed before, and it was this greed, this need for Luisa, to taste every inch of her deliciousness and mark himself on her, that had him snaking lower.