by Penny Jordan
‘I loved James,’ she told him. ‘But someone like you could never understand that.’ Her voice caught and then broke.
Stifling an oath, Rocco released one of her wrists to cup her chin and lift it, so that he could look into her eyes. She looked like a martyr, all trampled pride and virtue, defending a lost love.
‘You say that now,’ he told her savagely, ‘but you were still prepared to give yourself to me.’
‘No. I loathe the thought of you touching me.’
‘Like this, you mean?’
He was going to regret this when he had calmed down, Rocco knew, but right now his pride was asserting its need to be assuaged in a way that was driving out everything else.
Whilst she protested, he bent his head and silenced her with the pressure of his mouth on hers.
Julie told herself that she didn’t want him, that she truly did loathe him, but some irresistible form of alchemy was taking place, transforming those feelings into their exact opposite. Her free hand lifted to his jaw—rough with nearly a full day’s growth of beard, prickling the tender pads of her fingertips—to keep his mouth on her own.
Her heart was jerking in hot, tight spasms that echoed the speed with which the dull, heavy weight of the ache in her lower body was growing.
Rocco had released her other wrist to tangle his hand in her hair. He spread it flat against the back of her head, holding her beneath his kiss whilst his tongue prised open her lips.
Her heart shuddered, and burst into a flurry of heavy beats. The dull ache low down in her body spread to her thighs. Her tongue found his and she explored it with delicate little touches of her own tongue. She and James had never kissed like this. She had wanted to, but James had never initiated the intimacy.
Her heart slalomed as Rocco curled his tongue round her own, stroking it rhythmically, making her whole body move against his in an answering rhythm.
When had he last found this kind of sensuality in a kiss? Rocco wondered, already knowing the answer to his own question. Her response to him was sending rivers of molten desire speeding through him, destroying every obstacle in their way. Wasn’t it more a matter of admitting that he had never found it—had never known that it could be found or that he wanted to find it—until now?
Rocco cupped the side of Julie’s face with his free hand and kissed the tender spot just behind her ear, stroking it with his tongue tip.
Violent shudders of pleasure rocked through Julie’s body. She turned her face into Rocco’s hand, caressing his fingers with her tongue, feeling the need inside her building to a hot, tight pulse.
Frantically she pushed Rocco away, catching him off guard.
‘What is it?’ His voice was raw and thick with arousal, and his hands returned to her body, shaping her waist, moving upward towards her breasts.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Julie told him desperately, too caught up in the intensity of what she was feeling to hold back the truth. ‘I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to want you so much. It’s too much.’ She trembled visibly.
The heaviness of her longing lay within her like an alien life form, possessing and controlling her. She looked at his hand, wondering what he would do if she reached for it and placed it against her sex, where the pulse of her desire had gone from a small flutter to a fierce, almost painful clamour. She felt lost, afraid, and terribly alone, in a place that was totally alien to all her previous experience, taken there by her desire for a man she didn’t want to want.
How the hell did she expect him to back off after saying something like that to him? Never mind when she was looking at him in the way that she was—as though all she wanted was to be possessed by him? Rocco wondered grimly. He felt his self-control give way beneath the combined weight of her words and his own desire.
‘You are too much,’ he told her thickly. ‘Too much for me to resist.’
His hold encircled her, his hands sweeping up over her ribcage beneath the silky-fine knit of her top, pushing aside the decorative rather than practical barrier of her bra. His heat invaded her skin, branding his touch upon it. Her breasts, turgid now with desire, welcomed the cupped pressure of his hands, whilst the kisses he skimmed along the length of her neck and into her shoulder set off a reaction that burned its way through every sensory nerve ending her body possessed, so that her whole body vibrated visibly in mute shudders to the music of his touch, like an instrument played by a master musician.
Here on this island, with its buried veins of molten lava that ran so deep and possessed such danger, she was, Julie recognised distantly, finally discovering the hidden depths of her own passion. Like someone standing on its edge, looking down into the sleeping heart of the volcano, oblivious to its true nature, she had stood for so long on the edge of her own passions that she had overlooked how powerful they were.
Now, like lava running hot from deep down inside the earth, this man—a man whose blood and history had made him part of this island of volcanic uncertainty—was deliberately inciting her own fevered desire to the point where she could no longer control it. She could feel the need building up inside her—overpowering, commanding, demanding that she give herself over to it and to the man who had aroused it.
What was it about this woman that enabled her to transform herself into this living, breathing embodiment of such erotic and intense sensual responsiveness? He asked himself. It was as though she knew his every need, and could answer it in a way that took him deeper than he had ever previously gone into the molten heart of his own desire.
What her touch, her flesh, her self were drawing from him could never have been conjured up by mere sexual experience or tired, over-used mechanical responses of the ‘you touch me like this and I respond like this’ variety.
Somehow she was able to imbue even something as simple as the unsteady breath of her heartbeat against his flesh with such passion that her pleasure seemed new and tumultuous—an acknowledgement of a gift from him that took her into sensual realms she had never known before. Just the heavy- lidded and helplessly liquid look of longing that seemed to be dragged from her as though her need for him completely overwhelmed her was a form of arousal, and it took him in turn to a pitch that promised—and threatened—a degree of pleasure that challenged his own self-control.
When his touch had brought her to a state of semi-collapse, to lie boneless and mutely imploring against him, Rocco removed her top and then her bra, before sliding off her linen trousers.
Below the twin concave dips on either side of the minute swell of her stomach, he could see quite clearly, through the sheer fabric of her knickers and the more intimate covering of silky blonde hair that covered her sex, the frantic fast pulse of her need.
Rocco closed his eyes protectively and took a deep breath that lifted his torso, exhaling slowly as he fought for the command of himself that he could feel slipping away. But it was no good. The minute his eyelids lifted his gaze and returned it to that pulse, his whole body reacted to it.
He started to undress, unfastening just a few buttons on his shirt before he stopped, driven by his own need to lean forward and place his palms flat on the bed on either side of her hips, so that he could lower his head and feel that pulse, with its message of sensual untrammelled heat, against his mouth, so that he could take it deep inside himself to where his own body ached in exactly the same way.
Julie heard herself cry out—a sharp, keening sound somewhere between uncontrollable longing and helpless recognition that she was lost now to any kind of self-restraint.
The heat of Rocco’s mouth penetrated the fine fabric covering her sex, making her feel as though she was melting inside, turning wet and soft, her flesh yearning.
When Rocco straightened up she wanted to protest, to beg him to continue. A wild, feverish and driving clamour of physical urgency was possessing her, causing her to move restlessly on the bed. The small out-of-control movements of her body reflected her impatience and her need, but then she realised that Ro
cco was removing his clothes, and her movements stilled. Her concentration was focused on watching as he shrugged off his shirt. The late afternoon sunlight breaking through the clouds strobed golden bars of light against his naked torso—honey against amber, sleeked with silk and velvet darkness where his body hair arrowed down beneath the waistband of the trousers he was now unfastening.
At some point he had removed his shoes, and for some reason the sight of his feet, bare, tanned and masculine, caused her heart to flip over. It was laughable, really, that such a small intimacy should possess such an intense charge. Was it because when James had made love to her he had never properly undressed, claiming that his shared student digs made it unwise? Did the sight of Rocco’s bare feet somehow signal to her senses that now at last they would be able to experience what true sexual passion and the possession that went with it really meant?
Was it true after all that one did not need to be in love to enjoy passionate sex? Did she care?
Rocco stepped out of his trousers. Julie’s heart took a high dive into shuddering delight. She had seen adverts for men’s underwear, featuring what she had always suspected must surely be digitally honed and enhanced male models, but now she realised they had come nowhere even close to reflecting anything like the degree of male sexual perfection that was Rocco Leopardi. And how well that name suited him. Like the leopard, his flesh clung to sensuously strong muscles that moved sinuously and gracefully: a hunter’s body, dangerously sleek with strength and purpose, its flesh satin-smooth, making her ache to reach out and stroke her hand against it.
When he removed his sleek-fitting white boxer shorts Julie sucked in her breath.
Had she actually ever seen James naked? If so, suddenly she not only couldn’t remember but didn’t really care. This—Rocco’s body—was surely physically male sexual perfection? She had never given any thought to wondering if one day she might look at a naked man and want to feast her gaze on his sexuality. She simply hadn’t thought in those kind of terms. She had loved James as a person, not for sex, and she was not the kind of woman who had ever been interested in going on a girls’ night out to watch male strippers. She had believed that desiring a man came from loving him, but now, shockingly, she realised that just looking at Rocco was making her feel positively faint with lust.
Rocco watched Julie looking at him with a slanting half- hidden glance. Her lips were parted, her tongue pushing between them to dampen them, and her heart was thudding visibly and unevenly against her ribs. Her nipples were gathered and hard, but it was the look of open and awed delight he could see in her eyes that his own flesh registered first and responded to.
It was a look that said she was paying him the greatest compliment a woman could pay a man who had not yet been her lover. A look that aroused him even as it honoured and welcomed him.
He lay down on the bed beside her, kissing her slowly and with deliberately erotic intensity, using his tongue to tease and enflame her until she was reaching for him, her hands curling into the hard muscles of his arms, her mouth opening beneath his and her body arching up against him in open abandonment.
He cupped her breast and rubbed the pad of his thumb against her nipple as he kissed her neck, and then her shoulder, feeling her whole body jerk up against him in hot pleasure. He took her hand, lacing his fingers with her own and kissing the inside of her wrist as he played sensually with her nipple, before drawing her hand down to place it against his erection.
She made a semi-mute sound, her eyes widening as though with confusion and uncertainty. Her fingers trembled as they brushed against him, and then closed round him whilst she released her breath in a ragged exhalation.
His flesh felt hot and slick and heavy, moving almost of its own volition within her hold, causing her hand to tighten around it in possessive female delight. She released him to touch and stroke the full length of him, from the hard and shiny tip to the thick hair growing round the base that prickled against her fingers and then back again, until the sensation of his mouth against her breasts pierced her with such unbearable pleasure that her hand automatically gripped him. She was unable to enclose him fully, but still she tightened her fingers around him as the movement of her hand mirrored the slow, deep tug of his mouth against her nipple.
Rocco reached down and slid his hand into the open silk organza leg of her knickers, probing the already swollen and unfolding protective outer lips of her sex. Just as her tongue- tip had tempted him earlier, so the hard arousal of her clitoris tempted him now.
What was Rocco doing? James had never… But of course she knew what he was doing, Julie realized, and as she lay back, panting softly under the intensity her own pleasure. She wasn’t that naïve, even if she had not experienced such a pleasure before. It gripped her and took her, softening some muscles and tightening others, opening her legs, lifting her hips, making her tremble violently, ready to throw herself into the heart of the volcano if necessary, rather than be denied pleasure.
Pleasure that Rocco’s touch was promising her with a long, lazy caress that went the full length of her eager wetness in a way that made her ache and long feverishly for the thrust of his flesh within her own. She opened to his touch and cried out beneath the onslaught of sensation, her senses overloaded by the movement of his fingers against her clitoris.
Impatiently Rocco tugged off Julie’s silky knickers, and then tensed as he realised what he was doing. She was lying naked and ready for him, her hips arched to allow him to remove her underwear, exposed intimately to his gaze. He tracked the frantic and unsteady pulse he could see beating beneath her skin. He didn’t have a condom, and he didn’t trust her. She had been his half-brother’s plaything, and that of heaven alone knew how many other men. It was unthinkable that he could want her—and even if he did it was more unthinkable that he should take the risk involved in having sex with her. He started to move away from her, and then checked when she made a small agonised sound.
She was looking at him with helpless need and longing, pleading silently with him, pain and pride mingling with her shock at the extent of her wanting. She wasn’t making any attempt to hide from him what was happening to her. The look on her face could have been that of a virgin who had never known such pleasures before, who was still half-afraid of them. But of course she was no such thing.
Rocco sighed and placed his hand on her thigh to push it closed against its twin, so that he could reject her without having to say the words he knew would humiliate her. Where had it come from, this extraordinary feeling he had of wanting to be gentle, of not wanting to hurt her? And more importantly why?
Her eyes closed, tears seeping from their corners, and a deep shudder racked through her.
She was in his hands—literally as well as figuratively. His to take or leave; his to pleasure or leave unfulfilled; his…
Something about her need for him, and the manner in which she was so helplessly vulnerable to it and to him reached out to him, touching his heart and making it impossible for him to deny her.
Rocco leaned over her, kissing her closed eyelids, tasting the salt of her tears, stroking her until her flesh quickened to his touch beyond the point of no recall.
It should have ended there, with the sound of her ragged breathing soft in his ear and the frantic pump of her heart easing back under the post-orgasm tremors seizing her body. He had, after all, given her what she had wanted, but in doing so he had unleashed his own passion, and now it was his turn to ache and burn for her beyond sanity or safety.
Her arms held him, wrapping around him. Her body was sweat-slick against his own. He lifted her hips and gave in to his need to sink into her, slowly, deeply, letting the mind- destroying pleasure take him as her flesh caressed him, her muscles holding him tighter than he had imagined possible.
How was it possible for a woman of her experience to show so little artifice? To be so held in the grip of her desire that her awe of it shone in her eyes and echoed in her soft cries of pleasure? How was
it possible for her to be so sweetly shocked by the way he filled her, murmuring incoherent words of admiration and delight into his ear whilst her lips pressed eager kisses against his flesh? How was it possible—?
But anything and everything was possible when a woman aroused a man the way she had aroused him, Rocco acknowledged as he let the fire take him and burn him, commanding his thrusts and his rhythm in the same way that he was commanding her response to them, possessing them both and driving them through urgency and need to the heart of their shared desire. The volcanic explosion that brought his climax a second ahead of hers let him feel the pressure of her flesh gripping him and releasing him in swift convulsive movements.
It was over, leaving her boneless, mindless…and heartless? Julie closed her eyes. Her body was too sated by the extraordinarily intense power of her orgasm for her to have the energy to think. She reached out and let her fingers drift down Rocco’s back, damp with the sweat she could still taste on her own lips. She felt humbled and awed, almost unable to believe she had known so much pleasure, and she was hugely grateful to fate for giving her both the opportunity to do so and the man who could arouse it as she lay in a post-coital state of euphoric bliss.
Rocco had given her something that James never had, and she would always be grateful to him, and to life, for that.
The post-orgasm scent of their bodies surrounded her, soothing and relaxing. Julie closed her eyes and moved closer to Rocco, burrowing against him, wanting to be close to him…
She was nothing like he had imagined, he thought. She was a voluptuous innocent who had somehow undermined his defences and taken him to a place he had never previously been.
A voluptuous innocent? She was practically a whore, Rocco reminded himself grimly, and if she seemed innocent it was probably because she was experienced enough to know that men who should know better were turned into helpless fools by her toxic masquerade.
And yet still he couldn’t bring himself to leave her…