by Olivia Gates
That thought gave him the strength to put her down, step out of reach when she stumbled to embrace him again.
Her arms fell to her sides, her shoulders hunching as she suddenly looked fragile and lost.
Then her tears flowed again, so thick it seemed they shriveled up her face. “Oh, no-y-you already showed me that you don’t want me, and I-I came on to you again…”
She choked up, stumbled around and disappeared from the roof.
He should let her go. Talk to her again when his body wasn’t pummeling him in demand for hers. But even if he could survive his own disappointment, he couldn’t survive hers. He couldn’t let her think he didn’t want her. He had to show her the truth, even if the price was having her only once. He would take anything he could have of her, give her anything she needed.
He tore after her, burst into her room, found her crumpled facedown on her bed, good arm thrown over one of the bouquets he’d flooded her room with. She lurched at his entry, half-twisted to watch his approach, her wet gaze wounded and wary.
He came down on his knees at the foot of the bed. Her smooth legs, which had tanned honey-colored under his agonized eyes these past weeks, were exposed as the long, traditionally Catalan red skirt he’d picked for her to wear today rode up above her knees.
He wanted to drag her to him, slam her into his flesh, overpower and invade her, brand her, devour her whole.
He wanted to cherish her, savor and pleasure her more.
She gasped as he slipped off her shoes, tried to turn to him fully. He stopped her with a gentle hand at the small of her back. She subsided with a whimpering exhalation, watched him with her lip caught in her teeth as he prowled on all fours, advancing over her, kissing and suckling his way from the soles of her feet, up her legs, her thighs, her buttocks and back, her nape. She lay beneath him, quaking and moaning at each touch until he traced the lines of her shuddering profile. The moment he reached her lips, she cried out, twisted onto her back, surged up to cling to his lips in a desperate, soul-wrenching kiss.
Without severing their meld, he scooped her up and stepped off the bed. She relinquished his lips on a gasp of surprise.
“I want you in my bed, querida.”
She moaned, shook her head. “No, please.” He jerked in alarm. She didn’t want to be in his bed? He started to put her down when she buried her face and lips in his neck. “Here. Among the roses.” “Dios, si…”
He’d fantasized about having her in his bed from the day he’d first laid eyes on her. Even when she’d become a forbidden fantasy, her image, and the visualization of all the things he’d burned to do to her, with her, even when he’d hated her and himself and the whole world for it, had been what had fueled his self-pleasuring, providing the only relief he’d had.
He’d covered his bed with the royal blue of her eyes. The rest of the room echoed the mahogany of her hair and the honey of her skin. He’d needed to sleep surrounded by her.
But this was far better than his fantasies. To have her here, among the blazing-red beauty of his blatant confession that she was his most important woman. His most important person.
He hadn’t meant to confess it, but couldn’t stop himself. He also hadn’t dreamed it would lead to this. To beyond his dreams.
He laid her back on the bed, stood back taking her in. Unique, a ravishing human rose, her beauty eclipsing that of the flowers he’d filled her room with. She must have realized their significance, encouraging her to divulge her own need.
He felt his clothes dissolve off his body under the pressure of his own, under her wide-eyed awe, her breathless encouragement.
Then he was all over her again, caressing her elastic-waist skirt from her silky legs, kneading her jacket off, then the ensemble blouse over her head. Her bra and panties followed as he traced the tide of peach flooding her from toes to cheeks, tasting each tremor strumming her every fiber.
Then he was looking down on what no fantasy had conjured. Thankfully. Or he would have lost his mind for real long ago.
He remained above her, arms surrounding her head, thighs imprisoning hers, vibrating as the sight, the scent and sounds of her surrender pulverized his intentions to be infinitely slow and gentle. Blood thundered in his head, in his loins, tearing the last tatters of control from his grasp in a riptide.
Then she took it all out of his hands, her hand trembling over his back in entreaty, its power absolute.
He surrendered, moved between her shaking thighs, pressed her shuddering breasts beneath his aching chest. Then she conquered him, irrevocably.
Her lips trembled on his forehead, his name a litany of tremulous passion and longing as she enveloped him, clasped him to her body as if her life depended on his existence, his closeness, on knowing he was there, as if she couldn’t believe he was.
Tenderness swamped him, choked him. He had to show her, prove to her, that he was there, was hers. He’d already given her all he had. All he had left to give her was his passion, his body.
He rose on his knees, cupped her head in one hand, her buttocks in the other, tilted one for his kiss, the other for his penetration. He bathed the head of his erection in her welcoming wetness, absorbed her cries of pleasure at the first contact of their intimate flesh, drank her pleas to take her, fill her.
He succumbed to the mercilessness of her need and his, drew back to watch her eyes as he started to drive into her, to join them. Her flesh fluttered around his advance, hot and tight almost beyond endurance, seeming to drag him inside and trying to push him out at once, begging for his invasion while resisting it.
He tried again and again, until she was writhing beneath him, eyes streaming, her whole body shaking and stained in the flush of uncontrollable arousal and unbearable frustration.
His mind filled with confusion and colliding diagnoses.
“Please, just do it, Rodrigo, hard, just take me.”
The agony in her sobs was the last straw. He had to give her what she needed, couldn’t draw his next breath if he didn’t.
He thrust past her resistance, buried half of his shaft inside her rigid tightness.
It was only when her shriek tore through him that he understood what was that ripping sensation he’d felt as he’d driven into her. And he no longer understood anything.
It was impossible. Incomprehensible.
She was a virgin?
Eleven
Rodrigo froze on top of Cybele, half-buried in her depths, paralyzed. A virgin? How?
He raised himself on shaking arms. Her face contorted and a hot cry burst from her lips. He froze in midmotion, his gaze pinned on hers as he watched her eyes flood with the same confusion, the same shock along with tears.
“It shouldn’t hurt that much, should it?” she quavered. “I couldn’t have forgotten that.” Dios. He’d wanted to give her nothing but pleasure and more pleasure. And all he’d done was hurt her.
“No” was all he could choke out.
She digested that, reaching the same seemingly impossible explanation he had. “Then you have to be…my first.”
Her first. The way she said that, with such shy wonder, made him want to thrust inside her and growl, And your only.
Something far outside his wrecked restraint-probably the debilitating cocktail of shock and shame at causing her pain-held him back from that mindless display of caveman possessiveness.
“I remember I wanted to wait until, y’know, I met…the one. I assumed that when I met Mel…But it-it seems I wanted to wait until we were married. But…”
He’d been trying to get himself to deflate, enough to slip out of her without causing her further pain. He expanded beyond anything he’d ever known instead. His mind’s eye crowded with images of him devouring those lips that quivered out her earnest words, those breasts that swelled with her erratic breathing.
“But since there are ways for paraplegics to have sex, I still assumed we did one way or…” She choked with embarrassment. It was painfully endearing,
when their bodies were joined in ultimate intimacy. “But it’s clear we didn’t, at least nothing invasive, and artificial insemination is essentially noninvasive…”
He shouldn’t find her efforts at a logical, medically sound analysis that arousing as she lay beneath him, shaking, her impossible tightness throbbing around his shaft, her torn flesh singeing his own. But-curse him-it was arousing him to madness. He wanted to give her invasive.
He couldn’t. He had to give her time, for the pain that gripped her body to subside. He started to withdraw. Her sob tore through him.
He froze, his own moan mingling with hers until she subsided. Then he tried to move again. But she clamped quaking legs around his hips, stopping him from exiting her body, pumping her own hips, impaling herself further on his erection.
“I’m hurting you.” He barely recognized the butchered protest that cracked the panting-filled silence as his. “Yes, oh, yes…” He heaved up in horror. She clung harder, her core clamping him like a fist of molten metal. “It’s…exquisite. You are. I dreamed-but could have never dreamed how you’d feel inside me. You’re burning me, filling me, making me feel-feel so-so-oh, Rodrigo, take me, do everything to me.”
He roared with the spike of arousal her words lashed through him. Then, helpless to do anything but her bidding, he thrust back into her, shaking with the effort to be gentle, go slow. She thrashed her head against the sheets, splashing her satin tresses, bucking her hips beneath his, engulfing more of his near-bursting erection into her heat. “Don’t. Give me…all of you, do it…hard.”
He growled his capitulation as he rose, cupped her hips in his palms, tilted her and thrust himself to the hilt inside her.
At her feverish cry, he withdrew all the way, looked down at the awesome sight of his shaft sinking slowly inside her again.
He raised his eyes to hers, found her propped up on her elbows, watching too, lips crimson, swollen, open on frantic pants, eyes stunned, wet, stormy. He drew out, plunged again, and she collapsed back, crying out a gust of passion, opening wider for each thrust, a fusion of pain and pleasure slashing across her face, rippling through her body.
He kept his pace gentle, massaging her all over with his hands, his body, his mouth, bending to suckle her breasts, drain her lips, rain wonder all over her.
“Do you know what you are? Usted es divina, mi belleza, divina. Do you see what you do to me? What I’m doing to you?”
She writhed beneath him with every word, her hair rippling waves of copper-streaked gloss over the crisp white sheet, her breathing fevered, her whole body straining at him, around him, forcing him to pick up speed-though he managed not to give in to his body’s uproar for more force.
“I love what you’re doing to me-your flesh in mine-give it to me-give it all to me…”
He again obeyed, strengthened his thrusts until her depths started to ripple around him and she keened, bucked up, froze, then convulsion after convulsion squeezed soft shrieks out of her, squeezed her around his erection in wrenching spasms.
The force, the sight and sound and knowledge of her release smashed the last of his restraint. He roared, let go, his body all but detonating in ecstasy. His hips convulsed into hers and he felt his essence flow into her as he fed her pleasure to the last tremor, until her arm and legs fell off him in satiation.
He collapsed beside her, shaking with the aftershocks of his life’s most violent and first profound orgasm, moved her over him with extreme care, careful to remain inside her.
She spread over him, limp, trembling and cooling. He’d never known physical intimacy could be like this, channeling into his spirit, his reason. It had been merciful he hadn’t imagined how sublime making love to her would be. He would have long ago gone mad.
He encompassed her velvet firmness in caresses, letting the sensations replay in his mind and body, letting awe overtake him.
He was her first. And she’d needed him so much that even through her pain, she’d felt so much pleasure at their joining.
Not that it had mattered to him in any way when he’d thought she’d belonged to Mel, had probably been experienced before him.
But now he knew she’d been with no one else, he almost burst with pride and elation. She was meant to be his alone.
And he had to tell her that he was hers, too. He had to offer her. Everything. Now. “Cybele, mi corazón,” he murmured into her hair as he pressed her into his body, satiation, gratitude and love swamping him. “Cásate conmigo, querida.”
Cybele lay draped over Rodrigo, shell-shocked by the transfiguring experience.
Every nerve crackled with Rodrigo-induced soreness and satiation and a profundity of bliss, amazement and disbelief.
She’d been a virgin. Wow.
And what he’d done to her. A few million wows.
The wows in fact rivaled the number of his billions since he’d given her all that pleasure when she’d simultaneously been writhing with the pain of his possession. But the very concept of having him inside her body, of being joined to him in such intimacy, at last, had swamped the pain, turned it into pleasure so excruciating she thought she had died in his arms for moments there.
Love welled inside her as she recalled him looking down at her in such adorable contrition and stupefaction. The latter must have been because she’d babbled justifications for her virginal state with him buried inside her. Another breaker of heat crashed over her as she relived her mortification. Then the heat changed texture when she recalled every second of his domination.
What would he do to her when pain was no longer part of the equation? When he no longer feared hurting her? When he lost the last shred of inhibition and just plundered her?
She wondered if she’d survive such pleasure. And she couldn’t wait to risk her life at the altar of his unbridled possession.
She was about to attempt to beg for more, needing to cram all she could into her one time in his arms. But she lost coherence as he caressed and crooned to her. Then his words registered.
Cásate conmigo, querida.
Marry me, darling.
Instinctive responses and emotions mushroomed, paralyzed her, muted her. Heart and mind ceased, time and existence froze.
Then everything rushed, streaked. Elation, disbelief, joy, shock, delight, doubt. The madly spinning roulette of emotions slowed down, and one flopped into the pocket. Distress.
She pushed away from the meld of their bodies, moaning at the burn of separation, rediscovering coordination from scratch. “I meant it when I said no tomorrows, Rodrigo. I don’t expect anything.”
He rose slowly to a sitting position, his masculinity taking on a harsher, more overwhelming edge among the dreamy softness of a background drenched in red roses. He looked like that wrathful god she’d seen in the beginning, decadent in beauty, uncaring of the effect his nakedness and the sight of his intact arousal had on flimsy mortals like her. “And you don’t want it, either?”
“What I want isn’t important.”
He stopped her as she turned away, his grip on her arm gentleness itself, belying his intensity as he gritted, “It’s all-important. And we’ve just established how much you want me.”
“It still makes no difference. I-I can’t marry you.”
He went still. “Because of Mel? You feel guilty over him?”
She huffed a bitter laugh. “And you don’t?”
“No, I don’t,” he shot back, adamant, final. “Mel is no longer here and this has nothing to do with him.”
“Says the man whose every action for the last ten weeks had everything to do with Mel.”
He rose to his knees, blocked her unsteady attempt to get off the bed. “Care to explain that?”
Air disappeared as his size dwarfed her, his heat bore down on her, as his erection burned into her waist. She wanted to throw herself down, beg him to forget about his honor-bound offer and just ride her to oblivion again.
She swallowed fire past her hoarse-with-shrieks-of-pleasure voc
al cords. “I’m Mel’s widow, and I’m carrying his unborn child. Need more clues?”
“You think all I did for you was out of duty for him?”
She shrugged dejectedly. “Duty, responsibility, dependability, heroism, nobility, honor. You’re full of ’em.”
And he did the last thing she’d expected in this tension.
He belted out one of those laughs that turned her to boiling goo. “You make it sound like I’m full of…it.”
Words squeezed past the heart bobbing in her throat. “I wish. You make it impossible to think the least negative thing of you.”
He encroached on her as he again exposed her to that last thing she’d thought she’d ever see from him. Pure seduction, lazy and indulgent and annihilating. “And that’s bad…why?” Oh, no. She’d been in deep…it, when he’d been only lovely and friendly. Now, after he’d kick-started her sexuality software with such an explosive demonstration, had imprinted his code and password all over her cells, to all of a sudden see fit to turn on his sex appeal intentionally was cruel and unusual overkill.
She tried to put a breath between them. He wouldn’t let her, backed her across the bed, a panther crowding his prey into a corner. She came up against the brass bars, grabbed them, tried to pull up from her swooning position.
“It’s bad because it makes it impossible to say no to you.”
His lips twitched as he prowled over her, imprisoning her in a cage of muscle and maleness. But instead of his previous solemn and tender intensity, that mind-messing predatory sexiness spiked to a whole new level. “That has always been my nefarious plan.”
“Okay, Rodrigo, I’m confused here,” she panted. “What’s brought all…this about?”
His eyebrows shot up in mock-surprise and affront. “You mean you don’t remember? Seems I have to try much…harder-and longer-to make a more lasting impression.”