by Dani Collins
“What happened?” she asked with concern, gently touching the blue-green smudge.
He glanced and dismissed it with, “I stumbled during gait therapy.”
“You can walk?”
“I can balance on crutches and one prosthetic leg while dragging the other. It’s not practical for daily life, but it keeps my good leg from atrophying and helps with other functions.” He settled onto his back, one arm curled behind his head to reveal the tuft of hair beneath. He angled his head to study her. “I’m regretting taking off your boots. I would love to see your foot right here while you unzipped it.” He patted the mattress next to his hip.
If he was feeling a fraction of the self-consciousness she was experiencing, there was no evidence of it. He radiated confidence and patience.
She stood, but she was so befuddled, her fingers couldn’t find the zipper on her skirt.
“Please don’t laugh at how awkward I am.” She turned the skirt. Her hair fell across her face, blinding her as she tried to work the catch free.
“On the contrary, I’m turned on by the fact you’re as excited as I am. Let me help.” He pushed to sit up and she nervously edged closer. With no clumsiness whatsoever, he opened her skirt and brushed it off her hips.
He brought her twitching hands to his shoulders and pressed one palm to his neck so she could feel the rapid slam of his pulse. “I’m so aroused, I can hardly breathe.”
His skin was faintly damp with perspiration, his nostrils flared and tense.
Yet he was in complete control. She stroked her fingers through his hair, as though she’d been given the gift of petting a tiger. The strength and power in him awed her and the flare of excitement in his eyes excited her. It was reassuring to know he was reacting so strongly. Heady. He began to roll her leggings down and she pushed her panties off with them, kicking them away as she stood before him, still nervous, but driven by that urgency again.
A primordial noise rumbled in his chest as he looked at the thatch of blond over her mound. His splayed hands grasped her hips and drew big circles to her butt cheeks and the backs of her thighs, nudging her closer to the edge of the bed between his open thighs until her knees and shins rested against the side of the mattress. His hands lingered to caress in slow circles that were driving her mad while he blew softly on her curls.
A helpless noise left her and she dug her fingernails into his shoulders. Her inner muscles clenched while the rest of her went taut.
“Shy?” He dragged his gaze upward as if it took supreme effort. “Or something more?”
“Shy,” she managed in a paper-thin voice. “I’ve never—No one—”
He set a light kiss against her mound and she forgot how words worked. Every single nerve ending throughout her body pulsated.
He was a ridiculously patient man, teasing her with another small kiss into the crease where her thigh met her pelvis, then the other side. When his tongue traced a barely-there caress along the seam of her folds, skating a not-quite-fulfilling touch across the bud swollen with yearning, she moaned his name. Her fingers moved mindlessly in his hair.
He groaned and heat enveloped her flesh. She had thought what they’d done on the sofa was a type of paradise she could never again live without, but this. This was the sort of rapture that would induce her to do nearly anything to keep experiencing it.
He proved it, too. Just as the last vestiges of control were abandoning her, when she was so aroused she was relying on the hard hands under her butt to keep her upright while she pushed her hips into his lascivious kiss, he dropped his head back to look at her from beneath heavy eyelids.
An unconscious noise of loss throbbed in her throat.
He smiled, wicked and dark, then twisted to throw pillows into a pile against the headboard. He dragged himself to sit against them and met her gaze as he rocked to get his briefs down, revealing his thick erection. He took himself in hand, squeezed.
“You’re going to decide how much you can take.” He sounded as primal as she felt. He unwrapped a condom and rolled it on. “I can still feel heat. Pressure. Let me feel how hot and tight you are.”
He invited her to straddle his thighs. There was no modesty as she splayed her knees on either side of his hips, but given what he’d done to her already, inhibitions were moot. He held himself steady for her to position herself and she began accepting him into her. It was deliberate and overwhelming, both physically and emotionally, but she had never wanted anything so much in her life.
The pinch of his broad shape entering her was sharp enough to startle her. She steadied herself by gripping the headboard.
“Take your time.” His voice was gruff, his skin pulled taut across his cheekbones. He watched her with such intensity, she ought to have caught fire.
She was on fire. The pressure between her legs burned, but he shifted his touch and caressed her, using her own moisture to lubricate his penetration, enticing her to chase that capricious flutter that promised such exquisite pleasure.
He was saying things in Sicilian. Dirty things, maybe, but his tone was filled with praise and encouragement. Earthy pleasure. He didn’t seem to care that she was being tentative. He groaned in suffering, but the fingers that dug into her hips didn’t force her to take any more of him than she was ready for.
His intrusion hurt, but the internal stretch seemed to amplify her growing arousal. He kept caressing her, soothing her taut flesh with gentle fingers where they joined, then heightening her desire with circling touches across the straining button he’d anointed so mercilessly with his tongue.
She could hear herself making noises that bordered on distress as she hovered in the space between acute pain and profound pleasure. Such exquisite torture. How did anyone stand it?
“Give me your nipple,” he coaxed in a voice that resonated from deep in his chest.
She did, leaning her breast closer to his mouth. The movement caused him to shift inside her, alarming her with the stinging sensation. She gasped, but as he suckled, she grew wetter and found herself sinking and lifting, seeking that hot friction. She was afraid to take all of him, but oh, it felt lovely to have the tip of him moving inside her.
This was the mysterious primeval knowledge she’d sought. This was the ethereal world she had heard existed between the poetic descriptions of sensual magnificence and the corporeal reality of sex. She had never understood how another’s touch could be more gratifying than her own, but his hand and mouth and penetration became her entire world.
This man, with his head dropping back to watch her, somehow heightened everything about this experience into something exalted. His scent permeated the air she breathed and his lips tasted of her own essence. She sank all the way down, taking him fully inside her, and dazzlement turned his eyes silver. She could feel their sweat mingling, and their noises of pleasure were a perfect harmony.
She had never felt so connected to anyone. As they moved like this, they were essentially one being, experiencing together something that could not have happened apart. Not with anyone else, ever, anywhere. Only them. Here. Now. Like this.
As she rode up and down every last inch of him, her arousal contracted to a tight point inside her. She stilled, fighting to hold back from the paradise she longed for, hovering on the brink of losing control.
“Giovanni,” she breathed. “I’m—”
“Do it,” he growled.
She moved with unfettered greed, thrilling at the feel of him buried deep inside her, and the euphoria of climax crept up on her. In a mindless need to have him with her, she scraped her thumb across his nipple and sucked his earlobe while her orgasm engulfed her, flooding her with shuddering ecstasy.
He locked his hands on her hips and his whole body clenched right before he released a ragged cry of gratification.
CHAPTER THREE
“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” FREJA murmured
next to him, pulling Giovanni from his postcoital doze.
He didn’t want to come back to full consciousness. He would have to start picking apart exactly how unwise this had been, from the dinner he’d been urged to cancel to...this.
He shouldn’t be feeling this smug when she had so completely destroyed him, leaving him more sated than any sexual experience he’d ever had.
Still, her odd choice of words penetrated his haze.
“Mission?” His voice had to be dug out of the depths of his chest and barely arrived above a graveled whisper. He turned his head on the pillow.
A decadent smile touched her lips. “I don’t want to leave this bed.”
He didn’t want her to leave it, either. Ever. Realizing that was one of those moments when his life went out of focus and came back with finer edges and starker contrasts. It was sobering because he couldn’t pretend things hadn’t changed. He had.
“Not even to eat? I’m starving.” He kept his tone light so he wouldn’t betray how deeply affected he was. “I’ll make a call, order in. Stay here.” He had to make more than one call, but food was a good excuse to gain some distance and perspective. He sat up on the edge of the bed.
“I might shower if you don’t mind?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Run a bath. I’ll join you.”
“Do you remember where my bag went?”
“Bidduzza, I’m having trouble remembering my own name.”
She chuckled throatily and rose to hug him from behind. The cool swells of her breasts were against his back and her bent knees bracketed his hips. Her arms slithered around his neck and she gave his earlobe a light nip.
“Ouch.” He protectively pinched it. Definitely a bath and a tutorial on his most sensitive erogenous zones. Sucking? Great. Biting? Not so much.
Which implied they would be doing this again.
Since when did he have such weak self-discipline?
“Sorry.” Her soft breath wafted against his nape while her hair fell across his naked shoulder in a sensuous tickle. “I’m trying to thank you. That was wondrous.”
“It was.” Recognizing that, admitting it, increased his growing caution. He was very good at compartmentalizing, but needed to catch up on the filing. “I’ll find your bag.”
“I can.” She rose and picked up his shirt, shook it out and pushed her arms into the sleeves. “Do you mind?” she asked with a glance as she did.
How could he? Not only was she a splendid picture of debauchery, rosy curves and shadowed nipples visible beneath the fine linen, he experienced a Neanderthal-like thrill at seeing her in a garment that belonged to him. Not that he was such a throwback as to see her as a belonging, but he was aware of something inside him locking into place. The kind of possessiveness that came of discovering something priceless and resolving to shelter it close. Protect and cherish.
Damn, that was unsettling. He had sexual affairs, but always kept them as simple and casual as possible, yet here he felt the tug to follow when she moved out of sight into the bathroom. The water started running.
He pulled on his briefs and settled in his chair, picked up his pants, but his phone wasn’t in them. On the table by the front door, perhaps.
“What do you feel like?” he asked when he found his phone and she joined him in the lounge. “There’s a Thai place that’s quite good.” He thumbed through his contacts. “The vegan place is better, but it takes longer.”
“You’re vegan?”
“I have teams of people dedicated to my physical health. I eat what they make me. I should check the refrigerator. There’s probably something there.”
“Whatever you want is fine.” She picked up her bag from the table and started to dig through it. “But I need lip balm before I eat. My lips feel like they’re starting to chap. How do you think that happened?” She tucked her chin and elevated her brows in a scold.
“I have no idea. Let me kiss it better,” he offered.
“Nice try. Not until—” She frowned. “Someone has been through my bag.”
A guarded shiver chased over him, making him wish he’d put on more clothes. This was what came of letting sex make him complacent.
“Is something missing?” he asked with a suitable level of concern, even though he was damned confident nothing would be. “I can’t imagine anyone at the restaurant went into it, but I can make a call.”
She set the bag back on the table while she took a thorough inventory. “Everything seems to be here.” She counted some bills, rearranged the order of them before she folded them back into a pocket.
“How do you know someone’s been through it?” Only spies like him tended to set up little traps to betray those who might enter where they weren’t invited.
“I’ve lived out of a suitcase most of my life. I arrange all my bags so I can get what I want without looking and can always tell when a maid or customs agent has rummaged through. I never put my lip balm in that pocket.” She tsked. “Maybe tell the restaurant to be on the lookout for pickpockets?”
“I’ll call them after I order the food. Join you in a minute,” he promised.
She disappeared and he tapped to call Everett.
“You left early,” was Everett’s abrupt greeting. Perhaps that was the reason his minion had been so sloppy in the search of Freja’s bag.
“Anything?” Giovanni asked.
“Two passports. American and Swedish.”
That fact had been in the dossier Everett had provided on Giovanni’s request, the one that had included her extensive debriefing after her two-year stint in a North Korean village, the names of her contacts at university, and the particulars of her book deal. The general consensus among government agencies was that she could be a foreign operative, but no one had been able to prove it or determine who employed her.
“That’s it?” Giovanni prompted.
“She was prepared to spend the night with you.” Everett’s tone held a warning.
Giovanni dismissed her changes of clothes with a meaningless grunt. Freja had been coming from work. Plenty of women were veritable tortoises, carrying their entire boudoir everywhere they went.
“I have a car waiting to take her home,” Everett said.
“Unnecessary.” Giovanni didn’t even pause to think about it.
A potent silence on the other end told him he ought to.
“Do you mind if I have dessert?” Freja asked, jolting him with her sudden reappearance. “I have a hideous sweet tooth. Chocolate?”
“Done,” he assured her, saying to Everett, “Did you get that? Add dessert to my order. Something with chocolate. Leave it with the doorman.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Absolutely,” Giovanni lied dismissively. “Good night.”
* * *
The massive triangular jetted tub was set into a corner of the palatial master bath. The tiled edges were set at a height that made it easy for Giovanni to transfer back and forth from his chair. The windows fogged from the steam off the water, but otherwise offered a clear view of the city.
“I’ll have to tell the doorman he can eat the Thai delivery,” Giovanni said as they finished what his Sicilian nutritionist had left in the refrigerator.
He hadn’t bothered to heat the chickpea fritters or saffron risotto balls. They’d gobbled them down cold with antipasto and scoops of savory pistachio sauce. He’d even brought a handful of chocolate chip cookies from the freezer. They tasted amazing with the rich red wine they were sipping from stemless glasses.
As he reached to set the tray on the floor beside the edge of the tub, the jets went off. She realized he’d put on music when he’d lowered the lights. Feathery strokes of guitar played over the soothing breaths and lazy keys of an accordion.
He settled back with a sigh of repletion and invited, “Come here.�
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She shyly drifted from her seat opposite and he drew her in front of him. She reclined upon him, head pillowed by his shoulder as he stretched his long arms along the tub’s edge and absently adjusted the handheld spray washer in its holder.
“What if we fall asleep like this?” she asked, eyelids heavy.
“Then we will wake up very cold and wrinkly.”
She smiled and they were quiet for a few minutes.
“Will you tell me about your time in North Korea?” he asked.
Her defenses were so low, she felt thin and fragile as his question penetrated. Hot emotion rushed into her eyes and she turned her face against his bicep in an instinctive flinch.
“Can’t you just read it?” Telling him the story, when she was this defenseless, felt too hard.
“You don’t want to tell me?” Subtle tension hardened the body that cradled hers.
“It makes me sad. And no one will let me be sad. They want me to be angry. And grateful that I was rescued.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m grateful to be in a country where I can talk and move freely, obviously. But I’m equally grateful to have had a home there. I wasn’t as miserable there as people want me to be.”
“You said your father’s editor didn’t send him there. What were you two doing there? Why did he drag you into the farthest reaches of China, never mind North Korea?”
“That was his job,” she defended her father for what felt like the millionth time. It amazed her how many people criticized him for taking his daughter into remote parts of the world when his tales of parenting while trying to avoid yellow fever, Zika, and old-fashioned travel tummy were the reasons for his great appeal. “Taking impulsive side trips was very normal for us. We were visiting the crater lake in the nature preserve on the border between China and North Korea when the opportunity came up to join a tour to see the other side. Pappa was always trying to make a point that people are just people and that nearly every place in the world is safe to visit if you’re respectful. It was, but we were hiking in the foothills of the mountains when he had the stroke. The guide had to run to ask villagers to come back with a vehicle to carry him down. He had passed by the time they got us to the clinic.”