Olivia Gates Bestseller Collection 2012 (30 page)

She wouldn’t put anything past him.

Then they turned a corner against the high-rise wind, and it all made sense. As much sense as finding herself staring back at the gleaming black vicious beauty crouching in the middle of a large yellow circle on the ground.

He had his own freaking copter and helipad right outside his veranda door! With seventy-foot rotors, a passenger compartment big enough for half a dozen people and an outer body right out of some sci-fi flick.

Which really figured. When you had a fleet of jets, why not a multimillion-dollar toy to avoid the hassle of traffic jams?

Durante strapped her with utmost care on board the futuristic vehicle, taking the pilot seat, performing all safety measures then launching them in the air. She felt she’d left her stomach on the ground, along with a few nerves that snapped as she had her first personal encounter with seeing land recede almost beneath her feet.

He touched her gently, as if he knew, as he always seemed to know what she felt. Then he seemed to remember something major.

He’d cleared the city and veered out over the endlessness of the ocean, when he looked at her with that tenderness she’d never seen in another man’s eyes and murmured, so quietly
that she was stunned to hear him over the drone of the rotors, “Are you safe?”

She nodded before she realized what he was talking about.
Then
she contemplated jumping out. She couldn’t have this conversation. Yeah, right. And this reluctance had to be some new standard for stupidity.

She was willing to have sex with him, but not to discuss protection from its risks?

She forced herself to spill all she had to say on the subject in one go. “I am. In every way. Checked and rechecked, although I
never
neglected protection. I also protected myself just in case. Measures still in place. I’m also at a safe time. I’m certain.”

He made her breathing difficulties worse when he murmured, “I’m safe, too. I never neglect protection. But I can’t even think of using it with you. I want to feel you without barriers and scorch you with my pleasure as you scorch me with yours.” When she gurgled something he turned to her, serious, placating. “Don’t feel under any pressure to agree. I’m just telling you how I feel. I’ll arrange for protection to be delivered—”

“I don’t want you to use it, either,” she blurted out.

His eyes flared his satisfaction. It was all she could do to draw in enough air to keep from passing out.

In less than fifteen minutes she saw their destination. His yacht, moored miles offshore.

He landed on the uppermost deck where they’d had their first conversation on board. He turned off the motor, jumped out and was at her side in what felt like a flash, undid her belt and carried her down. She let him. She couldn’t have walked if she tried.

He put his lips to her forehead as the sun dipped into the water, setting in a conflagration of color.

Suddenly the languorous spell of the moment fractured. He was putting her down, tenderly, languidly, but still letting her go. He took a few steps backward, the crimson rays of the departing sun striking turquoise lasers off his eyes.

Then he slowly, oh so slowly undid his tie.

She watched every movement of his large, beautiful hands, his corded neck as he flexed it and pulled the tie from around it, then his sculpted fingers as they finally held the tie away from his body, like a magician showing his audience the setup of his trick before he executed it. He let the tie go.

It plummeted, the silk sighing as it hit the deck.

He licked his lips, made her feel as if he’d licked hers then continued down the trail his eyes traveled down her middle. “Your turn.”

G
abrielle shot a panicked look around, the warmth of the June day seeming to rise into raging heat instead of cooling with the sunset.

“Here?” she gulped.

“We have the place and the ocean to ourselves,
bellissima.
”

So this was what he’d arranged during those minutes away.

It thrilled her that he gave her this freedom from scrutiny. It also terrified her, how much she wanted to take advantage of it, lose every inhibition. She wanted to attack him with kisses, but…

What if it
was
her? What if even wanting him this…terribly, she still felt nothing? Where would she be then?

Where she’d be anyway, eventually. Out of his life. So she just had to take what she could. Whatever the outcome.

As for what to take off, the logical thing was her jacket.

She was done doing things logically. Her logic had messed up her life so far. It was obviously essentially flawed. And
logic said this couldn’t be happening. But it was. And how. So to hell with it.

Elation simmered from her bones outward as she slowly, oh so slowly took off…her watch.

His face blazed in wicked delight when she let it fall to the deck, simulating his actions to the last move.

“Tormentress,” he rumbled, took off his cufflinks.

She raised him her earrings. He surrendered his phone. She reciprocated with her hair clip. He threw down his checkbook.

The challenge arced between them in currents of elation and stimulation. She’d never laughed so freely with anyone. Or at all. And to be laughing even as longing melted her insides—
that
was unreal. And yet it felt like the only real thing she’d ever experienced.

Then she was out of nongarment things. He wasn’t. The man
was
a magician. He had to be pulling all that stuff out of thin air. Her shoes went, then her jacket. When it was her blouse’s turn, he moved closer. He took one step forward and something new off for each button she undid. Then all the buttons were undone and he was a breath away. The blouse hung open, still revealing nothing. She quivered. “Your turn.”

“It’s still your turn. With the last button, it comes off.”

Her hands trembled uncontrollably as she pushed her blouse off. Then she was in her skirt and bra, unable to look at him, afraid to document his reaction, cringing inside.

What if he thought her breasts too big? Ed had said they were grotesque, unbalanced for her body. What if he preferred slimmer women? Different proportions? What if…?

A shockwave swept through her. Her eyes flew to his face.

She might have been alarmed at the eruption of testosterone blasting off him, the carnal ferocity in his features, if it hadn’t gratified her, aroused her to the point of near-frenzy.

He tore off his jacket, muscles rippling, his whole body expanding. Then he hissed, “Next.”

She expended the remnants of her coordination undoing her skirt.

Durante’s nostrils flared, his gaze pouring heat over her, his chest rising and falling as if with exertion. He flicked open the first button of his shirt, hissed again, “Next.”

She fumbled her bra open, instinctively held it in place.

“Let it drop,
bellissima.
”

She did, whimpered. With the relief of releasing her swollen breasts from the imprisonment of the bra that had grown stifling. His jaw muscles worked as he undid another button then dropped to his knees, hands spanning her hips in a girdle of fire, his fingers hooking into her panties. “And last.”

By the time the torturous sweep of lace and steel fingers skimmed her toes, she was panting. His hands reversed their path, inflaming her flesh with raw need. Then they stilled, an inch from her core.

He raised eyes like incendiary precious stones.
“Divina, preciosa mia…divina.”

He bent his awesome head to her flesh, suckled and nibbled her thighs and abdomen, moving higher like a starving man who didn’t know where to start his feast. Her fingers convulsed in the wealth of his silky hair, pressed his face to her flesh in an ecstasy of torment, unable to take the stimulation, unable to get enough.

He took her breasts in hands that trembled, pressed them, weighed them, kneaded and nuzzled them as if they were the most amazing things he’d ever felt. Tears broke through her fugue of arousal. “You said fast and ferocious…
please
…”

“There’s been a change in plan. The first two times will be torturously slow. We’ll get to fast and ferocious the third time. Or maybe the fourth. Definitely the fifth.”

She watched his head move against her breasts, heard her pleas thicken as his tongue and teeth turned the flesh she’d always thought sensitive to discomfort or pain into an instru
ment of unbearable pleasure. He tasted and nipped and murmured wonder and hunger, circled the center of her distress. If it wasn’t for the ocean air cooling as the sun disappeared, she might have spontaneously combusted. Then his hands moved away and his tongue and teeth strayed over her…

This was nothing like she’d expected or imagined. Every squeeze had the exact force, each rub and nip and dig the exact roughness to extract maximum pleasure from her every nerve ending. He layered sensations with each press and bite, until she felt devoured, until she was overloading. Something was burning inside her. She undulated against him feverishly, pressing her clamoring flesh against any part of him in mindless pursuit of assuagement. Only then did he drag a rough, electrocuting hand between her thighs, teasing and tormenting his way to her core. The heel of his thumb found her outer lips at the same moment the damp furnace of his mouth clamped over a throbbing nipple. Sensation slashed her nerves.

He supported her collapsing weight, carried her to rest against the railing where they’d stood that night, one knee beneath her buttock, one between her thighs.

“I wanted to do this to you that first night…” He slid two fingers between her molten inner lips, stilled at her entrance. “I wanted to see you like this, on fire, open, hunger shaking you apart. Then I wanted to do this…”

He again dropped to his knees, spread her legs, placed one after the other over his shoulders, opening her to his eyes and touch. He inhaled her, rumbled like a lion maddened at the scent of his female in heat, then blew a gust of acute sensation over her quivering flesh. Her hips bucked, her last “please” morphing into a squeal. It became a shriek when he pumped two fingers into her, in a slow, slow glide. The sunset turned into darkest night as she convulsed, pleasure slamming through her in desperate surges.

Her sight burst back to an image from a fantasy. Him,
clothed, kneeling between her legs, her, naked, splayed open over his shoulders, in the midst of an ocean that did feel as if it were their own.

Then, among the mass of aftershocks she’d become, she felt it. His fingers still filling her, pumping her, beckoning inside her.

Her gasping mouth widened as his tongue joined in, licked from where his fingers were buried inside her upward, circling her bud until she heard her voice sobbing pleas again. His lips locked on her core. She bucked, pressed her burning flesh to his mouth, opening herself fully to his double sensual assault, bewilderment shooting through her as each glide and graze and pull and thrust sent hotter lances skewering through her, as if she hadn’t just had the most intense orgasm of her life. And before she could draw a full breath, she was in the throes again, quaking and screaming with an even more violent release.

She tumbled from the explosive peak, drained, sated. Stupefied. What had just happened?

Her drugged eyes sought his, as if for answers. Even in the twilight they glowed azure, heavy with hunger and satisfaction.

“You are the most magnificent thing I have ever touched or tasted. I will never get enough of you.”

Suddenly she was hungrier, the emptiness where she needed him gnawing at her. She writhed, her hands running over his lush hair. “Can we skip to fast and ferocious now…
please?
”

He chuckled against her inner thighs, cupping her, desensitizing her. “But those two times don’t count. The ones I promised will be with me inside you, riding you to ecstasy.”

Her mouth dropped open.

Before she could respond, he swept her up in his arms, headed inside the yacht, taking a route she hadn’t seen before.

In minutes he entered a huge, elaborately furnished suite with marble floors, Persian carpets and soaring ceilings that traversed two decks. Must be the master suite he’d mentioned. A gigantic, circular bed draped in royal blue satin crouched
beneath a domed skylight that glowed with the last tendrils of twilight. Oil lamps blazed everywhere, swathing everything in golden mystery and intimacy.

Sinking deeper in the sensory overload realm, she tried to drag him on top of her as he put her on the bed. He sowed kisses over her clinging arms, withdrew, stood back looking down at her.

“Meravigliosa,”
he breathed. “Do you realize how amazing you are?” Elation, embarrassment and disbelief gurgled in the back of her throat. “Do you want to
see
how amazing I think you are?”

That got her voice working. “Yes, please.”

And he started to strip. And if their stripping game had had her begging, his as he exposed each sculpted inch almost had her passing out with the pressure of anticipation. She’d been right the night of the ball. He did have the body of a higher being.

He was down to his boxers when he turned into the light…and she saw it. The scar. A two-inch, puckered line across the smooth perfection of his skin. Negligible, really.

A wave of nausea hit her. She scrambled up on hands and knees, hugged him convulsively around the waist, pressed her trembling lips to where he’d been hurt. A few inches to the right, where its perpetrator had aimed, and the knife could have caused untold damage. Could have snuffed out all this uniqueness and vitality.

He smoothed his hands over her hair. “Don’t think what-ifs,
amore.
I’m fine and that’s what matters,
sì?
”

He understood, as he always seemed to. She hugged him harder, opened her mouth over his wound, as if she could drain away the pain of the memory. He groaned, pressed her against his flesh, surrendering to her need to heal him. She couldn’t
bear
it if something happened to him. She moaned the dread out loud.

“Nothing will happen to me.” His eyes were serious, pledging. Then they suddenly melted in sensuality and teasing as he rubbed
her breasts with the silk-roughened steel of his thighs. “Except maybe a heart attack from this display of beauty.”

She gazed up at him, her insides trembling. How she
wanted
him. In every way.

He stepped back and dropped his boxers, released the proof of how much
he
wanted
her.
In that way, at least.

She’d felt that he was big. But this…she’d never seen anything half as huge. Or anywhere near as beautiful.

Her senses swam. The spike of desire combined with shock of intimidation almost dragged her under.

One thing brought her back to full focus. The need to feel his manhood, touch it, smell it, taste it. She’d never wanted to do that, had even been repulsed when she’d imagined doing it, to other men. She shook with wanting to do it to him.

He let her hold him, shuddered at her touch, groaned at the flick of her tongue, growled when she overcame the last shred of inhibition and opened her mouth wide over the satin crown. She moaned around his hot hardness, lost in the pleasure of him. Then she leaned back to look up at him.

“Oh, Durante,” she whispered. “You’re the most magnificent thing I’ve ever touched or tasted, too.”

His fingers dug into her scalp, shooting pleasure to every hair root. “Take your every pleasure from me, always. But I need to pleasure you now, with my body.”

She relinquished him as if all her strings had been cut, melted onto her back awash with the enormity of craving and anxiety.

She’d know now. Her body was weeping in an agony of need for him. If she didn’t feel pleasure with him, it was hopeless.

But he’d already given her pleasure like she’d never known. She truly didn’t care if she couldn’t feel anymore. She just needed to feel him inside her before she disintegrated.

He prowled over her, kissed his way from her toes to her center to her breasts to her lips until his bulk pressed between her trembling thighs. He cupped her buttocks, touched the head
of his erection to her entrance, nudged her, bathing himself in her wetness. Her hands pressed his biceps convulsively, her intimate flesh fluttering around him, begging him to enter. His eyes roiled with a dizzying mixture of lust and tenderness as he finally pumped his hips, breached her tightness with persistent yet restrained pressure. Then he was there, where she needed him, penetrating her in a long, languorous thrust.

The expansion of her tissues around his erection went on and on. The fullness sharpened into an ache that became almost a pain. Darkness danced at the periphery of her vision.