A Sicilian Husband - Kate Walker [23]
Gio helped her by shrugging the fine linen from his shoulders, tossing the discarded garment to the floor before turning his attention to the now rumpled and disordered skirt that was pushed up around her slender hips.
‘Stockings,’ he growled on a note of purely predatory satisfaction as his efficient actions exposed the delicate lacy tops that clung to her pale thighs. ‘Do you know what stockings do to me?’
Terrie could only shake her head, sending her blonde hair flying in a wheat-coloured halo. She didn’t know, but she could certainly guess. And the rough, crooning sound he made low in his throat, the fierce glitter of his eyes, the raw unevenness of his breathing told their own tale.
The one flimsy barrier between him and the hot, moist centre of her need of him was easily stripped away. Clever, knowing fingers found just the right spot and stroked, caressed, tormented until she was gasping for breath, head tossing on the pillows, her own hands clenching over the hard muscles in his shoulders and clinging on desperately for support.
‘Gio!’
‘I know, cara. I know…’
Between them they disposed of his remaining clothing, the sensation of heated skin against skin adding further fuel to the inferno already raging in every sensitised inch of Terrie’s body. She was so close now—so close to the moment of ultimate union, ultimate intimacy, that she couldn’t bear to wait. And when he seemed to hesitate, just for a second, she almost panicked, clutching at him and bringing him closer to her, only now aware of how he had momentarily backed away.
‘Teresa…’
Her name was a moan of protest on his lips.
‘I have—nothing… Do you…?’
She didn’t understand what he was saying. Couldn’t understand why he had hesitated. Didn’t want him to pause, to think, to do anything now but take her, love her, make her his.
‘No, no, no,’ she muttered. ‘It doesn’t matter—really, it’s not important, not… Gio—please!’
The final word was a cry of desperation, of longing. And in the same moment that she let it escape her she lifted her hips from the bed, pressing herself invitingly against him, mutely encouraging his final possession.
Through the roaring in her head she heard Gio give a faint sigh of surrender, sensed all resistance seep from him like air from a punctured balloon. And the next moment he had curved hard, hot hands around her hips, holding her just where he wanted her as he thrust his powerful body into hers in one long, forceful movement.
Almost immediately whatever control he had been exerting broke totally. His movements, hard and fast and fierce, took possession of her, took control of her, lifting her up and up, riding the waves of demanding passion, cresting each one. Going higher and higher and higher…until there was nowhere else to go but over the edge into an explosion of ecstasy and oblivion that totally engulfed them both.
It was the first, faint fingers of light from the dawn that crept through the uncurtained window and fell onto his face that gradually penetrated the heavy, exhausted sleep into which Gio had fallen, making him stir and frown slightly, wondering where he was.
Outside in the street below, the sound of cars, a noise that never stopped in this city that never seemed to sleep, reminded him that he was in London. But this was not his room. Not the elegant suite he had woken in every other morning of his stay…
Even as his thoughts were sorting and deciphering the information, a small, soft sigh, like the murmur of a sleeping kitten, broke through his confusion, waking him fully and sharply.
Teresa.
Memory hit home with the force of a lethal bullet, driving away the last traces of sleep and blasting him awake in a moment of pure shock.
Teresa. Terrie. The woman called herself Terrie.
She had told him her surname, but it hadn’t registered in his mind. To him she was just Teresa. Nothing more.
The woman