Italy's Most Scandalous Virgin - Carol Marinelli Page 0,22

lightly but deeply.

‘Dante...’ She was pressed into taut flesh and she could feel his hard length against her stomach. She felt dizzy as his mouth pressed harder against her neck, and something awakened deep inside her.

‘Go now,’ he told her, even as he undid the little black pearls of her woollen dress and exposed her black bra. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘before we do something we regret.’

‘I don’t want to go.’ So raw was her admission that for the first time that day, tears squeezed out of her eyes.

‘We can’t go anywhere,’ he told her. For the first time he was not warning a lover that he had no desire for a lengthy affair—more, he was reminding Mia that they could never be.

‘I know.’ She whimpered her response, for he had lowered his head and the feeling of his mouth on her breast brought both tension and relief. He tasted her at great length, and to various degrees; his tongue lathed, his teeth nipped, and his jaw was rough, all of which was a dose of the sublime, and when he lifted his head she only wanted him more.

Need overrode shyness, so it was Mia who removed his shirt, taking in the body that she had ached to see for so long. The dark bruises of his nipples, the fan of hair on his chest and the flat, toned stomach were a feast not just to her eyes but to her mouth as well as she tasted his skin. The sound of him unfastening his belt had her clenching down below. Yet when he had completely undressed, when she saw him so erect, she felt her throat tighten at the sight of him. She couldn’t not touch him, yet she was nervous too, and so she stroked first the line of black hair on his stomach, and then trailed her hand down to the jet-black, crinkly curls below.

‘Take me in your hand,’ he said roughly.

Now it was fascination that overrode shyness. First, she touched him lightly, but feeling the strength behind the soft velvet skin she closed her hand around him and was startled—in a good way—at the low growl he gave.

‘Mia.’ He sounded like he was on the edge as he put a hand over hers and together they stroked him. To see him grow even more at the touch of her hand made her throat feel as if she were choking, so tense was she with excitement.

‘I need to know you,’ he said as he undressed her. ‘I need to know your scent and your taste...’

She was shivering as he knelt and pulled down her tights, taking her knickers too, and she wept as he held her hips and he kissed her there. ‘Dante...’ Her hands were in his thick hair, his tongue probing, as his hand moved between her thighs to part them further. He was seducing her on his knees and she was shy but wanting, nervous but needing. She did not know this feeling, this feeling that moved her hips of their own accord into his kiss, and did not know how the stroke of his tongue could make her feel so urgent, so desperate. ‘Please, Dante,’ she begged, because she was losing control and not sure how to or if she should. His fingers were on a delicious, relentless, creep into where not even Mia herself had been. She clamped her thighs together and forced out her truth. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone.’

Dante halted, unsure if this was a game, but when he looked up and saw her—stunned, frantic and so very unsure; when he felt the press of her thighs on his hand, for the first time, a woman naked and wanting yet resisting—he was unsure how to proceed.

‘Virgin?’

One word that raised so many questions.

Or rather it should raise so many questions, but it raised something else instead, to intense proportions. And now they were past caring that they were forbidden.

‘Come here,’ he said. He pulled her down so she was on her knees facing him. He took her face in his hands, and he looked at her turned-on eyes and swollen mouth. He had but one question. ‘Do you want this?’

‘Yes.’

And then, for the first time, Mia received the warmth of Dante’s smile. It was a caress in itself; it was intimate; it was everything, for it blew away the grief and hell of today. So beautiful was his smile that she returned it, even though she was shivering.

‘It’s okay,’ he told her,