Chapter Ten #2
He’d kicked his recliner seat upright, slammed his glass on the table to the side of his chair and grabbed hold of her hips before he could stop himself.
He forced himself to unblur his eyes and meet her stare. There was such distress in it that something inside of him broke. His fingers losing the grip they’d been clinging to, he plunged head first into the truth of his feelings for her.
‘I do want to make love to you, Marnie,’ he whispered raggedly, ‘more than I have ever wanted anything, but you’re so fragile that I don’t want to do anything that could hurt you.’
Her eyes…they were a stormy grey…widened, her breath audibly catching in her throat.
He skimmed a trembling hand over her breasts. Pregnancy had made them swell like it was making her stomach swell, and all he could think was that she was the Venus de Milo come to life, but a million times more beautiful.
Pulling her closer, he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his cheek to the soft, succulent breasts.
He could hear the rapid thump of her heart beneath his ear, a sound that filled him with so much emotion that if he could burrow his hand through her skin and hold it in his hands, he would.
He would hold it and cherish it, do all the things he should have done when they were married.
‘I want you so badly it hurts,’ he confessed.
‘Tonight… I didn’t reject you, fiore mio, never think that, but you’re so small and I’m so big and bulky that I fear I will break you.
I think of all you have suffered carrying our child, and I will wait however long it takes before I make love to you again because all that matters to me is that you are here with me, back in my life where you belong. ’
Just as he belonged to her.
If it wasn’t for the thud of her heart against his ear, he’d fear Marnie had turned to the stone he’d tried to turn himself into. She didn’t move a muscle.
Then, after time seemed to have stretched to the end of eternity, her fingers slipped tentatively through his hair.
Domenico expelled his first proper breath since she’d walked into the room and nuzzled his cheek tighter into her. The fingers of her other hand joined the first, clasping his skull and tilting his head back.
He opened his eyes. The storm of the grey in her stare had disappeared, but there was no calmness in it. The storm had been replaced with an emotion so potent he felt it penetrate every cell of his body.
She leaned her beautiful face to his, close enough that he could feel her breath on his face, and whispered, ‘You can’t break me, Dom.’
Her scent swirling through his senses, he clenched his hands into fists, barely able to speak for the desire thrumming so wildly inside him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Not in any way. Never again.
‘Then you won’t.’ With a boldness Marnie had never dreamed she possessed, she cupped Domenico’s cheeks and pressed her mouth to his, holding it there as she breathed his dark taste deep into her lungs.
He did want her. Wanted her with the same depth of need that she wanted him. She’d seen it in his eyes, heard it in his voice, and now she could feel it in the tremors of his magnificent body as he continued to resist the desire that belonged to them both.
Belonged to them both.
Maybe he would never have the great passionate lust for Marnie that he’d once felt for Carmela, but he did want her.
He desired her. Felt enough for her that he would put his own needs aside for her protection.
That meant something. It might not be the something she’d once so desperately craved, but it was enough.
She didn’t want protecting. Not anymore. She just wanted him, the man who’d captured her heart when she’d been only eighteen years old.
Moving her mouth slowly against his, she slid her fingers back into his hair, threading the soft strands in the way she’d ached to do when they were married.
And, slowly, he responded. Slowly, the taut lips relaxed and began to move with hers.
Slowly, the fists behind her back loosened, his hands spreading open and flattening tightly against her skin.
With a shuddering breath, he moved his mouth away and pressed his forehead to hers. ‘Are you sure about this?’
She gazed into the gorgeous eyes pulsing with his hunger for her. ‘More certain than I’ve ever been about anything.’
A bone-deep certainty that wasn’t fuelled by unrealistic dreams. The Marnie who’d married with those unrealistic dreams didn’t exist anymore.
She didn’t doubt that Domenico could still hurt her emotionally—that had already been proved that night—but how she reacted to it was in her own hands. He could only hurt her if she let him.
His eyes closed, the strong column of his throat moved, and then he was sliding a hand beneath her bottom and rising to his feet, lifting her with him until she was nestled securely in his arms. Without another word spoken, he carried her out of the room and up the stairs.
It was beyond magical to be carried in Domenico’s arms in the way she’d once dreamed he would do on their wedding night, and when he kicked open the bedroom door, her heart ballooned so big it threatened to choke her.
He’d kicked open the door to his room.
Since she’d agreed to try again, they’d only shared her bed. Although Domenico had said she could choose which of their two rooms to make their own, she’d not set foot into his territory, and he’d extended no invitation for her to enter it.
That he was carrying her across the threshold of his room signified the crossing of a much more significant threshold, and it was all she could do to snatch air through the suffocating emotion in her chest.
Feeling like he had the most precious cargo in the world in his arms, Domenico gently laid Marnie on the turned-down bed.
Needing a moment to gather himself, he sat beside her and soaked her in. The staff had switched on the headboard lights. They cast her in a perfect soft, golden glow.
He’d never allowed himself to look at her naked before. Not truly look at her. He’d never allowed himself to see the smooth perfection of her lightly golden skin or the plumpness of her milky breasts and the perfect roundness of her pale pink nipples.
His heart thumped harder as his gaze drifted lower, over the swell of the belly that used to be flat, down to the neat pubic mound.
The dark blond hair there was as soft as the hair on her head, he remembered.
He’d stroked that hair more times than he could ever count, but never the long blond locks of her head.
It had been an intimacy he’d refused to allow in his desperate quest to keep his wife at a distance.
During their marriage, he’d always gone to her bed when she was already tucked beneath the sheets. He’d always made love to her with the lights out.
No, he acknowledged painfully. He hadn’t made love to her. He’d never allowed that. He’d never allowed true intimacy, only sexual intimacy. Even that sexual intimacy had come with barriers.
Was it any wonder she’d become so desperately unhappy, he thought wretchedly. The one night the barriers he’d erected had broken, it had been anger driving them both in their wild coupling. Anger and misery and despair.
Marnie had been desperately unhappy with him. Domenico had been desperately unhappy without her. He’d just been too arrogant, stubborn and pigheaded to realise either of their unhappiness.
Too blind to realise he’d been in love with her all along…
It felt like a hammer slammed against his ribs, and suddenly he could feel the scald of heat crawling through him as the truth he’d plunged into when his fingers had lost their grip hit him even harder.
He loved her. Loved Marnie. Loved her with every fibre of his being.
Rubbing his thumb over her flushed, high cheekbone, he breathed a gentle kiss to the softest lips on this earth and breathed in the softness of her clean skin. When he drew back, her eyes were liquid.