Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
I T WAS THE sweetness of Victoria’s hot breath falling against his lips and onto his tongue that swamped the last of Marcello’s resistance. With a groan of surrender, he pressed his mouth to hers.
If he hadn’t already succumbed, the first sweep of her tongue against his would have incinerated his resolve. Wrapping his arms tightly around her, he devoured her pliant softness with hungry kisses that sent thrills licking through his entire being. Dio , her lips...soft succulence contrasting headily with the hard, passionate ardour of her responses. He was plundering heaven, and heaven was welcoming the plunder with soft moans and nails scraping into his skull. Dio , even her skin when he rubbed his cheek against hers felt like erotic satin.
Biting with barely disguised restraint at her delicate ear lobe, he pulled his head back and gazed at the dimly lit face he’d been blind to the beauty of for so long he wondered how he’d been able to see at all. Exquisitely beautiful, from the mesmerising hazel eyes to the oversized lips and the pretty chin with the faintest cleft in it. Every inch exquisite. Every inch of Victoria exquisite. The need to taste it all...
The second fusion of Marcello’s lips to hers was even headier than the first. Sinking into the hard, passionate demands of his mouth and tongue, consumed by his dark taste and the sensations flickering like lightning through her skin, Victoria no longer had thoughts. All she had was Marcello; his taste, his scent, his touch, all seeping through her senses to set her alight. Even his voice when he whispered into her ear, ‘Come,’ soaked into her skin with the same strength as the feel of his hands sweeping down her back.
Feeling as light as the bubbles in a glass of champagne and as drunk as if she’d consumed a whole bottle of it, she let him take her hand and lead her into the darkened bedroom.
A chink of silvery light from the falling snow seeped through a gap in the heavy curtains, creating a shadowed path to the bed. Hands clasped, they walked it together. By the time they reached the head of the bed, Victoria’s heart was thumping so hard that sucking in air to breathe had become impossible. Excitement churned like a sickness in her stomach.
Large hands clasped her cheeks. Marcello’s face emerged from the shadows. He pressed his forehead to hers. Eyes intense, his Italian accent more pronounced than she’d ever heard it, his voice was hoarse as he whispered, ‘You can still walk away, Victoria.’
Unable to speak, all she could do was shake her head.
His eyes closed. His nostrils flared. And then he moved his hands from her cheeks, straightened, and, in one fluid movement, stripped off his T-shirt and threw it to the floor.
Her heart came close to punching out of her chest. It didn’t matter that it was too dark to see clearly. Every inch of his torso had been committed directly into her memory bank that lifetime ago in his office, from the flat brown nipples to the dark hair that swirled around them and snaked over the washboard abdomen and down to the place she always refused to imagine even when a throb pulsed strongly between her legs. That pulse was throbbing stronger than it ever had now, and when he removed the rest of his clothing and stood naked before her and her stare took in the shadowed length of his arousal, the pulse that followed weakened her legs. Weakened all of her...and yet somehow strengthened her.
A hand clasped the back of her head. His smouldering face hovered over hers. ‘Last chance,’ he whispered savagely.
Something, an instinct that came right from the feminine heart of her, had her cupping his cheeks tightly. Bringing her mouth to his, she whispered with equal savageness, ‘No more chances.’
The tiniest beat passed in which time hung by a thread, and then his mouth plundered hers with a kiss so hot and demanding that her weakened legs finally buckled. Wrapping her arms around his neck, revelling in the sensation of his strong arms snaking around her back to hold her tightly to him and the feel of his arousal pressing hard into her abdomen, she moaned into his mouth.
So enraptured was she to be under this sensuous assault that she barely felt her feet leave the ground when he lifted her onto the bed. A fleeting memory came of when he’d first carried her and the embarrassment that she was too heavy to be carried like a child that had broken through the fog of the virus. But there had been safety in his arms too, she remembered with wonder. Even while the virus had been running riot in its quest to infect and incapacitate her, she’d had safety in Marcello’s arms, had instinctively known he would never let her fall...
Her head fell onto the pillow. Marcello’s weight covered her body, his demanding mouth swooped back on hers, and the memory dissolved as she dissolved into him.
When Marcello covered Victoria’s breast with his mouth and felt the scrape of her nails down his back, the thrills of arousal coursing through his loins was strong enough to take him back two decades, to his first time, when the thrill of promised pleasure had almost tipped him over the edge before he’d even started.
That eager adolescent no longer existed. Experience had taught him control. Taught him how to give pleasure for the woman’s benefit and not his own. However badly his short-lived affairs ended, he’d never had the worry that they’d left his bed unsatisfied.
The strength of his desire now was beyond anything, even that first time. The urge to make Victoria his, to thrust deep inside her and lose himself in her curvaceous softness was as strong as the hunger to devour every delicious centimetre of her flesh and uncover her every last erotic secret.
Dio , it was like he’d never caressed breasts before. The weight and fullness of Victoria’s simply begged to be squeezed, the texture and taste begged to be licked and kissed and nipped...her moans of pleasure... When she cradled his head in a silent plea for more and writhed beneath him, he encircled a large nipple with a groan and gently bit, fighting the very real need to consume her whole. For the first time in his life, Marcello’s need to devour had nothing to do with the giving of pleasure to satisfy his ego, but to satisfy his greed, and it was his greed for more, more of Victoria, that had him snake down to the pubis that had haunted his imagination for much longer than the days he’d pretended to himself.
He’d spent eighteen months ruthlessly refusing to think of Victoria as a woman precisely because his subconscious had known what would be unleashed. And now that denial had been unleashed, he was like a child let loose in a chocolate factory without supervision.
He would not deny himself any more. He would not deny her. For this one night he would drown in her.
Spreading her thighs, he pushed them back. Too dark to see with any clarity, he rested his face between her legs and inhaled deeply. He didn’t need to see clearly, not when the memory of her naked in the bathroom was still so vivid. He could satisfy his other senses, and, with another greedy inhalation of her erotic musky scent, he laid himself down and feasted.
Victoria had lost her mind. This was beyond good. Beyond pleasure. The sporadic groans from between her legs only added to the heady wonder. Marcello was getting as much from this as she was, and, God, she’d never known it would feel like this. Be like this. Something was building inside her, a thickening beyond any climax she’d brought herself to during the lonely nights she’d tried desperately hard not to picture Marcello touching her...
She moaned loudly as he slid a finger into her heat, and then his tongue found a rhythm that had her writhing and wantonly begging him not to stop until her climax ripped through her and she could speak no more.
The ripples hadn’t even begun to subside when he wrenched his face away from the source of her pleasure and crawled back up her body to cover her mouth with a deeply passionate, musky-tasting kiss. Before she could wrap her arms back around him, he was kneeling between her legs and reaching into his bedside table. A short rustling and then he was ripping into a small square foil with his teeth. He’d sheathed himself in moments and then he was pushing her thighs back again, the head of his huge arousal at the entrance of her heat.
Through the dark, she felt his stare on her as he leaned forwards and raggedly muttered, ‘ Dio , Victoria, I have never wanted anyone like this.’ Without a second of hesitation, he drove deep inside her with a loud, drawn-out groan.
The sharp pain made her gasp. Her right leg reflexively kicked and she came within a breath of telling him to stop.
But he’d already stilled. Breathing heavily, he whispered, ‘Are you okay?’
Slowly expelling her own breath, she realised she was okay. More than okay. The pain had already faded and as her body stretched to accommodate him and adjusted to the delicious newness of Marcello fully inside her, the magnitude of what was happening hit her.
Marcello was inside her.
Marcello was making love to her.
Cupping the back of his head, she lifted her face for his kiss. The heat of his mouth sent sensation dancing through her and, relaxing, she slid her hand to his shoulder, closed her eyes and trusted him to take her to paradise.
When he started to move, paradise itself moved closer.
This was beyond anything Marcello had ever felt before, ever experienced. Every nerve ending was alive with sensation, every vein threaded with electricity, every sense attuned to Victoria’s every touch and every breathless moan. The need to drive deeper and deeper into her tight, slick heat, to fuse himself in his entirety to her...
Her moans deepened.
‘ Dio mio , Victoria, you’re incredible,’ he groaned before gritting his teeth in an effort to keep control of himself, and increased the tempo of his thrusts; the need to feel and experience her climax with her as strong as the increasing desperation for his own release.
Just as he felt he couldn’t hold on any more, the legs wrapped around his waist and the arms around his neck tightened and she spasmed into him and around him, crying out his name as she pulled him over the edge and into an abyss of the most intense pleasure of his life.
Victoria held Marcello tightly and tried to snatch air into her lungs. She could feel the beats of his heart thumping strongly. Hear his own struggles to find air.
He was still inside her. She wanted to keep him there and never let him go...
An impossible dream but with the bliss of her climax still tingling through her veins and skin, and his mouth hot in her hair, a dream it was impossible to deny herself from longing for.
The virus that had debilitated her had weakened her defences and given the space for feelings hidden even from herself to bloom.
They were feelings as impossible as her dream. Feelings that must never be spoken of. This blissful closeness they were sharing was a temporary, fleeting thing. In a minute or an hour or a day or a week or a month, Marcello would call time as he always did.
She’d made love to him knowing he would break her heart. He would have broken her heart even if she’d walked away as he’d urged her to do.
The darkness of the bedroom meant she didn’t have to hide her dejection when he finally lifted his head and pulled himself out of her.
‘I need to get rid of the condom.’
She sighed and ran her fingers lightly through his hair.
He kissed her gently and then climbed off the bed.
She missed his warmth before his feet even hit the floor.
Snuggling deep under the duvet, she tried to stop herself thinking about the day in her future when an entitled female voice called and demanded to be put straight through to him. Or, worse, the day he casually instructed her to keep an evening in his schedule free. That he’d been celibate since Jenna was little short of a miracle and a feat unlikely to be repeated. She had to be realistic about these things.
An orange light appeared from the bathroom. Phone guiding him, he strode to the bedroom door without looking at her and distantly said, ‘I’m going to find matches to light a candle.’
Irrationally stung, she snuggled deeper, hugged herself tightly and willed the tears not to fall.
Looked like she wouldn’t even have an hour to savour what they’d just shared.
He must be regretting it already, and it pained her to remember how many times he’d urged her to walk away before they took things too far.
She had no idea how long she lay there, torturing herself over a future she had no control of, when he padded back into the bedroom, still using his phone as a torch. In silence, he headed to the sideboard in the corner. The angle he placed his phone while unwrapping the candle illuminated him, and she took a crumb of comfort that he hadn’t bothered to cover his nakedness. Surely if he was planning to start a big ‘We really shouldn’t have done that and it must never happen again’ conversation, he would put some clothes on?
But then, who knew how Marcello extracted himself from a woman’s bed when he had no intention of sharing it with her again? Not Victoria. She’d never asked. Never wanted to know.
There was a click, and then a whoosh of blue and orange flame from what looked like a miniature flamethrower shot out from his hand and the wick of a candle caught light. Another click as he turned the miniature flamethrower off and then he turned, now illuminated by the flickering candle light, and walked towards her.
Holding the duvet tightly to her chest, she sat up.
It wasn’t until he’d slid beside her, rested his back against the headboard and taken hold of her hand that she was able to take a proper breath.
It was a breath that stuck in her throat when he said in a voice too casual to be casual, ‘Victoria... Tell me that wasn’t your first time.’
The freezing of Victoria’s hand in his answered Marcello’s question.
Biting back a curse, he tipped his head back and forced himself to breathe.
When he’d come back to earth after their lovemaking, it had been the moment he’d first entered her that had rung loudest. Her gasp. The flash of uncertainty that had temporarily gripped him before he’d completely lost his mind in what they were sharing.
Even as he’d been turning the kitchen upside down searching for something to light the candle with, the thought had refused to be shaken off.
And now his worst fears had been confirmed.
Victoria had been a virgin.
This beautiful, witty, confident, highly intelligent twenty-five-year-old woman had been a virgin.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he dragged out. Something dark and acrid was bubbling in his guts.
He heard her swallow. ‘Because you would have used it as an excuse to stop.’
‘What the hell?’ Snapping his gaze to her, he stared intently at the face only a little more discernible under the candle’s illumination, but discernible enough for him to catch the defiance on it. ‘Did you plan this?’
‘Why would I do that?’ she asked tremulously. ‘ How could I do that?’
Cursing under his breath, he let get of her hand and gripped the back of his neck. ‘Why would you give your virginity to a man like me, Victoria?’
Her voice lifted. ‘Because you’re a professional?’
‘This is not the time for jokes.’
‘I know but this conversation is excruciating.’ She laughed but it sounded more like a sob. ‘You kept telling me to walk away, but I couldn’t. It was already too late for me. And it was too late for you too—if it wasn’t, you’d have walked away. If I’d told you I was a virgin then...’ She gave another sobbed laugh. ‘What I’m currently feeling for you is something I’ve wanted to feel my entire life.’
The dark acridity in his guts intensified, the impending sense of disaster back with a vengeance. ‘I cannot give you anything more than this.’
‘I know ,’ she stated vehemently, sitting even straighter. ‘I know that better than anyone, but I also know that our working relationship as we’ve always known it was over the moment this thing between us became impossible to ignore, and to think we could just carry on as if it weren’t this enormous white elephant between us is for the fairies. But just because I was a virgin doesn’t change anything. You’ve been straight with me about your feelings on relationships and stuff and I haven’t wilfully ignored them. The only reason you’re acting the way you are now is because you’re afraid my virginity means I’m going to suddenly expect a ring on my finger, so put that out of your mind. I expect nothing, Marcello, and I hope for nothing more than to leave this apartment with some semblance of our old relationship still intact.’
For the longest time their gazes held, her hazel eyes repeating what her lips had just uttered, words that were exactly what he’d needed to hear. Hearing them, though, and seeing them alive in her eyes brought none of the relief he would expect, and it took a long time before he was able to control the beats of doom pounding inside him enough to suck a long breath in.
‘I am sorry for making assumptions,’ he said heavily. ‘I haven’t been with a virgin since I was one myself.’
That it had felt like it was his first time with Victoria only added to the weight of doom inside him.
‘It really wasn’t a big deal for me, Marcello, so please don’t make it one for you.’
How could he not make it a big deal when he had so many contrasting emotions thrashing through him? The most unwelcome of them all was the secret thrill that kept punching through the acridity. He’d been Victoria’s first. She’d given herself to him .
Damn it all to hell, how was he supposed to make sense of any of this?
‘I mean it,’ she said into the silence, peering at him intently, reading him better than anyone else in the world. ‘My virginity is irrelevant.’
‘Was,’ he supplied tautly.
‘What?’
‘ Was irrelevant. It is gone. Given to a man who didn’t deserve it when there must be hundreds—thousands—of men out there who would be able to give you everything you wish for.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘My virginity wasn’t a prize to give, thank you very much, and how do you know what I wish for?’
‘You come from a big family. Do you not want that for yourself?’
‘I want a family of my own but not yet. Not for a long time.’
But she did want one. In his heart, he’d always known it, had recognised it in the softening of her stare at Denise’s baby.
‘Then why did you hold on to it for so long?’
‘It wasn’t a case of holding out. It’s just the way life worked out for me.’
He couldn’t stop himself asking, ‘How?’
Her shrug was almost imperceptible. ‘I’m the plainest of five sisters and from a town so small it should really be called a glorified village. There were hardly any boys there and the ones who weren’t gay all fancied one or other of my sisters. They never gave me a second glance. Not a single boy asked me out until I arrived in America.’
‘Are Irish boys all blind?’ he asked incredulously. How anyone could consider Victoria plain was beyond all comprehension. That she should consider herself plain...he made a mental note to drag her to an optician at the soonest opportunity.
Her beautiful features relaxed and she gave a soft laugh. ‘My sisters are all stunning. I know I’m not ugly but compared to them I’m nothing. When I started at Columbia, I had hopes of finding a nice boy, but I swear American boys are a different breed from Irish ones—they were all so confident , and because I was this duck out of water trying to find her feet in a strange country, I ran a mile from them. By the time I graduated, I’d loosened up a bit but all the decent ones had paired off, and then I started at Hansons and, as you know, it’s run and staffed by cretins, and then I was poached by this gorgeous Italian man to work as his executive assistant and any hope of finding someone went out of the window by the constant demands he made on my time outside working hours.’
Something stuck in his throat at the same moment something relaxed in him, just as he’d just seen Victoria visibly relax.
He was making too much of her virginity. He was making too much of this whole thing. He’d crossed a Rubicon he’d sworn never to cross and made love to his closest employee, and there was no turning back. What was done was done. He could spend the rest of the night castigating himself for something that couldn’t be reversed or...
‘This Italian man...’ He leaned his face close to hers. ‘He sounds like a monster.’
She held his stare a long moment before her lips curved into a smile.
‘He is,’ she promised solemnly. ‘He has no concept of personal time. I’ve lost count of the times he’s woken me in the middle of the night because he needs something and doesn’t want to wake his household staff, and that’s not forgetting the time he basically bullied me away from a theatre show I’d spent months looking forward to seeing for the sake of finding a Montblanc pen.’
He ran a finger down her delicate jawline. ‘Definitely a monster. How do you put up with him?’
‘By putting his photo on a board and throwing darts at it whenever I have a minute to myself, and by dreaming up inventive ways to maim him.’
The darkness curdling inside him finally lifted as laughter broke free, lifting and floating away completely when the widest smile lit Victoria’s face, a moment that felt so good and right that he stamped on the voice warning him strongly against taking her into his arms again, and hauled her back to him. The moment her laughing mouth fused with his, the voice evaporated.