Chapter Ten
LATER THAT EVENING, having showered and changed for dinner, Alessia found Gabriel in the dining room. The table had been set for their meal but he was sat at the other end surrounded by sheets of paper.
He looked up as she entered the room. His gaze flickered over her and she caught again that flash of desire as another smile that creased his eyes lit his handsome face.
The longing that had caught her in her grandmother’s dressing room flooded her limbs again, weakening them, and it took a beat before she could close the door and cross the room to stand beside him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, glad that her voice, at least, still sounded normal.
The rest of her had felt decidedly abnormal since her grandmother’s dressing room, like electricity had replaced the blood in her veins.
She’d been aware of every movement and every sensation her body made, from the lace knickers she’d pulled up her legs and over her thighs, to the lipstick she’d held between her fingers and applied to lips that tingled, to the perfume she’d dabbed to the pulses on her neck and wrists.
Every whisper of sound she heard outside the bedroom had made her heart leap.
It was pounding now, as hard as she’d ever known it.
Why was she standing so close to him?
He looked her up and down again, this time much more slowly. His nostrils flared. ‘Getting some ideas down about what we can do with the stables while the ideas are fresh in my mind. I’d like to have my office facing the garden on the ground floor.’
Her arm brushing against his, Alessia peered at the sheets. He’d sketched the floor plan in remarkable detail. How could he remember it so clearly? she wondered, awed too at how well he’d recalled the proportions of each room.
Why this should make her heart swell and ripple even more she couldn’t begin to guess.
And why she’d leaned so close into him she couldn’t begin to guess either.
Trying hard to cover the emotions thrashing through her, Alessia shifted away from him then turned round so her back was to the table, raised herself onto her toes and used her hands as purchase to lift herself onto it.
They were almost eye level.
If she moved her foot an inch to the left, it would brush against the calf of his leg.
‘You are keen to get out of the castle,’ she managed to tease. Or tried. She couldn’t seem to breathe properly.
His eyes locked onto hers. ‘I don’t like my business belonging to everyone else.’
Somewhere in the dim recess of her mind, she understood what he meant.
The family’s personal wing of the castle was busy.
Alessia had her own offices but they tended to blur with her private quarters, clerical as well as domestic staff in and out, her family’s clerical staff often popping in to ask her questions or get her input.
Everything was fluid, communication between the family’s respective teams high, everyone working and pulling together for the same aim—the monarchy’s success.
Right then, she couldn’t have cared less about the monarchy’s success. Right then, the only thing Alessia could focus on was the hooded desire flowing from Gabriel’s eyes, entwining with the buzz in her veins, and the feel of his calf beneath her toes...
Large hands gripped the bottom of her thighs just above the knees. Jaw clenched, Gabriel brought his face close to hers and bore his gaze into her. ‘What are you doing, Lessie?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, staring right back at him.
Had she kicked her shoes off so she could rub her toes against his leg?
Her head was swimming. She knew she should push his hands away but the sensations and heat licking her from the outside in were too strong.
Erotic fantasies were filling her, a yearn for Gabriel’s strong fingers to dip below the hem of her white, floaty skirt and slide up her thighs to where the heat throbbed the most.
Another image filled her: Gabriel lifting the strawberry-coloured bandeau top she’d paired the skirt with over her breasts and taking her nipples into his mouth.
Was that why she’d chosen to wear a top that needed no bra? she wondered hazily.
‘Alessia, talk to me.’
His voice was thick, and as she gazed helplessly into his eyes, the pupils swirled and pulsed into black holes she could feel herself being pulled into.
‘I... I don’t want to talk,’ she whispered hoarsely, unable to stop herself falling into the limitless depths.
Gabriel tightened his grip on Alessia’s thighs and tried his damnedest to tighten his control.
He could feel her desire with all of his senses, feeding the thick arousal that had become a living part of him, unleashing unbound since she’d walked into the dining room, as beautiful and as sexy a sight as he had ever seen.
The heat of her quivering skin burned into his flesh, its scent sinking into his airwaves.
Hunger, pure, unfiltered, flashed from her melting velvet eyes into his.
It was there too in the breathless pitch of her husky voice. Smouldering.
God, he wanted her, with every fibre of his being, but he would not be the one to make the first move. It had to come from her.
He drew his face even closer to hers and forced the words out. ‘Alessia, what do you want?’
Her hands suddenly clasped his cheeks. Her breaths coming in short, ragged bursts, the minty taste of her warm breath flowed into his senses, making him grip even tighter as desire throbbed and burned its way relentlessly through him.
It was the control she could see him hanging onto by a thread that unlocked the last of Alessia’s mental chain.
She could feel Gabriel’s hunger for her as deeply as she felt her own but he chose to starve than do anything without her explicit, wholehearted consent because he knew the mental agonies she’d been going through and, more importantly, he understood them.
He would rather put himself through the agony of denial than risk hurting her again, and her heart filled with such emotion it felt like it could burst out of her.
It was impossible to secure her heart against him. Impossible. Her heart and her body were intricately linked when it came to Gabriel and if she couldn’t give one without the other then so be it. She’d committed herself to him for life, and the feelings he evoked in her were never going to subside.
What was the point in fighting the woman inside her any longer?
She was crazy for him.
Gazing deep into his eyes, she whispered, ‘I want you.’
He breathed in deeply and shuddered.
‘I want you,’ she repeated, and then she could hold back no more and, digging the tips of her fingers into his cheeks, she kissed him with every ounce of the passion she’d been denying them.
The groan that came with his response could have been a roar.
In seconds he was off his seat, holding her tightly to him and kissing her back with a ferocity that sent her head spinning.
As if he’d looked inside her head and read her fantasies, long fingers dipped under her skirt and dragged up her thigh, and round to clasp her bottom.
Arms entwined around his neck, she closed off the world and sank into her senses...senses which were receptacles for Gabriel, for his taste, his touch... All of him.
Lips moving together, tongues duelling, fingers scraped over flesh and ripped and pulled at the intrusive fabric separating them.
Grabbing his shirt to loosen it, she fumbled with the buttons before giving up and slipping her hand beneath it, flattening her palm against his hard abdomen, thrilling at the heat of his skin, the soft hair covering the smoothness.
Up her hands splayed, ruching his shirt as her fingers rose until he broke the connection of their mouths to undo the top few buttons himself and yank it over his head.
Gabriel would not have believed it possible for his arousal to deepen any further but then he saw the drugged ringing of Alessia’s eyes as she wantonly grazed her stare over his chest. When she put her mouth to his nipple and scraped her nails over his back, the charge that fired through his veins. ..
Never had he responded with such violent fever...
Apart from with Alessia.
Time had dimmed the intensity of the pleasure they’d shared that night but now, with her rosebud lips worshipping him and her hands stroking and scraping over his burning flesh, he knew that dimming had been an essential defence mechanism in him because the force of his desire was too savage and greedy to be unleashed again.
But it was unleashed now. Unleashed and frenzied and as essential as the air he breathed. She was as essential to him as the air he breathed, and he wanted to taste every part of her and consume her into his being.
Clasping her hair he used every ounce of his control to gently pull her head back.
Those drugged velvet eyes met his. Colour slashed her cheeks, her lips, lipstick kissed off, the darkest he’d ever seen them.
He kissed them again. Hard. Thoroughly. And then he buried his mouth into her neck and pressed her down so she was laid on the table, her legs hooked around his waist, and set about consuming her.
Alessia was lost in a world of delirious pleasure.
Her flesh burned and, deep inside her, pulses were converging and thickening, an urgency building that Gabriel’s slavish assault only added fuel to.
Her bandeau top yanked down, she cried out when his hot mouth covered her breast: sucking, biting, licking, sending her spinning until she cried out again and arched her back when he moved to the other.
The assault of his mouth continued down to her belly, his hands clasping her skirt and pushing it up to her hips.
Raising his face to look at her with hooded, passion-ridden eyes, he bared his teeth with a growl and clasped her knickers.
With another growl, he tugged them down her thighs and off her legs, and in moments he was on his knees with his face buried in the most feminine part of her.