Page 44 of Awakened in Her Enemy's Palazzo

Her breath left her body in a long, soundless gasp as he slid into her. Her eyes squeezed closed, blanking out everything, including the expressive series of shadows that moved across his clenched features.

Everything but the exquisite sensation of him filling her slowly, slowly, until she had all of him.

She could fill the tension inside her build as he moved, his strokes faster and deeper. She could not match his technique, nor his powers of seduction, so she just held on for the ride. And then she arrived with an explosion of sensation so intense she didn’t know where she began and he ended...it was just one pulsing explosion of pleasure that made them one.

Her sex-soaked brain came lazily back to life as she drifted down to earth, her body racked by pleasurable little aftershocks.

She kept her eyes closed. She knew she had to be careful not to project her feelings onto Theo. But it wasn’t easy. She wanted to scream...yell it from the rooftops. Everything felt so good and so special, so utterly perfect, that she wanted to share—though in this case she knew it would be an overshare.

‘Are you asleep, Grace?’

‘Yes.’

She almost was—and anyhow, she definitely wasn’t awake enough for a post-coital post-mortem over why he was her first lover.

If she hadn’t told him, would he have noticed? He might not have. She thought for a beginner she had not been bad, and hopefully what she’d lacked in technique she had made up for in enthusiasm.

‘B plus,’ she mumbled.

‘What was that?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

Theo laughed and stared down at her face, stroking her soft cheek for a while before sliding down the bed, pressing her face into his shoulder and adjusting his body as she curled into him.

This was not an intimacy he had ever allowed himself—it was not a tenderness that he had wanted—but it feltright.

He was too tired to analyse its rightness...

When Grace woke it was still dark, and Theo was wide awake, looking down at her.

‘You’re leaving?’ she asked.

‘Do you want me to?’

She shook her head.

‘Good.’

He kissed her—a long, dreamy kiss that she felt all the way down to her curling toes. Then, to her annoyance he pulled away, propping himself on one elbow.

‘So—before you distract me—what,’ he asked, ‘was wrong with your George?’

She didn’t misunderstand his meaning. ‘Maybe I should have mentioned before—?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘That you were a virgin?Maybe?Seriously, Grace?’

The shock still hadn’t worn off. Nor had the knowledge that he had found it arousing to be her first lover—arousing and incomprehensible, considering her innate sensuality.

‘Last night you needed sex,’ Grace said.

And she had been handy, she knew.

‘And I needed to—Well, I needed—You get to a certain age and it’s—People think there’s something wrong with you if you’ve not had a lover. And there’s the whole “do you mention it on the first date or—?” Look,’ she said touching her hot cheeks. ‘I’m blushing and I’ve seen you naked.’

He still was, she assumed, her glance sliding to the sheet that was gathered around his narrow waist.

‘Last night with you...it didn’t feel awkward.’

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