Page 163 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 5-8

‘I want that too,’ she breathed, and with gritted teeth, he watched her slither back into the centre of the bed.

‘Come to bed,’ she breathed. It was all he’d wanted for months. To hear his wife say those words.

He reached for the tie at his throat. Loosened it, tugged it free, and let it flutter to the floor. The buttons were next. So many of them that it felt like an eternity before he could bare himself.

Her gaze seared his skin. But he didn’t stop. He removed his trousers, his boxers, socks and shoes.

He crawled between her thighs. Felt her raise her hips to meet him, meet the hardness of him pulsing against her. And he removed the final barrier between them, the black lace of her panties. Pulling them down over her calves, her ankles, and tossing them aside.

On the way back, he kissed the exposed softness of her ankle bone, her knee, her inner thigh.

‘Put your legs on my shoulders,’ he commanded, because he wanted her open to him. For her to be in a position to take all of him so deeply she wouldn’t be able to breathe for the fullness.

She did as he instructed, and he shifted against her, feeling how ready she was for him, the wetness at her core.

His need to be inside her was frantic, all consuming.

And he pressed into the intimate centre of her, entered her. Slowly, inch by inch.

He took his time, knowing that once he was fully inside her he would be lost to the urgency between them. Compelled by the need to drive into her again and again until his body was released from the hold she had over him.

He needed a moment to gain back a modicum of control.

‘Dante, do you want to...stop?’

‘Is that what you want?’ he growled, his neck straining as he fought every instinct to thrust up inside her.

‘No.’ Her hair, strewn over the white pillow, moved with the shake of her head. And he wanted to fist it. Drag her mouth to his.

‘I want to go slow,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘You won’t hurt me,’ she promised. ‘My body will remember you.’

Her hips flexed, and she took him inside her a little more. ‘But if you want to stop,’ she said, and he heard the tightness in her voice. Heard a need he mirrored in his taut muscles, begging for release. ‘We can.’

‘I do not want that,’ he ground out.

Her hands, open palmed, smoothed over his chest. And when she ran her fingertips over his bruised nipples, her touch ignited a fire in his skin. And he was burning.

‘Then don’t stop.’

Sweat beaded on his brow. ‘I won’t.’

He thrust up into her.

‘Yes!’ Her face contorted. ‘Again.More.’

He gripped her hips, plunged, hard and deep.

Dante strained against his instincts, despite her words, despite his, to do what he wanted and take her mindlessly.

His muscles burned with his resistance. If he did these things, if he let go, gave in to the animalistic instinct to rut these thoughts away, he’d hurt her.

Slowly, he slid into her again and again, let her body remember him. Welcome him back.

Her ankles locked around his neck. ‘Faster, Dante,’ she pleaded.‘Harder.’

And her whispered words were what his body longed for. Had longed for, for months. And she knew, didn’t she? She knew what he needed because she needed it too. To end the endless days of foreplay, the months of self-denial. To surrender to this agony between them.

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