Page 237 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

Whatever happened now, she was going to be hurt. That was her fate. You didn’t fall for Marcello Guardiola and expect a happy ending. The most she could hope for was a happy-for-now.

She’d imagined he would be the worst person in the world to fall ill with when he’d turned out to be the best. If just to be held by him like this felt like heaven then...

She sighed against his mouth before staring deep into his eyes and whispering, ‘It’s already too late.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

ITWASTHEsweetness 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.

---