Page 245 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

Her mouth dropped open. ‘You sabotaged my night out on purpose?’

‘Sì,’he agreed without an ounce of shame. ‘I didn’t want you doing what Denise did to me.’

‘That’s a blatant abuse of power. There are laws against things like that, you know.’

He slid his hand around and cupped her breast. Voice thickening, he said, ‘We have already established that I am a monster and that monsters need to perform penance.’

Capturing the hand on her breast and squeezing it, Victoria shifted herself forward so his hardness pressed between her legs. She ground down on him. There it was. That dilation in his eyes. She would never, ever get enough of seeing that and knowing she was the reason for it, not even if they had all the time in the world...

The despondency at what the dress and theatre tickets represented suddenly lifted.

Marcello had feelings for her. She knew it as well as she knew him. He’d deliberately sabotaged what he thought was a real date. Not even he usually stooped that low: he didn’t have to. It was a rare member of his vast staff who left for pastures new. Denise leaving had been an anomaly. From the few conversations Victoria had had with her predecessor, Marcello hadn’t been a fraction as demanding of her personal time as he was of Victoria’s.

Her chest contracted and then bloomed open, and, though she tried her best to temper it, hope rushed to fill the gap.

Frightened at the direction of her thoughts and feelings, Victoria yanked her jumper off and then kissed him hard, infusing her senses with his dark taste and driving out everything else. Dragging at his bottom lip with her teeth, she huskily whispered, ‘Sabotage means serious penance.’

Marcello cupped the back of her head and pulled her mouth back to his. ‘Punish me however you see fit,’ he said between savage kisses.

Hazel eyes flashing their desire, she tugged at his sweater. Between them they lifted it off him before she slipped an arm behind her back and released her bra. Beautiful, bountiful breasts jutted before him, and he took one into his mouth and sucked greedily, his hands already working on the button and zip of her jeans.

With the barrier of two sets of denim between them, Marcello clasped her bottom and got to his feet, carrying her with him, then practically threw her onto the bed.

When he yanked her jeans and knickers down her legs, he had a brief memory of the first time he’d performed this same act. Then, he’d been determined to avoid letting his gaze focus on any aspect of Victoria’s body. Now, he shamelessly soaked in every perfect inch.

How the hell was he supposed to return to their normal working life after this? he wondered for the hundredth time as he kissed her perfect toes and, working his way out of his own clothing, kissed his way up her perfect leg. Just to imagine being back in the office they shared...

His arousal grew even stronger as he inhaled the heat of her excitement at the same moment an image flashed in his mind of bending Victoria over his desk...

Burying his face between her legs, glorying in her moans and pleas, he submitted to his imagination and let it run riot into all the directions he’d expressly forbidden it from running before.

He didn’t see how they could end it. Not yet. It was too soon.

But end it they must.

Somehow, he would have to find a way for them to work as they’d done before with this chemistry still blazing so brightly between them, but it was impossible to imagine catching a glimpse of Victoria absently chewing on her bottom lip and not wanting to replace her teeth with his own. Impossible to imagine sharing the back of the car or the cabin of his private jet and not having the need to pull her onto his lap, bunch her smart skirt around her waist, pull her knickers aside and thrust up into her, and as he imagined that, she arched her back and cried out loudly.

Crawling up to kiss her, he groped in his bedside table drawer for a condom with something bordering on fury. Finally grabbing hold of one, he yanked it out with such impatience that he knocked the drawer off its hinges. It fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

‘Clumsy,’ she breathed heavily as she snatched the foil from him and, with a growl, used her teeth to rip it open. ‘On your back, slave.’

The fury abated as he did as commanded.

Heaven was Victoria rolling the condom over his arousal.

Nirvana was Victoria climbing on top of him and sinking down on his length, and as she grabbed his hands and placed them on her breasts then pressed her hands tightly into his chest, cheeks ablaze with the colour of her passion, he realised true nirvana would only come the day he entered her bare...

The thought was swept aside as the pleasure took control and the glory that was Victoria riding him with her head thrown back before she threw herself forward and, her lips entwined with his, ground herself down on him hard enough to bring them both to an earth-shattering climax.

Such was the force of Victoria’s orgasm that she fell into the most delicious passion-induced coma in which her brain switched off but every nerve ending buzzed with pure post-coital bliss.

This was her favourite time, the silent moments when they lay replete in each other’s arms, as close as it was possible for two humans to be.

Marcello’s sigh brought her out of the coma. She sighed too, because she knew what it meant. Time to break the fusion.

With a kiss tender enough to make a grown woman cry, he climbed off the bed and padded to the bathroom.

Stretching, she sighed again and rolled onto her side. The bedside table loomed in her vision and she smiled, remembering why its drawer was on the floor, then peered over the side of the bed to see the mess it had made, smiling even wider to see the scattering of the restocked condoms he’d had delivered and...

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