Page 210 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 5-8

Mari turned slowly in the circle of his arms, wrapped her arms around his neck and looked up at his beautiful face, his strong jaw, the masculine beauty of his lips, the intensity of his dark eyes, now looking quizzically down at her. She allowed herself a smile, anticipation already fizzing in her veins.

‘I want you too.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DOM GROWLED, a low guttural sound of victory, a sound that rumbled into Mari’s bones as he dipped his head to sweep her into his kiss. And this time she went willingly. This time it wasn’t Dom driving the kiss. It was Mari that wanted it. Because she’d been wrong on so many levels—wrong to deny them both the passion and the pleasure she knew they would find together, wrong to waste so much of what little time they had. She took everything that he offered and hungered for more.

He delivered, wrenching his lips from hers to blaze a trail down her throat and setting her flesh alight under his heated mouth. He was hot. So hot, turning her own need to combustible. Dialling up her own desire to the max.

And his hands, his strong hands, were everywhere, cupping her behind and moulding her to him, leaving her in no doubt of his arousal, further ratcheting up her need.

‘Come,’ he said, breathing hard as he took her hand. They half stumbled, half danced their way across the sand, their progress slower than either of them would have preferred, but only because they couldn’t get enough of the touch, the feel, the taste of each other.

Because it was the same as it had been twenty years before, except it was better. Twenty years better. Somehow, they made it to Dom’s apartment building and into the private lift that would take them to his penthouse. Mari found herself wedged in the corner, Dom’s hands busy shimmying her skirt up her legs, his leg inserted between hers, while his mouth and his seeking tongue plundered hers. It could have been uncomfortable—in other circumstances it would have been an outrage—but right in this moment there was nowhere in the world Mari would rather be. The lift rose, taking the temperature of Mari’s blood with it until it was simmering, and she was threatening to combust.

The lift doors opened behind Dom and they spilled out, leaving a trail of clothing as Dom steered her towards the bedroom.

Such a big bed. It was a crime to have waited so long to enjoy it.

Why had she waited so long? Why had she tortured herself? Those questions tumbled through her mind as they tumbled together onto the bed, mouths locked, kisses deepening, the emotions of the past week unleashed in one furious tangle of bodies and mouths and limbs.

And then the questions stopped, and all Mari had the brain space to do was feel.

Hot breath intermingling, their bodies driven by desire, it was a desperate battle to remove what few clothes remained, a frenzied and furious race to achieve skin-to-skin contact.

The feel of Dom’s ribbed chest beneath her hands, the hard-packed belly of his abdomen, the feel of his erection jutting into her as she lay with her leg across him. Her inner muscles clenched with anticipation, muscles long neglected and forgotten for too many years, but muscles that had been merely lying in wait, ready to be awakened again.

And who better to awaken them than the man who’d set light to them in the first place? Dom. Her first love. Her best love.

Her only love.

Dom looked down at her, now naked on the bed, his hand smoothing her hair back from her brow. ‘You’re even more beautiful than I remembered,’ he said. She looked up at him, at his dark eyes still overcome with grief, but now burning with something more urgent, more primal.

She recognised it because she felt it too.

Need.

And then he dipped his head to take one peaked nipple in his heated mouth, drawing her in, his tongue circling her nipple, before he sucked on that bullet point. Exquisite torture, pain and pleasure intermingling as her back arched on the bed. Her other breast was already screaming for equal treatment when he turned his attention there, torturing her further, the buzzing need between her thighs growing more insistent. More needy.

Her hands were in his hair, her fingernails raking his scalp as he rose up to claim her mouth once more.

He slipped a hand lower, smoothing over her belly and lower still, over her mound and between her pulsing lips. Her breath hitched. Because he was touching herthereand it was as if every dream she’d ever had of making love with Dom, every memory she’d ever had, was rolled into this moment. It was as if the world began and ended where his fingers shimmied. It was suddenly the most important thing in her life. The only thing in her life.

‘So slick,’ he murmured into her mouth, while one fingertip traced the outline of her opening.

‘Dom,’ she begged, not knowing what she was begging for, knowing that only Dom could give it to her. Before his fingertip alighted on that tightly packed nub of nerves, gently circling, gently toying, each pass, each touch building on the other until there was nowhere to go but to fly.

He barely had time to sheath himself before he was inside her. Inside her and filling her and grinding his hips against hers, lifting one leg higher as he plunged deeply into her. She cried out with the exquisite intimacy of it. Cried out with their perfect fit, their matched rhythm, the memories of the past melding with the newly made experience of now. And still he took her higher until Dom cried out with one final lunge.

Mari came apart in colours, an out of body experience of bright and shimmering light that drifted down from the heights in time with her heartbeat.

She clung to him, her breathing ragged, her senses reeling.

Because she’d had sex with Dominico.

No, she’dmade lovewith Dominico.

And it was perfect.

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