Page 19 of Bound By The Italian’s 'I Do'

Naturally, it had been a distressing time for a young boy, but he’d got over it. By the time he was twelve, Gianni and Alessandro had dreamed up their plan to leave. A cast-iron dream left little room for the adolescent Gianni to think about his mother or deal with the churn of anguish as to how she could have left him.

Strangely, he hadn’t allowed himself to remember that long-ago anguish for so long that to suddenly think about it now was disconcerting. Emotional pain was something he’d never allowed himself to feel again. In this whole world he loved and trusted Alessandro, and that was it. This beautiful conniving woman gazing at him with eyes ablaze with desire was poison. If she had her way, she could destroy him as effectively as his mother had once done. But not emotionally. When it came to his heart, she couldn’t touch him. No one could.

Issy was poison...but she was a hot poison. Her poisonous intentions couldn’t quell the attraction smouldering thickly between them. Her poisonous intentions only added piquancy to it. Gianni wanted to taste her venomous lips again and, when her fingers finally closed around his hips and the tips dug through the material of his shorts, his desire ran free to imagine losing himself in all her beautiful toxicity.

‘We’ll have to get you a pair of red lifeguard shorts and one of those banana board things,’ she murmured, her mouth so close to his that the scent of her sweetly toxic breath filled his senses.

There was venom in her breath for sure, a potent drug designed to bewitch and enthral and thicken the desire already rampaging through him. What she didn’t know was that her poison could only work on a base level with him. He didn’t deny that on a base level it was stronger than any other desire he’d experienced, infecting him right through to his pores, coming close to making him tremble with its strength. Dragging his hand around her back, he clasped her bottom and pulled her flush against him, letting her feel the strength of his excitement. ‘Banana board things?’

She hitched a breath before answering. Her eyes had become glazed and when she spoke, there was a breathless quality to her voice. ‘You know, those things lifeguards carry under their arms when they’re running to save someone from drowning.’

He brushed his mouth against her toxically sweet lips. ‘Do you mean a float?’

Her beautiful face flush with colour, she made a noise through her nose he supposed was meant to be a laugh and pressed her breasts tighter against his chest. ‘Probably. I’ll send you one for your birthday.’

He squeezed her bottom and ground himself harder against her, loving the barely perceptible shock that quivered through her and the pressure of her fingers on his hips. ‘What if I need to save your life again before my birthday?’

Her eyes were now so dark and drugged with desire he could see the fight she was waging to keep control of herself. There was barely any coherence in her voice, but somehow she managed to keep the banter going. ‘You’ll just have to use your superhero powers again.’

‘I’m no superhero,bella. Just a man.’ A man with a deep hunger for another taste of Issy’s poisonous lips. Finally fusing his mouth to hers, Gianni rolled on top of her and sank into the heady pleasure of her mouth.

Oh, God, didn’t she know how much of a man he was? Issy thought wildly as red-hot lava pumped through her veins. The feelings Gianni elicited in her were so out of this world, a craven need that his touch and ravenous mouth only fed, that she gave no thought to resisting. With his weight on her, covering her, subsuming her, the essence of herself slipped out of her grasp and she stepped into the flames of desire.

His kisses were hard and demanding, a devouring of mouths and tongues, a sensory whirl that had her press her screaming, sensitised skin tightly against every inch of him that she could. Dragging her fingers over Gianni’s smooth, muscular back, she revelled in the groans he made at her touch and kissed him even harder, only breaking her mouth from his to gasp at the shock that thrilled through her when the weight and length of his excitement jutted through his swim shorts and jabbed against the scrap of material covering her most intimate parts. It was a thrill that burned deep in the heart of her and instinctively, she wrapped her legs tight around his waist and raised her hips.

She didn’t know if the rocking motion was all them or if the swell of the water beneath the inflatable they were locked in each other’s arms on was the cause and she didn’t care. A burning coil had wound itself tightly in her core and was throbbing with a desperate need for relief, and she clung even tighter, kissing him even harder as the length of his thick hardness thrust against her swollen nub and...

The coil sprang free without warning. One minute she was rocking against him, caught up in the most heavenly thrills she’d ever experienced in her life; the next she shattered, and even as the unexpected explosions of her very first climax throbbed and raged through her, still she clung to Gianni, burying her face in his neck, desperate to keep the connection between them and draw out this most incredible moment of her life.

It was only when the spasms subsided and Issy realised Gianni had stilled that she came back to earth with a sharp bump. In an instant, the crest of the most glorious experience she’d ever ridden was over and sanity crashed into her like a bucket of ice being tipped over her head.

Oh, God, what had just happened?

She squeezed her eyes shut and wished for a hole to open in the inflatable and to sink beneath the surface and never come back up again.

This was terrible. Horrendous.

She tried to breathe. Tried to think. Then she tried not to think because even as the last thrills limped through her, her head was swimming with the fact that she’d just come completely undone and behaved in the most shocking, wanton, shameful fashion. And forhim.

And all in her bikini. He hadn’t even needed to touch her there.

The weight crushing her slowly lifted, but only the physical weight. She could feel Gianni staring at her. What must he think of her? She shouldn’t care what he thought of her. Shedidn’tcare. She didn’t.

She needed to bluff her way out of this, and as she realised this, the path of least humiliation opened to her. She just had to get back into character. It was beyond belief that any of his previous lovers had cared two hoots about seeming wanton to him. Wanton was what Gianni wanted!

As humiliating as her responses to him were, she needed to think of them in a positive light. Most importantly though, she must take more care than ever not to let desire for him overtake her sanity again. Use this as a warning to keep her internal guard up.

Gianni, struggling to find his breath, studied Issy’s flushed face intently. His head was reeling from what had just occurred between them. Their kiss in the pool had blown his mind. This had come close to blowing his head off his shoulders. And hardly anything had happened. He was still to taste anything but her mouth.

But never had he experienced such unbridled hunger before.Dio, the ache in his loins was like nothing he’d felt before. Her passion...

His loins were on fire. He ached so badly to smother her mouth again and continue what they’d started. The fusion of their mouths had sent an inferno raging through them, from simmer to scorching in an instant. When he’d sensed what was happening to her... It hadn’t seemed possible.

But it had been real. Issy had climaxed. He guessed from the ragged sharpness of her breathing and the way her eyes were still screwed so tightly together that it had been as big a shock to her as it was to him.

Just as shocking was how close to the edge he’d come too.

What the hell was happening to him? He was thirty-two years old. He’d learned to control his bodily responses to beautiful women before the end of his adolescence. He tookpridein his control so to know that a few beats longer with their groins locked together would have tipped him over the edge too was beyond his comprehension. Issy was beautiful and sexy but so were plenty of other women. He’d never come close to losing control like that before.

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