Amassing all the patience and reverence and his experience, he applied himself to giving her the one thing she had asked of him.
Holding himself off her on one elbow, he plucked at the taut nipple calling for his attention. He licked it, before sucking into his mouth and beneath him, Nush trembled, arching off the bed into him. Demanding more.
More, more and more, even as if he gave her everything.
Even as she clung to his neck with one arm, she sent her other hand on a quest of his body. Fingers like butterfly wings explored his neck, his pecs, his abdomen, and Cristo, where they were joined even.
The woman was analytical and there was no stopping her curiosity.
A growl escaped his mouth as he felt her fingers flutter over his balls, traced over the root of his cock, following to the folds of her sex. “Touch your clit, Nush.”
“Yes sir,” she whispered cheekily and drew circles over her clit. Seeing her fingers move over that swollen flesh, Cristo, that was an image that would haunt him forever.
He pulled out, and thrust in, a deep heat gathering at the base of his spine.
Her own growl joined his. “I’m getting there, Caio. God, please push me off. Now.”
Lifting her hips off the bed, he thrust in and out at an angle, his own climax reaching and roaring for him.
“Oh...” she whispered, head thrown back as he hit her clit on the way in and out. “Caio, I feel it. I feel it here,” she said, touching the slit of her sex when he’d almost pulled out completely.
He grinned and their eyes met. “Collecting all the data, Princesa?”
“You know it.” Sweat-dampened brow, lush full lips, and chest covered in his stubble burn, she was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen. “Now, harder. Caio. Please, faster.”
“Keep touching yourself,” he whispered and then his rhythm became something else.
It became madness. It became a hungry bellow from his chest. It became a hungry claiming like he’d never known before.
She got her wish, screaming out his name as she climaxed and her clenching muscles tipped Caio over. He came with a hard burning rasp wrenched from his throat, heat invading every limb and muscle and leaving him shaken. For a few seconds, he allowed himself the luxury of feeling her under him, burying his face in her neck and inhaling the scent their bodies coated the air with. In his arms, she felt small, fragile and yet there was such power in her to...shatter him if she wished.
The thought made his chest cold and he moved to lift away from her.
Her hands on his shoulder, she stopped him. “We did it,” Nush whispered, eyes gleaming, and his heart thumped unsteadily in his chest.
Suddenly, his life without Nush in it didn’t bear thinking about. Maybe this wasn’t something he’d imagined his life to play out, but he wasn’t foolish enough to reject a gift just because he hadn’t recognized it immediately for what it was. But would her love for him last when he didn’t return it? When it would always be marred by a shadow of disbelief and fear that she’d take it back?
Would she realize one day that he didn’t deserve it?
CHAPTER TWELVE
ITWASLUNCHTIMEwhen Caio jumped out of the helicopter and signaled his pilot to leave. He’d been terse and short and unsettled all day and most of his team had sighed out in relief when he’d announced that he was taking off for the day.
As the chopper’s wind blew at him, playing with his hair and clothes, Caio admitted the truth he’d been fighting all week.
His heart was not in it anymore. In seeing his plans through—the very plans it had taken him more than a decade to set in motion.
Seeing his stepfather Carlos’s face turn frightfully purple as Caio had walked into his office two days ago to reveal to him that he was the designer of his destruction had not been as satisfactory as he’d expected. Not when he had to face the diseased spirit of employees who had been with the company from his father’s time.
The last decade and more had not been kind to Carlos. In fact, Caio wondered if his ruin had begun from the day Caio’s mother had died.
It had only left him with disgust as to how many lives Carlos had actually ruined. And neither had there been satisfaction in seeing his stepbrother Enzo dragged away by the police for embezzling pension funds, for all the Ponzi schemes he’d run using Caio’s father’s name. Not when Caio had also been witness to Enzo’s wife’s tears—a woman Caio himself had once liked. In the battle that had resulted between him and Enzo, Sophia had chosen Enzo, knowing of Caio’s imminent ruin, and expulsion from his own father’s company.
But nothing in him today had liked the misery on Sophia’s face or seeing the framed picture of her three kids on her desk whose futures had been shattered by everything Caio had unleashed.
All he had known then was that he had to leave. Nothing was going as he’d planned. It hadn’t felt like freedom from the fury that had coursed through him, corroding him for years. It hadn’t felt like relief from the isolation he’d felt, from his family, from his own identity as the son who’d been loved by his parents.
He’d thought he’d feel redeemed, different, maybe even renewed.