Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  As if the telling movement triggered something inside him, he slid the hand lower, skimming over her hips and her thighs to reach for the edge of her nightgown, then with a smooth, swift, experienced efficiency stripped it all the way up to her throat.

  The loss of his mouth and the slick, lithe way he removed the scrap of silk over her head set her shivering and gasping, then the kiss was deep and hungry again, the massaging hand gliding now, over her newly exposed flesh. He stroked her thighs, the gentle contours of her hip and the indentation of her waist. When she whispered something into his mouth, he rose up and looked down her length to watch as his fingers moved on over the flat of her stomach to skim across the top of one pale rounded breast.

  Lizzy closed her eyes when she felt the possessive claim that hand made and was ready this time for the burning wave of pleasure that drenched her as he stroked, then cupped, then grazed the aching tip with the pad of his thumb. Her nipples sprang out in a blatant leap and she squirmed in embarrassment.

  He wasn’t embarrassed. He just used his long fingers to shape the quivering globe in preparation to take that tight dark rosebud into his mouth. A piercing hot sting struck from the centre of her nipple and shot all the way down to her thighs, bending her body like a wand. Once again he lifted his dark head and looked at her, then strung a gentle line of slow, tender kisses along the line of her jaw. Lizzy closed her eyes and endured until at last he stopped teasing and gave her what she wanted—the warm, seductive pressure of his mouth on her own.

  She kissed him as if she would die if she didn’t. She floated on a sexual high. When he tried to calm her, she ran her fingernails into his hair and scored them down his back.

  ‘Il virago inglese’ he accused on a rough shaken shudder.

  Lizzy didn’t care. She wanted his touch, she wanted to toss herself back to where they’d been on that other bed, before she’d chickened out and called a stop. And she wanted to feel every sensual sensation she knew was still waiting for her to experience.

  So the tense curse that left his chest meant nothing to her until he used the superior strength in his arms to bring her tumbling halfway back down to earth.

  ‘I said slowly,’ he husked at her. ‘I will not ravish you, Elizabeth.’

  But she didn’t know the difference between fast and slow. Her own wild senses were ruling her actions; the sweet, tight pulse of desire was controlling the pace. The fingers she sent spearing into his neck so she could bring his mouth back to hers were fierce and urgent. ‘I want to be ravished,’ she whispered to him.

  His kiss-heated lips twisted into a grim smile. ‘You don’t understand the concept and I will not give you an excuse to accuse me of ravishing you once it is done and your conscience decides to torment you.’

  Her eyes widened in protest. ‘I w-wouldn’t do that—’

  ‘You would,’ he insisted. ‘You want me but you don’t want to want me, you have simply allowed yourself to forget that. In fact,’ he added, sending a sardonic gleam to her liquid green eyes, ‘I predict you will take great pleasure in accusing me of anything that might come to mind.’

  ‘How can you be so cold and detached that your mind can even think of these things right now?’ she threw at him helplessly.

  ‘I am not cold and detached.’ But his dark face clenched. ‘I am just trying to play this as fairly as I can for you!’

  ‘Me?’ Lizzy choked out a laugh, feeling the whole wretched, glorious wash of pleasure swirl into bitterness. ‘You haven’t been fair to me since you met me.’ Clenching her fists, she used them to try and push him away. ‘You’re a lousy lover, Luc,’ she added in thick frustration when she couldn’t budge him by even half an inch. ‘The kind that sounds like he wants me to sign another contract before he condescends to move this marriage on!’

  Once again her tongue had outpaced her common sense. Lizzy knew it the moment the cutting accusation was out. Her breathing disappeared, her eyelashes flickering as she took in the look that had frozen his face. Teeth burying themselves into her full bottom lip, she waited, heart pounding, her foolish stubbornness refusing to let her take the words back before it was too late.

  And she knew she should have done—his complete stillness told her that she should. Yet he didn’t move, didn’t speak, he didn’t make any really visible sign that she’d managed to cut into him at all. It was just there in the pulsating silence, in the way she was suddenly feeling the difference in their age and experience, and in the tiny quivers stinging her muscles in places they should not be doing at a tense moment like this.

  ‘S-say something,’ she breathed when she could stand it no longer.

  He moved then, like a man who had just come to a grim decision. One of his arms snaked outwards and suddenly a light switched on, bathing them both in a soft golden glow that did nothing to lessen Lizzy’s tension one bit. She actually felt her eyes turn black. Yet he still just continued to look down at her, into her huge wary eyes and the silken tumble of chestnut curls rippling the pillow around her delicately featured very pale face.

  And her heart wasn’t beating fast now, it was thumping slow and thick. His face, his beautiful, beautiful face was still so expressionless it just didn’t go with what he did next.

  What he did was to spear his long fingers into her hair, then curve them around the back of her neck. As she gasped he tilted her head back so it arched her slender white throat, then lowered his dark head and buried his mouth in her taut, smooth flesh.

  Nothing in her meagre experience with men helped to warn her as to what was coming. It was seduction at its most deep and determined level. It was the man of experience making no concessions for her foolishly defiant innocence. He made love to her with a grim and silent precision; he dragged each and every sensually erotic sensation to the stinging surface of her pale, smooth, receptive skin. He moved his mouth in hot, sensual glides until he reached her parted, trembling mouth, then he kissed her long and deep and without mercy until she was dizzy with it, throbbing and drunk. And he used his hands and his mouth and his tongue in ways and in places she hadn’t known could be so deliciously good.

  The quiet command of his voice worked her like a puppet. She was trapped, enslaved by the string-pulling power of his knowledge and her own desire to feel whatever he decided to bestow on her too-responsive flesh. He caressed each curve and hollow and soft warm crevice of her body; he drew her taut with exquisite sensation with his hands and his mouth and his teeth. He kneaded the rounded, swollen fullness of her breasts and sent her teeth into his satin, taut shoulder when he teased and sucked their eager tips.

  She even felt him tremble once or twice when her restless, untutored fingers scraped across his flesh. And when the downward glide of his trailing fingers finally took control of the pulsing ache between her legs she flailed in a morass of hot feeling, lost to reality because her own heady consciousness had locked onto the will of her body and the way he slowly, relentlessly brought her climbing and crawling and panting and needing to a whimpering, pleading peak.

  No single part of her did not know what it was like to be caressed by him—no nerve-end, no muscle, no velvet dark place of intimacy, until she pulsed and throbbed and breathed out his name in a helpless, breathless, sensual chant.

  She hadn’t opened her eyes in ages, not since she’d lowered her eyelids in surrender and let him do this to her. But as she felt his weight easing down on top of her and her thighs being urged apart her eyelids lifted, her eyes making deep, deep contact with the heavy gold darkness in his.

  Everything about him was heavy gold darkness, the breadth of his shoulders blocking out most of the lamplight, the long, hard-muscled torso pressing down on her with his hips. She felt the presence and the power of his erection nudge against her carefully prepared warm and wet and swollen flesh. His mouth was still somber, but it was tender when he took her mouth in yet another deep, drugging kiss.

  Then it was there. His hands cupped her bottom to lift her and he made that
first smooth, blinding thrust with his hips. Her body throbbed and stretched to accommodate him; she felt him like a burning shaft of fire in the innocence of her sheath. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into his shoulders and sensation poured in a swirling wave of fear and anticipation down the pulsing length of where they had joined.

  ‘You are sure you want this?’ he husked at her.

  The fact that he’d even asked the question after so much pulsing macho male domination made tears sting the back of her throat. The point surely was—did he want it?

  Lizzy nodded, her mouth just a breath away from his mouth, her eyes clinging dark and vulnerable and helplessly needy to his. It was his eyes that closed when he made that final invasion, his mouth that quivered tautly as she tried to choke back a cry of pain. It was his hands that trembled as he pushed the hair away from her face, then kissed it, kissed it in soft, soothing touches until he felt the tension slowly seep out of her. Then she felt him go deeper, felt the singing dance of her nerve-ends clamour to his probing force. His hands were gliding down the silken thighs to her calves then, and lifting them until her legs circled his waist.

  The action sent him even deeper, he shuddered and whispered something in Italian she did not catch, then he was folding her into the strong embrace of his arms and moving—moving, feeding them both into a sensuously searing rhythm that throbbed like a living entity inside her. Her fingers clung to his back as he increased the pace with each hot, pleasurable thrust. She knew where she was going but didn’t know how to reach it. She whimpered anxiously against his mouth.

  He caught hold of her hair again to push her head backwards. ‘Look at me,’ he said, and she lifted heavy eyelids she hadn’t been aware of closing, to be trapped in the burning dark flames in his eyes. Then, like that, he made it happen for her, made her body quicken and finally surrender to the bright and sizzling accelerated rush.

  Her first cry broke his rhythm from deep and slow to short and fast and she lost it—lost whatever it was she’d been desperately hanging onto as she shot on an explosion of fierce pleasure into wild white pulsating light, while he held her and watched her and orchestrated each wave as it battered into her, each helpless cry, each quivering, broken, convulsive tremor that just seemed to go on and on and on … until with a low, thick groan he joined her, spilling heat on the flames with a sharp stabbing movement that sent an ecstatic pleasure rippling through every muscle and bone and sinew he had.

  Seduction, she acknowledged long minutes later when she finally drifted back to earth again. I’ve just been completely, beautifully, thoroughly and ruthlessly seduced.

  He still hadn’t moved and his weight was heavy on her; she could feel the still-pounding beat of his heart against her crushed breasts. She became aware that her legs were still wrapped around him, though their bodies were no longer intimately joined.

  Still, she knew the image of the two of them like this was going to live with her for the rest of her life.

  Coupling, she named it.

  It was that physical and basic.

  Releasing the still trembling tension out of her limbs, she slid them away from him. As if her movement made him also decide to move, he levered himself up onto a forearm, reached out and switched off the light.

  It was so abrupt, so stunningly final. He didn’t release her when he shifted his weight onto the bed beside her, but there were no words spoken between them, no clash of eyes. It was as if now it was over he was expecting them both to just fall asleep.

  It hurt. It made vulnerable tears sting the backs of her eyes and her throat. She was damp between her legs and the lingering tremor of pleasure still worked within her as her stretched muscles slowly contracted back to their original state.

  When she couldn’t bear it and tried to speak he just put his hand to the back of her head and pressed her face into the prickly dark warmth of his chest.

  He fell asleep like that—holding her. Lizzy had never felt so wretched in her entire life. Had she brought it on herself? Was this grim silent aftermath her reward for persistently taking stabs at him—at his irritatingly unflappable control, at his prowess as a lover? She wished she knew why she did it. She wished she understood how she could resent him so angrily yet want him so badly. She just didn’t understand herself at all.

  She tried to move away from him, but his powerful arms held her fast. Oddly—again—she found she liked being held by him and slowly let her muscles relax.

  It didn’t occur to her that he was lying there with his eyes wide open, and that each time she moved against him he was having to fight to keep his response in check.

  And she didn’t know that while she was seeing what they’d just done as a basic coupling, he was seeing it as the most soul-stripping experience of his cynical sexual life.

  Lizzy drifted asleep in the warm cocoon of his arms and awoke late the next morning to find an empty place beside her in the bed. In a way it was a relief. No awkward moments having to face him while her defences were down, no stumbling around trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t come out sounding silly and vulnerable and gauche. She could shower at her leisure and get her act together.

  No, she couldn’t. Instead she sank down on the edge of the plunge bath and let the whole high octane event of her wedding night rush through her head and her body in small explosions of remembered feelings, few of which made her feel good about herself—or about him.

  What were they doing to each other? Why were they doing it? All Lizzy knew as she sat there remembering the hot tempo of their passionate coupling was that somehow, in the last week leading up to last night, she had allowed Luc De Santis to become a terrible fever of desire that had built and built inside her until it had taken her over. Because she loved him—?

  No! She stood up with a jerk. No, she didn’t love him. She didn’t want to love him!

  Dear God, don’t let me go down that no-hope route.

  Coming down the stairs half an hour later took courage because she still hadn’t reconciled last night in her head. And she ached all over, in places she didn’t think it was possible to ache, places that made her feel sensitive and self-aware and—yes, scared of what to expect from him when they met.

  Unsure where to go once she reached the hallway, she followed her instincts and found herself back in the room they’d eaten supper in the night before. It was late, almost lunchtime by her reckoning, though her body clock was so up the creek, she wasn’t sure if that meant lunchtime in Italy or lunchtime here because she’d forgotten to put on her watch when she’d changed before she’d left the Lake Como villa.

  The room looked different in the daylight. Bigger and bright, with the sun shaded from streaming in through the wide open windows by a huge striped awning she could see rippling softly in the breeze outside. Beneath it was a smooth stone patio stretching out to the glinting blue of a large swimming pool, and beyond that the lush colourful growth of a lovingly tended tropical garden leading right down to the edge of a blinding white sandy beach, then the rich turquoise-blue of the Caribbean sea. No sign of the gazebo from this side of the house, she noticed, and the waves that washed the shore lapped gently as if they were too lazy to foam and roll.

  A sound from behind her made her turn sharply, expecting to find Luc, only to watch Nina come hurrying into the room with a beaming smile on her face.

  ‘Ah, so you have surfaced, signora. Mr Luc said to leave you to sleep your jet lag away, but I was beginning to worry that you would never wake up to this beautiful, beautiful day!’

  The housekeeper’s gushing bright chatter eased some of the tension out of Lizzy’s body. Within minutes she was sitting in the same chair she’d sat in the night before, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice and eating slices of delicious fresh fruit with Nina still fussing around her like a mother hen taking care of a brand-new chick.

  ‘Please call me Lizzy,’ she said after the signora began to grate. She didn’t feel like a signora, she didn’t even feel li
ke Mrs, though the gold ring on her finger told her she was.

  Which then asked the question—what did she feel like?

  ‘Mr Luc went out after his breakfast to check on his farmers, as he always does when he arrives here,’ Nina was saying, gaining Lizzy’s attention quicker than anything else could.

  ‘His farmers?’ she prompted.

  Nina gave a nod, pouring steaming coffee into her coffee-cup. ‘He didn’t tell you? This house and the land belonged to his grandmamma. Her portrait hangs in the main salon. I will show you later, if you like. Mr Luc spent a lot of his childhood here, during the school holidays. His grandmother was a forceful lady who pioneered the concept of collective farming on the island. Mr Luc has continued her success in the wake of her untimely death last year.’

  Last year? Lizzy had not known that Luc had suffered such a loss so recently.

  Nina nodded. ‘We still miss her—Mr Luc most of all. She made him human, he once told me.’ The housekeeper paused to offer up a sigh. ‘It is the downside of being born into great wealth and responsibility, I suppose, that you switch off your softer instincts so you will keep yourself strong.’ Then she showed Lizzy her wonderful smile again. ‘Now you are here to make him feel human, heh?’ The gleam in her rich brown eyes made Lizzy burn. ‘His grandmamma would like you. You have a look of her, and you are stubborn like she was, and—’

  ‘English,’ a different voice drawled.

  Lizzy froze in the process of picking up a juicy chunk of fresh pineapple, her eyes skittering towards the door where he stood leaning against the framework, casual as hell dressed in pale chinos and a blue tee shirt, his hair ruffled as if by the breeze. Every inch of him was long, lithe, so spare of flesh it was like looking at a breathtaking study of firm-muscled, lean golden strength that set her senses responding with tight little pulses deep down in the intimate place between her legs.

  ‘Virago.’ The housekeeper turned to smile at him, seemingly unaware as to how the tension in the room had just rocketed. ‘You called her the English virago.’