The Italian Duke's Virgin Mistress

by Penny Jordan

  ‘One night?’ he said softly. ‘Do you really think that one night will be enough to sate the hunger you have aroused in me?’ And then he was kissing her, fiercely and demandingly, and her own desire was leaping up inside her to meet the challenge of his.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THEY had reached the top of the stairs and they were still kissing, but Charley had no awareness of them having moved, no awareness of anything other than the heat of Raphael’s mouth on her own and the need inside her that he was feeding.

  Now, though, he had stopped kissing her. His hold of her wrists was slackening, his thumbs finding the excited race of her pulse and tormenting it with small circling caresses.

  ‘There can be no future in this,’ he warned her, as he had done before, emphasising the words as he spoke them.

  ‘I don’t want a future,’ Charley told him, and believed it. ‘I just want tonight and you.’

  Raphael could feel the wild fire of unleashed passion surging through his body. It was too much. He couldn’t deny her—or himself. The urge to hold her body against his own, skin to skin, roared through him, but somehow he held on to a final strand of self-control—for her sake as much as his own.

  ‘Very well, but there is one condition I must make—one assurance I shall need from you.’

  Charley waited. What was he going to say? That she must not fall in love with him? She knew that without him needing to tell her.

  Raphael expelled the air from his lungs and breathed in slowly.

  ‘There must be no risk of there being any consequences to our actions in the form of a child.’

  Why did his words strike against her heart like a sledgehammer blow? She certainly hadn’t been thinking of conception or children when she had so boldly begged him to break his rule.

  ‘Naturally I shall take precautions myself to ensure…’

  ‘There’s no need.’ Charley stopped him. ‘I’m on the pill.’ It was the truth, even if the reason she was taking it was because the anxiety of the last year had meant that she needed to take it to correct her monthly cycle.

  ‘Very well, but I must warn you that should you conceive the pregnancy will have to be terminated.’

  Shock jolted through her, icy cold, in instinctive rejection of what he was demanding.

  But it wasn’t his child she wanted, she reminded herself, it was Raphael himself. And she did want him—desperately.

  He should stop this right now, Raphael urged himself. It wasn’t too late. He could turn away—refuse what she was offering him. Refuse? When his body ached like hell for her, and his senses were already anticipating every single pleasure they would give one another? He was beyond stopping himself, beyond listening to any inner warning voices, beyond even questioning just why this woman of all women should have the power to overturn all the boundaries he had set in place.

  Charley moved uncertainly, a sharp point of light from the heavy chandelier that hung from the ceiling throwing the soft curves of her breasts into relief. Her nipples were pushing against the fabric of her clothes, tight and erect, their message of sexual arousal making Raphael’s own flesh harden. He released Charley’s wrist and lifted his hand to her body, rubbing the pad of his thumb against the cresting flesh, feeling his own body react to the visible shudder that gripped Charley as she moaned softly in response to his caress. It was too late to turn back—too late to do anything other than give in to the need driving through him.

  ‘This way.’

  Raphael was taking her to his bedroom. A new quiver of sensation ripped through Charley. Somehow the thought of Raphael making love to her in his bed rather than her own added an extra layer of sensuality and delight to what she was already feeling.

  Elegant and smart, like photographs she had seen of seriously expensive boutique hotel bedrooms, Raphael’s bedroom was decorated in shades of off-white, dark grey and aubergine, with heavy silk curtains striped in those colours to match the linens on the large double bed.

  Not that Charley was in the right frame of mind to appreciate the decor, nor indeed had the time, for no sooner had Raphael switched on the low-level lighting, and she had stepped inside, than he closed the door and took her back in his arms.

  The touch of his hand on her breast, expertly finding the hard rise of her nipple, made her shudder with fresh delight, but Charley’s conscience was beginning to intrude on her pleasure. Reluctantly she broke the kiss to admit to him, ‘There’s something I ought to tell you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well…’ Charley wrinkled her nose. ‘The truth is that I haven’t had much previous experience. I don’t want to disappoint you…’

  She could see his chest rise and then fall again. Had she put him off?

  ‘Much or any?’ Raphael questioned her.

  He was too astute. She had known that before.

  ‘Any,’ she admitted, before asking him, ‘Does that change things and put you off?’

  ‘Do you want it to?’

  ‘No!’ Charley told him vehemently.

  ‘The pleasure we shall give each other and share will be unique to us, exclusive to us, as it is with any lovers. But, like any man, I dare say my ego will enjoy knowing that I cannot be compared to a previous lover and found wanting.’

  Charley was so relieved that she burst out truthfully, ‘I can’t imagine any woman ever thinking that about you.’

  Raphael exhaled slowly, recognising that deep down inside himself he had already suspected he would be her first lover. His heart slammed into the wall of his chest. He wanted to take hold of her right now, slide the clothes from her body and give in to his desire to take them both to a place where all that mattered was their shared need for one another.

  The realisation rolled over him that he wanted her as he had never wanted any other woman—as he had never imagined wanting any woman—but all he said to her was, ‘I shall do my best to be worthy of your faith in me.’ He was unable to stop himself from adding under his breath, ‘I just hope that my self-control is up to the challenge.’

  His self-control? Charley trembled under the eager anticipatory tightening of her body. She felt, she thought dizzily, as though sensually, sexually, her desire for him had bloomed into a peak of lush, ripe readiness. Almost magically she was free of all restraints and inhibitions, just as though she had been reborn into the full flowering of her own sexuality. Because of Raphael. And not just because she wanted him, but because he had shown her that she could be free of the damaging beliefs of her past, that she could be whatever she chose to be.

  Her body was singing with excitement and joy, aching deliciously and oh, so tormentingly with a thousand aches that instinctively she knew would meld into one piercingly intense surge of need beneath Raphael’s touch.

  She looked up at him and smiled.

  ‘It isn’t your self-control that I want,’ she told him simply.

  Raphael felt the breath shudder through his lungs, the savage thrust of his desire crashing through his barriers.

  ‘You shouldn’t say such things to me,’ he warned her as he closed the distance between them.

  ‘Why not?’ Charley whispered the words against his lips. She was trembling so violently that she had to hold on to him for support.

  ‘Because it’s dangerous, because you are dangerous—dangerously enticing, dangerously sensual, dangerously tempting me to forget all the reasons why I should not be doing this,’ Raphael whispered back.

  His hands were moving over her, angling her within his hold so that he could shape and knead the soft fullness of her breast as he kissed her. Pleasure rushed through her—pleasure, excitement, and a need that had her finding his tongue with her own and caressing it, twining with it. Wild shudders of firework explosive delight showered her when Raphael stopped her, to turn her explorative caress into the shockingly deep thrust of his tongue within the softness of her mouth, his tongue and his hand against her breast working to a rhythmic beat that produced an aching echo of its urgenc
y deep inside her. Helplessly Charley pressed closer to him, her hands moving feverishly over his chest and then his shoulders, frustrated by the barrier of his shirt.

  As though he knew how she felt, he moved his lips to her ear, demanding, ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I want to touch you, all of you, without your clothes,’ Charley answered him immediately, her voice unsteady with the intensity of her longing.

  ‘Then take them off for me.’

  Undress him? A shock wave of raw need stormed through her, and then her fingers were tugging at his tie, trembling over his shirt buttons, only her longing to feel his bare skin against her own preventing her from being distracted by the way he was caressing her tight nipple whilst he held her shoulder with his free hand and slowly kissed his way along the side of her neck. At last she had his shirt unfastened, tugged out of the waistband of his suit trousers, and she was free to bury her face against the warm, muscular expanse of his chest with its soft covering of dark hair, breathing in the scent of him, pressing frantically hungry kisses on his bared skin, so completely lost in the pleasure of what she was at long last free to do that she was oblivious to the fact that Raphael had stopped kissing her and touching her, and was simply holding her whilst he struggled to control his breathing.

  This was so much more than he had been prepared for—so much more than he had understood he could ever feel or want. Charley’s open and uninhibited pleasure in what she was doing was undermining his self-control like the tide stealing away sand. Raphael cupped the sides of her head, arching his throat back in mute offering to the searing, scalding pleasure of her lips caressing his skin. An uncontrollable shudder of male pleasure seized him in its grip.

  ‘Enough,’ he told Charley rawly. ‘Now it’s my turn to undress you.’

  Where she had been all fingers and thumbs, all out-of-control excitement and delight, Raphael was skilled. His touch was sure and knowing as he dealt with the layers of her clothes until she was standing in her underwear—the delicate silk and lace lingerie that had been delivered with her new clothes.

  In one of the mirrors set on either side of the bed above the bedside tables Charley could see the pale shimmer of her almost naked body, glowing and pearlescent in the subdued lighting of the room, the slenderness and delicacy of her bone structure made more fragile by the solid muscularity of Raphael’s torso beside it.

  ‘We look so different,’ she told him, her voice husky, softened by desire.

  ‘But together we will make a perfect whole,’ Raphael answered her.

  As she watched their reflections she saw Raphael’s hand lift to her breast, to push down the silk fabric and expose the dark flesh of her nipple, hard and tight with arousal. The sight of it, knowing what its arousal meant, sent an urgent frisson of longing down her spine. As though Raphael had felt it and knew its meaning, he traced a line of fiery erotic kisses along her shoulderblade, whilst his fingertips plucked and teased the eager longing of her nipple, causing starburst after starburst of pleasure to spread through her. But that pleasure was nothing compared to the dark agony of desire that flooded her when Raphael took her nipple into his mouth, tonguing it; stroking it; making her arch her body up to him in helpless supplication, whilst her veins ran with liquid heat and her whole body pulsed to the rhythm of her longing.

  His mouth still on her breast, Raphael slid his hands into the cut-away legs of her knickers, moulding and kneading the rounded cheeks of her bottom, making her press as close to him as she could as the ache between her legs intensified. She wanted him to touch her there. She wanted to press herself against him, to rub herself against him. She wanted—Charley gasped in shocked delight when Raphael lifted his head, his hand sliding between her legs, his fingers stroking the soft swell of flesh that covered her sex, pulling down the pretty confection of silk and lace so that in the mirror she could see the movement of his hand against her body, could see too that he was watching her just as she was watching him.

  Slowly, so slowly that she had to hold her breath so as not to beg him to hurry, he parted the lips of her sex, causing a shudder of aroused delight to shake her body. Then she was arching with erotic shock when he stroked gently up and down the soft wet valley, and then pressed his fingers against the wellspring of her desire, rubbing it slowly, and then more swiftly, whilst she gasped and writhed and clung to him, her eyes wide with all that she was feeling. Her orgasm came so quickly and so intensely that it shook her from head to foot, and she needed the support of his arms to hold her as he kissed her and took the words of pleasure from her lips.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  STILL held in Raphael’s arms, Charley could feel the hard, urgent pulse of his arousal against her as she relaxed into him, stirring a new surge of eager desire within her body that had her moving languorously against him; satisfied and yet at the same time aware of the capacity within her to be aroused to fresh need—aware too of a deep inner ache that had not been quenched.

  What she had just experienced was the beginning, not the end, and the movement of her body against his was sending Raphael a deliberate message to that effect.

  Even so he still hesitated, forcing down the impulse to carry her over to the bed and spread the softness of her body there beneath his own, so that he could enter her and lose himself in her in the way his flesh ached for him to do, but then Charley moved against him, pressing closer to him, snapping the tautly strung fragility of his self-control.

  As though he had given his need words and spoken them to her, Charley whispered vehemently, ‘Yes!’ and within seconds he had removed the last of their clothes and they were on the bed, her body soft and eager beneath his hands.

  This was wonderful, heaven, beyond anything she could ever have imagined. Raphael’s skin felt like oiled silk beneath her explorative touch, his torso narrowing down to a flat belly, his body ridged with muscles beneath the warmth of his skin, and the reality of his erection a thousand times more breathtakingly erotic than any artistic phallic images she had ever seen. She reached out and stroked her fingertips along its length in wondering delight, gasping in sharp pleasure as her touch transferred the delicate stroke of Raphael’s tongue-tip against her earlobe to the hard possession of his mouth against her nipple, his lips tugging on its pouting sensuality after its earlier pleasuring. Instinctively she closed her hand around him, her body shuddering as she felt the fierce pulse beating from his flesh into her own, and then arching on a spasm of sharp pleasure when his teeth grated delicately against the sensitive flesh of her nipple. Had she thought that she now knew desire? She had been wrong. What she had known had been merely the foothills of a far greater height.

  Bending her head towards him, Charley whispered to Raphael.

  ‘I was right. You are the most wonderful lover.’

  ‘How can you know?’ he mocked her softly, kissing the valley between her breasts and then making his way up towards her mouth.

  ‘My body knows,’ Charley answered him, ‘and that is why it wants you so much.’

  Ridiculous that a few words should have such an intense effect on him, Raphael knew. But they had. It was time. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  Cradling Charley against his side with one arm, he reached towards the drawer in the bedside table with the other.

  Guessing what he was seeking, Charley placed her hand on his chest and shook her head, telling him fiercely, ‘No. I want to feel you inside me—just you. Your flesh against mine as nature intended. Not—not a…a chemical barrier that isn’t you… I’m on the pill so we’re safe. I want to feel you inside me, Raphael,’ Charley repeated determinedly. ‘Just you—all of you…’ She was kissing him in between her words: eager, passionate little kisses that, like her touch on his body, showed him how much she wanted him.

  He should ignore her pleas. He should behave sensibly. He should ignore the way his body had reacted when she had said she wanted him inside her. He should…

  ‘I want you so much,’ Charley whispered. />
  It was too much, and too late to stop himself now, with the soft weight of her in his arms, her body lying eagerly open to his possession, her muscles closing tightly around him as he slowly thrust into her.

  Charley shuddered and gasped, and then sighed with exalted pleasure, her hands gripping Raphael’s shoulders as he moved slowly and carefully into her. Each sensation built on the pleasure of the one before it, as though she was climbing a set of steps. Her body protested, her muscles tightening to hold him where he was when Raphael pulled back a little, but his next thrust reassured her body that he wasn’t leaving it, simply moving deeper and then deeper still, until she was moving with him, wrapping her legs around him, welcoming the increasing sensation of fullness and energy within her.

  She was Eve and the apple—all the woman he could ever want, and impossible for him to resist. Her response to him was driving him both to want to conquer her and at the same time give all of himself over to her. His whole world had narrowed down to the bed and to her, one moment spread out beneath him, the next wrapped around him. The scent and sight of her, the sound of her pleasure, the feel of her skin under his hands, the hot, slick power of the way her body received and held him…

  It was happening. It was coming. A flutter at first…but now the sensation gathered and gripped her. Charley sucked in a lungful of air and then tensed, her nails digging into the flesh of Raphael’s shoulders as she looked up into his face.

  His skin was sheened with sweat, the muscles in his arms corded and locked.

  She held nothing back, Raphael recognised, concealed nothing. He could see the ecstasy in her expression as well as feel the surging rhythmic contractions of her orgasm. His own body trembled and then shook, his throat arching and his whole body pulled as taut as a bow in that final second before he joined her in his own release into pleasure.