by Olivia Gates
And if this weren’t such a grim occasion, Antonio would have told him about her, would have joked about the brothers falling like dominoes one after the other.
But if Ivan felt about this woman like Antonio did for Liliana, what had happened to her, what was still ahead of her, must be killing him. While he had so much joy to look forward to with Liliana starting tonight, Ivan could only watch the woman he cared about struggle for her life.
Feeling guilty that he was the happiest he’d ever been while Ivan suffered his worst pain, Antonio grabbed him by the shoulders. “She will be fine, Ivan. She’s strong, and you brought her to me in the best condition possible. I believe her brother was lost at the scene, and it was only your efforts that kept his systems going till you got him here. It’s the only reason his organs were viable, making the transplant possible. It was you who saved her.”
Ivan avoided his eye, kept his downcast under the blackest frown Antonio had ever seen as he turned away. But not before Antonio saw what felt like a blow to the solar plexus. His iceberg of a friend’s eyes filling with tears.
Knowing Ivan wouldn’t want him to acknowledge his upheaval, he followed him in silence to the ICU’s observation area.
He stood behind him, felt agony radiating off him as he watched his mystery woman being hooked to monitors and drips.
“I’m a phone call away, Ivan.”
Back rigid, breathing strident, Ivan only nodded.
Knowing he could do no more for now, Antonio exhaled at the unaccustomed feeling of helplessness and walked away.
* * *
An hour later, Antonio entered his mansion. It was dim and quiet. But he knew Liliana was there. She’d texted him, and so had Paolo the moment she’d gone inside safely.
He walked through the foyer into the great room and found her there on the couch, her hair streaming off its edge in a cascade of curls. She was sound asleep.
He approached her soundlessly and looked down at her. With his best friend’s ordeal reverberating in his being, seeing her there, whole and irreplaceable, had a storm of emotions raging inside him. He wanted to wake her up, lose himself inside her, hide her within himself. And none of it was about lust. It was about passion and protection. Tenderness and togetherness. And everything he’d never shared with or offered another human being.
Unable to keep away anymore, he bent to pick her up. The moment he touched her, she opened her eyes. They penetrated him to his very recesses with their instant welcome. As she tried to sit up, he scooped her up and pressed her head to his shoulder.
“Shh, cuore mio, don’t wake up.”
She nestled deeper into his hold, her lips moving against his thundering heart as she spoke. “I was just dreaming of you...as usual.”
“Then continue dreaming, mi amore.”
He carried her to his bed, their bed now, wondering again that he was using Italian.
He’d learned the language in The Organization, perfecting it before he had English. They always taught every child his mother tongue, so they’d use him in missions involving his country or countrymen. But he’d never spoken it outside of those times.
Liliana made him speak it. He wanted to lavish on her the passionate endearments unique to the language he should have grown up speaking. Somehow, only they felt right to express what he felt for her.
Reaching his bed, he placed her lovingly on it before remotely parting the drapes, letting the moonlight in. He started to undress her, and she stirred again. She caught his hands, embarrassment staining her cheeks in the silver light.
He kissed her, pushed her back gently, crooning encouragement and praise to her as his hands roamed her body, and she melted back again, letting him do anything he pleased. And it did please him, beyond words, to get rid of every barrier, to finally see that body that had inflamed his though it had always been obscured.
And she was divine. Smooth and strong and sinuous, in the exact proportions he’d just discovered translated into his personal definition of perfection.
She watched him throughout, hanging on his reactions. He didn’t leave it to her deductions. He told her exactly what he thought. Then he started undressing himself, reveling in the awed, voracious look that possessed her face. If there was ever a reward for the years he’d spent training and maintaining his physique, it was that look. He was already addicted to it. Then he removed the last of his clothing, letting her see just how hard her beauty and her hunger made him.
At the sight of his erection, she gasped and sank back deeper in the bed, as if she already felt it invading her, pinning her to the mattress. She licked her lips, those lips he wanted nothing more than to feel around his hardness.
But that would come later. Now he needed to reassure himself that she was safe with him. That she was his to cherish, to protect.
Getting into bed beside her, he pulled her into his burning body. He groaned in unison with her long moan, aching and relieved, as their flesh touched without barriers for the first time. Then, gradually, he felt her tension dissipate in the serenity of deep sleep.
He watched her, at peace in his arms, for as long as he could, before he too succumbed. To the first true rest of his life.
* * *
He woke up to unknown yet breathtaking sensations. Silk and velvet sweeping all over his body.
Liliana was trailing her hands and hair and lips over him, caressing and kissing and delighting in him.
The light beyond his closed lids said it was around sunset. He’d never slept that long. Nor had he ever slept with anyone present except his brothers. He’d certainly never fallen asleep with a woman in the same bed. Not once in his life.
He kept his eyes closed for as long as he could bear, to savor her worshipping, his heart drumming to a slow, hungry rhythm.
Then he couldn’t take it anymore. In the same second he opened his eyes, he reached for her, swept her around and beneath him. This time, there would be no stopping him.
“Antonio.”
The way she made his name sound like an aching plea. For him. For everything with him.
He took her lips. A thousand volts crackled between them, unleashing everything inside him in a tidal wave.
Maddened by the immediacy of her surrender, he captured her lower lip in a growling bite, stilling its tremors, attempting to moderate his passion. But she made it impossible when she parted her lips wider for his invasion, and her taste inundated him.
Such unimaginable sweetness. And the perfume of her breath, the sensory overload of her feel. Everything about her was a hallucinogen that pounded through his system, snapping the tethers of his sanity.
Her whimpers urged him to intensify his possession. His hands shook with urgency as he wrapped her legs around his hips, rose to revel in the overpowering sight she made trembling in his arms.
“Tell me, mi amore. Tell me you need me to take you.”
Her answer was only squeezing her eyes in languorous acquiescence.
“I will take everything you have, Liliana, devour everything you are and give you all of me. Is this what you want? What you need? Now? And from now on?”
* * *
Lili heard Antonio as if from the depths of a dream.
Everything that had happened since he’d come to her yesterday making his offer of himself, on her terms, felt like one.
But in her wildest fantasies, she wouldn’t have dared hope for Antonio to feel the same sweeping desire for her, or to succumb to it, let alone as quickly as she had.
But he did. He had. And once again he was demanding her confession and consent. He was holding back to make certain she craved his invasion and sanctioned his ferocity.
Oh, how she did. Even if the power of his dominance, the starkness of his lust, staggered her. She might have come to his mansion, let him take her to
his bed, might have been so bold as to wake the sleeping tiger, but now as she lay beneath him, waiting to be devoured, a storm of agitated desire overwhelmed her.
Her heart plunged into arrhythmia and she felt as if her every cell swelled, screamed for his possession.
Almost swooning with need, she gazed up at him as he loomed above her, the fiery palette of the horizon framing his magnificent body, setting his beauty ablaze. His eyes looked filled with tempests, precariously checked. He was giving her one last chance to dictate the terms of her surrender before he devastated her.
Feeling she’d die if he didn’t she told him, “Take all of me, give me your all. Do everything to me, Antonio...everything. I need it all.”
Raking her body in fierce greed, he bared his teeth on a soft snarl as he cupped her breasts in hands that trembled, kneaded them as if they were the most amazing things he’d ever felt. Then he bent and took one nipple in the damp furnace of his mouth, squeezing a shriek out of her. She unraveled with every nip and suck, each with the exact pressure and intensity to extract maximum pleasure. He layered sensation upon sensation until she felt inundated.
She was shaking out of control when he slid down her body, painting her with caresses and licks until he stilled an inch from her core, his breath on her making her feel she’d spontaneously combust.
He lit her fuse when he spoke, his voice a ragged, bass growl. “Perfetto, bellezza, magnifica.”
As if everything about him weren’t overkill already, he had to go speak Italian. It made her writhe.
“Antonio, please...”
“Si, amore, I will please you...always and forever.”
He pressed his face to her thighs, his lips opening over her quivering flesh like a starving man who didn’t know where to start his feast. Her fingers convulsed in his silky hair, pressed him to her flesh, unable to handle the stimulation, yet needing even more.
He dragged a hand between her thighs, electrifying her as the heel of his thumb brushed open her outer lips. Her undulations became feverish, her pleas a litany till he dipped a finger between her molten lips, stopping at her entrance.
“I dreamed of you like this from that first day, open to me, letting me possess and pleasure you.”
He spread her legs, placed them over his shoulders, opening her core to him fully. Her moans became keens, sharpening, gasping.
He inhaled her, rumbling like a lion at the scent of his female in heat, as she was. He blew a gust of sensation over the knot where her nerves gathered. Her hips rose to him, a plea escaping her lips. It became a shriek when he finally, slowly, slid a finger inside her and she came, pleasure slamming through her in desperate surges.
He’d again made her climax with one touch.
Among the aftershocks, she felt his finger inside her, pumping, beckoning at her inner trigger. Her gasp tore through her lungs as his tongue joined in, circling her bud. Each glide and graze and pull and thrust made her need ignite again as if she hadn’t just had the most intense orgasm of her life.
Soon she was sobbing, bucking again, opening herself fully to his double assault until he had her quaking and screaming with an even more violent release.
She tumbled from the explosive peak, drained, stupefied.
From the depth of drugged satiation, her heavy gaze sought his in the receding sunset. His eyes glowed azure, heavy with hunger and satisfaction.
“From now on you’re on my menu every single day,” he whispered. “I’m already addicted to your taste and your pleasure.”
Something squeezed inside her until it became almost painful. It flabbergasted her to recognize it as an even fiercer arousal. Her satisfaction had lasted a minute and now she was even hungrier. No, she felt something else she’d never felt before. Empty. As if a void inside her was growing, demanding to be filled. By him. Only ever him.
“Don’t indulge your addiction now.” She barely recognized her voice, sultry with hunger, hoarse from her cries. “If you don’t give me yourself right now, I might implode.”
All lightness drained from his eyes as he squeezed her mound possessively, the ferocious conqueror flaring back to life. “And you will have me. I’ll ride you to ecstasy until you can’t beg for more.”
His sensual threat filled her with nervous anticipation. Her heart went haywire as he slid back up over her, sowed kisses over her from her mound to her face, before he withdrew to look down at her.
His exhalation was ragged. “Do you realize how incredible you are?” As she mumbled something between dismissal and embarrassment, he persisted. “Don’t you see how incredible I find you?”
He rose above her, displaying the full measure of his sculpted perfection. She struggled to her elbows, her mouth watering, her hands stinging, with the need to explore him, revel in him.
But he wasn’t inviting her to witness or examine his splendor, but demonstrating her effect on him. Glimpsing his manhood in the semidarkness last night had filled her sleep with sexual torment. It was why she hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him when she’d woken up, though she hadn’t dared remove the sheet he tented even in sleep. Now she forced her gaze down...and was again awestruck at the size and beauty of him.
What if she couldn’t accommodate him? Please him?
His muscles bunched as he reached down to the floor, picked up the pants he’d discarded and produced a foil packet. He was ready this time. Last time he hadn’t been, which meant he didn’t have women here. That was such a momentous realization, it made this even more incredible than it already was.
Then holding her eyes in such promise, he tore the packet open.
She almost came again just watching him sheath himself.
“Now I take you, mi amore. And you take me.”
Though she shook with agitation, she whimpered, “Yes...yes, please.”
She received him in trembling arms as he came down over her. She cried out at how her softness cushioned his hardness.
Perfect. No, sublime.
Pushing her legs wider apart, his eyes solicitous, tempestuous, he bathed himself in her readiness in slow strokes from bud to opening, driving her to desperation before he growled and finally sank inside her in one long, fierce thrust.
A red-hot lance of pain had the world flickering out for long moments, squeezing a cry from her very depths, before other sensations surged back in a rush, none she’d ever felt before. Fullness, completion.
Her eyes fluttered open to find him turned to stone on top of her, his eyes wild with worry.
“You’re a... You were a... It’s your first time!”
Quivering inside and out, the last thing she wanted was to talk, her mind unraveling with the feel of him filling her. But she had to answer his strangled exclamation. “You do remember me saying I was pathetically inexperienced, don’t you?”
His distress ebbed, tenderness replacing it. “Oh, yes, I do. Dio mio, you’re a surprise a second. Make that a shock a second. I didn’t think you meant...that.”
“What else did you think I meant?”
“I didn’t think. I basically can’t think around you.”
Then he started withdrawing from her depths, making her feel he was turning her inside out.
“No!” She clung to him with her arms and legs, tried to drag him back inside her. “Don’t go. Don’t stop. ”
Throwing his head back, he squeezed his eyes. “I’m only trying not to lose my mind here, mi amore, in consideration of your...state of inexperience. Don’t make it impossible.” He opened his eyes. “I’d only stop if you wanted me to.”
Emptiness threatening to engulf her, she thrust her hips upward, impaling herself on his massive girth, uncaring about the chafing pain, even needing it. “I’d die if you stopped.”
His groan was pained, as if she’d hurt him, too. “Stopp
ing would probably finish me, as well. For real.”
She thrust up again, crying out as he stretched her, the sensation making her delirious.
His hand combed through her hair, dragged her down by its tether to the mattress, pinning her there. Her heart shook her like an earthquake as she crushed herself against him. “Don’t hold back. I love the way you feel inside me. I love it. Fill me, hurt me until you make it better.”
“Si, amore, I’ll make it so much better.” He cupped her hips in both hands, tilted them into a cradle for his own, then slowly thrust inside her to the hilt.
It was beyond overwhelming, being full of him. The reality, the meaning and carnality of it, rocked her essence.
He withdrew again, and she cried out at the unbearable loss, urged him to sink back into her. He resisted her pleas, taking his time, resting at her entrance before he thrust back inside her. Then again, and again. Slow, measured, making her cry out hot gusts of passion and open herself wider with every plunge.
Holding her gaze, he watched her intently, avidly, adjusting his movements to her every moan and grimace, waiting for pleasure to fully submerge the pain. He kept her at a fever pitch, caressing her all over, sucking her breasts, draining her lips, raining wonder over her. “Perfetto, amore, inside and out. Everything about you is perfect.”
Her body soon rewarded his patience and expertise. It gushed readiness and pleasure over him, demanding everything he could give her.
“Antonio, I need everything now, please.”
“Si, bellezza, everything.” His groan reverberated in her mouth as he drove his tongue inside her to his plunging rhythm, quickening both.
Everything within her tightened unbearably, her depths rippling around him, reaching for that elusive something, something way beyond orgasm, nothing she’d ever attained, but that she felt she’d perish if she didn’t have now.
No longer coherent, she begged him, over and over. “Please, Antonio, please.”
But he understood, knew she couldn’t bear the buildup anymore. “Si, amore, ora. Now I give you all the pleasure this divine body of yours can withstand.”
