Ripped by Sarah Morgan Page B

like it. Never. Until a few days before we’d never touched each other, and yet somehow he knew my body. He knew just how to move, how to touch me, how to adjust the angle and the rhythm of his movements so that I felt every inch of him. With each expert thrust he drove me higher and higher and all the time I could feel him, all of him, strength, power, masculinity and I moved with him, my hands on his shoulders and then buried in his hair.
    He’d dimmed the lights, but the room was lit by the dancing flames of the fire and the glow of the city at night. We were surrounded by glass and the London skyline. It was like having sex outdoors, only without the risk of frostbite. Afterwards I realized that anyone with a pair of binoculars might have been able to see us from the apartments on the other side of the river, but I didn’t even think about it at the time and neither did he. We were just too into each other.
    The whole of me was trembling and held in a state of heightened suspension. I shouldn’t have been this desperate, but I was, and so was he. He said something to me in Italian, his lips dragging along my jaw and then lingering on my mouth. Presumably he didn’t expect me to answer him, which was a good thing because I wasn’t capable of speech. I didn’t know whether it was all the foreplay under the Christmas lunch table, whether this whole thing had been building since the wedding or whether this was sex Italian style (if so, I was emigrating), but I couldn’t hold anything back. Feelings and sensations spread through me. It started somewhere I couldn’t identify, deep in my soul, and then filtered and rippled through my body until I came in a glorious rush of pulsing pleasure. I felt myself tighten around him and heard him groan in his throat as he tried to hold on to control, but the ripples of my orgasm sent him over the edge.
    I heard him curse, but he was lost just as I was, and in a way I was relieved his grip on control was as useless as mine. If he could have detached himself from pleasure this intense I would have been worried.
    We didn’t stop kissing. Not once. Not as he thrust hard, or as my body gripped his—we just kept kissing and his tongue was in my mouth and mine in his and we just shared all of it. Everything. Every pulse, throb, flutter, moan and gasp.
    One of my hands was jammed into his hair, the other clutching his shoulder, now slick with sweat, and I lay for a moment stunned and shaken, just staring up at him trying to make sense of it.
    I didn’t know what was going to happen next. After all, this level of intimacy was new to both of us. I suppose part of me, the part responsible for self-protection, was braced for him to just roll away. And I suppose if he’d done that I would have said something like, ‘Well, I think “The Niccolò” is a product with a future,’ or something really glib that wouldn’t reveal how deeply the whole experience had affected me.
    I thought that was probably what someone would say after emotionless sex.
    But he didn’t roll away. He didn’t pull away. Instead he slowly, gently lowered his mouth to mine and kissed me again. But it was different now. This was a different type of intimacy. It was slow, sexy with a hint of gentleness that made my heart squeeze. I hadn’t expected tenderness. Even as I felt myself melt, I felt a faint flicker of panic. My heart was the one organ that wasn’t invited to this party.
    This was where he was supposed to do that classic man thing and say and do the wrong thing so that I could flounce back to Notting Hill and spend the rest of the night curled up with Rosie agreeing that men weren’t just from Mars—most of them were from a galaxy far, far away. But he didn’t. He lingered over the kiss, pushed my hair gently back from my face and studied me for a moment and then rolled onto his side and pulled me against him. If he’d done that in my apartment we would have both ended up on the floor, but