The Illegitimate King (Castaldini Crown 3)

She’d been a recluse her first eighteen years, and the next four hadn’t been much better as she poured all her focus and energy into her studies and sports. She’d rebuffed approaches, not only because they targeted her to exploit her status, to “score with a princess,” but because she hadn’t been interested in anyone.

Then she met him. And she knew. It was him or no one. And since she’d believed it would never be him, she believed she’d never know a man’s touch. Now she knew it—his touch. Now she could touch and see and feel and exult—in him. Only him.

Her hand tried to close around him, couldn’t. She swallowed as he throbbed in her grasp, as her skin absorbed the fusion of softness and hardness, the heat coursing in his shaft. He echoed her moan with a long groan as she stroked him. She watched pleasure slash across his hewn face, his muscled hips flexing as he thrust to her rhythm and watched her with mounting hunger. She worshipped him, brought her face down to his power and scent, all him, all male. She couldn’t help herself again.

She flicked her tongue across his erection’s crown, almost passed out at feeling the slick satin of his flesh against her tongue, his tangy taste against her taste buds. She inhaled deep to draw oxygen to her brain and only drew his scent into her lungs. With a cry of urgency, she opened her mouth to take in all she could of him.

His hand twisted in her hair, stopped her.

She whimpered. “I want to taste your pleasure.”

“You will. As I will taste yours, over and over. But I want our first pleasure together to be flesh in flesh.”

She wanted that, too. She was dying for that. But then, she was dying for everything. All at once. But he wanted that first. She was dying to give him everything he wanted.

She felt clumsy after the abandon of feasting on him, didn’t know what to do now. Her gaze wavered to his face as he sat up.

His eyes burned a path down her short-sleeved, formfitting top and its matching stretch pants. “Not a skirt suit, and yet another outfit that will forever feature in my most erotic fantasies. I want it off you. Now, Clarissa.”

Without a word or thought, thankful for the instruction, she crossed her hands at the hem of her top and pulled it over her head. She wanted it off, too. Couldn’t bear the friction of cloth on her burning skin, the imprisonment of her swollen flesh.

He growled something predatory at the sight of her breasts, fuller with arousal in the confines of her bra, deepening her cleavage. She fell back on the bed with the blow of arousal that slammed into her at the sound, the intention behind it.

He rose to his knees above her. “More, Clarissa. Show me the rest of you. Bare yourself fully to me. Drive me totally crazy.”

Her hands felt unmatched as she struggled with the button and zip of her pants. She shuddered all over as she tried to wriggle out of them. He watched her writhe before him, the ferocity in his eyes mounting. Then he exploded to his feet on top of the bed, bent and picked up her legs, raised her by them until only her shoulders and head touched the bed. He stared down at her, their harsh pants of stimulation filling the air.

She knew how she must look to him, held in his power upside down like that, half-fainting, wanting and inviting anything he’d do to her, lying in a pool of her hair, her breasts almost spilling from her bra under the pull of gravity, her stretch pants bunched midway down her thighs, her light purple panties stained by the darkness of her desire for him, the legs he held trying as hard as they could to pull him down, bring him between them.

Then in one swipe, like a magician, he had her stretch pants off.

He lowered her legs to the bed, stood above her, eating her alive with his eyes before he came down, prowled on all fours over her, until his powerful limbs became a prison of muscle and maleness all around her. “Mia bella unica. You are the miracle. And you were right. I’m very good at hiding my insanity. For six years, I’ve been insane.” His hands dipped beneath her and she arched up, helping him as he undid her bra. He peeled it off and her swollen breasts fell into his palms. She cried out as he pressed them together, mitigating the ache, increasing the need. He bent and showed her there was more suffering, more pleasure. Between long, hard pulls on her nipples, he swirled them with his tongue, grazed them with his teeth, blew the stimulation of his confessions on them. “You made me lose my mind with a look, a word. And that was before I touched you. Last night, early this morning, every gasp and moan, your pleasure and desire, whether I see them or feel them or imagine them, make me go mad. You were born to drive me to distraction.”

“Ferruccio, please…” This time she knew what she was begging for. “Don’t wait…I can’t…I can’t…”

His hands clamped her buttocks, squeezed and fondled, before he rid them of that last barrier in another magical move. “There will be no more waiting. Never again, do you hear?”

“Yes, yes…please.” Her quaking thighs opened for him, unashamedly offering, hurrying, begging.

He took his erection in his hand, but instead of driving into her, filling the emptiness gnawing at her, he glided the scorching head, flowing with his own arousal, through the engorged lips of her sex until he reached her slit. Her flesh fluttered around what it could reach of his hardness, as if trying to grab onto him, drag him inside her.

“Do you see how wet and hot and ready for me you are?” He glided up, nudged her most sensitive knot of flesh. She rose off the bed with a shrill cry of surprise and ecstasy. “When you were touching yourself for me, what were you imagining, Clarissa? Was it my fingers fondling you, my tongue licking you…or this?”

He glided down then up again, circled her swollen knot until she writhed, everything in the world, all reason and meaning focusing where his flesh tormented hers.

She keened her confession. “This…I saw you, felt you doing this…I was dying for you to do it for real. But this is a thousand times better…I never knew…anything…could feel this good.”

“Neither did I. And it’ll only get better.” He slid down a second before she came apart, then he thrust into her slit in compulsive strokes, shallow, fast, almost uncoordinated, his face driven.

Even as coherence seeped out of her, she realized he wasn’t in control of himself. His actions weren’t premeditated. He was as lost as she. And she knew something else. No one else had ever seen his vulnerability, provoked his uncontrollable need. Only her.

The conviction spread through her like a rush of lifesaving water after she’d been parched and withering.