She hooked her legs around him, tried to pull him, bring him inside her. She knew it would hurt. She wanted it to. She wanted him to brand her this first time.
Then he did. He lunged, tearing through her barrier, then plunging past into the depths that yielded for him, feeling like a sword just out of the fire. She screamed, writhed with the pain, with its excruciating pleasure, with the carnality, the completion of Ferruccio dominating her and surrendering to her captivation.
“Dio, Dio santo…so tight, so hot. Clarissa, amore…you’re burning me.” Her face was clenched in what looked like suffering as he withdrew then plunged deeper, again, and again, forging farther inside her, feeling as if he’d never bottom out. “Burn me, cuore mio, consume me as I invade you, take all of me, all the way inside you, all the way to the heart of you.”
He did feel he was all the way inside her. For a moment she thought he’d reached her heart for real. And he had—the heart of her femininity, her womb. That intimate nudge was beyond anything she’d dreamed of. Beyond endurance. Just the concept of it, the reality! All her life, everything she’d ever felt for him, every spark of sensation gathered into one pinpoint of absolute being, of experiencing everything at once. Then it exploded.
She convulsed, shattered, then reformed for the next wave. She heard screams accompanying the rending ecstasy razing through her. Then she heard his roar, felt him stiffen in her clutching arms, ramming her deeper than ever before, breaching her completely as jet after jet of warmth flooded her. His release. His seed, filling her. Her first intimacy, her only man, taking his pleasure inside her as he gave her more than pleasure.
She shook, writhed, wept. Then…Nothing.
Ferruccio felt Clarissa slump beneath him, her satin limbs sliding off him like the shedded petals of a rose.
Panic mushroomed in his chest as he took his weight off her inert body on shaking arms. He groaned as he withdrew from the depths that still clutched him, a prisoner to her possession.
He frantically examined her. Her face, streaked in tears, her lips, shining and plum red, parted…and gusting tranquil breaths.
He collapsed beside her. Dio…for a moment there he’d thought…
He shook his head in self-deprecation. Had he started to believe his own reputation as a lady-killer?
He rose again and looked down at her, all of her, all the treasures he hadn’t been in any condition to slow down and savor, when his first exposure to them had driven him into a frenzy.
Which wasn’t an excuse for pouncing on her like he had.
For six years he’d promised himself that the first time he got her in his bed, he’d pamper and service her until he had her weeping with satisfaction before taking his.
He’d achieved that, had her in such acute pleasure, she’d wept. In an agony of release she came so hard that she fainted. But that wasn’t the refined, protracted seduction he’d planned on. He’d lost control.
He’d never before come within miles of losing control.
But he’d touched her, and he’d become a mindless predator bound on branding his mark on his mate.
And how he had. He was shaken at the enormity of the experience. Branding her as his had been the first surrender of his life, his first real and total pleasure. But she’d branded him as hers, too. As he’d known she would when he’d first seen her and those intense feelings of possession, of belonging, had come over him. Before her rejection had swathed his feelings in harshness of bitterness, resentment and anger…
He ran a hand heavy with possession over her. His. At last.
He gathered her cooling body to him, took her into his still shaking arms…and froze. Beneath her. A tiny pool of blood.
Panic surged again. It subsided within a moment. The location and amount of the blood said it all; he’d been her first.
The discovery shook him. Elated him. Made him want to pound his chest and do backflips. She had been his all along.
But…if she had been, why had she put him—and herself—through all this? Why had it taken him going all caveman on her to make her give them this at last?
He looked down at the face etched by satiation, transformed by the experience. The image of all his dreams and fantasies, and far beyond both. And his rage crept back.
Why was he even wondering? He’d always known why.
He’d always felt her answering craving, felt her holding it on a tight leash, evading him so she wouldn’t succumb to the temptation. Because it had been abhorrent to her. He had been. She might have decided to give in to her hunger now, since he’d made it in her best interest to do so.
He’d told her to persuade him, but she’d come here not bent on persuasion but on conquering. And when she’d gone up in flames in his arms, she had conquered him. If she could do this to him without experience, he failed to imagine what kind of hold she’d have on him when she gained sexual confidence. Now that he’d tasted her, he was already addicted. He had to have more—all of her.
Disappointment twisted inside him, damaging things he hadn’t known existed there. Hope, need, dependency. All the things she’d unearthed in him since he’d first seen her, things she brought into the open when she’d seen him without his shields. She’d offered him a haven of her very self, given him a purity he’d never experienced, of appreciation, of empathy and eagerness to defuse his turmoil, to defend him against the shadows of his past.
And all along she’d remained the woman who despised him in her heart. There was no other explanation for the past years or her recent resistance. He should stop fooling himself, stop looking for excuses to exonerate her.
Not that that made any difference now. Now, she was his. And she’d remain his. As he’d remain hers.
Not that he was handing her power over him. Ever. He was getting what he wanted from her, and giving back only what would keep her in his power, in every way.
A wisp of gossamer slid down her face, her neck, her breast, the soothing contentment of it flowed until it suddenly turned into an electric current that zapped to her head, forked to her toes, turned to another pulse of heavy need between her legs.
Her eyes snapped open. He filled her vision in the now candlelit darkness.
Ferruccio. The man she’d been running from for what felt like her whole life. Spread out on his side beside her, propped on one elbow, running his hands in appreciation up and down the body he’d possessed, awakened, ravaged, satisfied, all to the point that she’d lost consciousness for the first time in her life.