Eyes blazing with humiliated fury held his for a long moment before she wrenched at the top button of her shirtdress.
“Slower,” he instructed. Leaning back, he hooked an ankle to a thigh and added with a knowing smile, “Tantalise me.”
Her lips pulled into an obstinate line. Fingers trembling, she slowly unbuttoned the dress. Tommaso caught glimpses of golden flesh, and then she was shrugging the sleeves down her slender arms. The dress fell to the floor. Only a black lace bra and matching knickers covered any of the trembling body he’d envisaged naked a thousand times. A hundred thousand times.
His heart a thrum pounding in his ears, he swirled the whiskey in his glass before taking another large drink. The burning heat of the alcohol travelled down his throat and into his chest, loosening the tight knots in it.
“Take the rest off.” His voice had thickened to match his loins.
The heat from Gabriella’s flaming face was strong enough to warm cold hands, but already she knew better than to disobey. Reaching behind her back to undo her bra, she slid the straps down her arms, freeing her breasts, and dropped it on top of her discarded dress.
Mother of God, her breasts were spectacular. Perfect. High and round, the large dusky-pink nipples jutted invitingly towards him, hardening his arousal into rock.
Her chest rising and falling in rapid, ragged motion, her burning face taut, she pinched the sides of her knickers.
“Wait,” he commanded.
Her forehead furrowed in confusion.
He glimmered a cruel smile. “I’ll take it from here.”
Her chin wobbled. Her slender throat moved. She uttered not a word of protest. Tommaso’s father had always said what a quick, smart brain she had, and so it was proving.
Gabriella’s smart, quick brain would absorb the humiliation of everything he intended to heap on her so much more acutely than if she were a vacuous airhead. He could do anything hewanted to her, and she would submit to it all without complaint. Only her pride would scream her silent shame at all his indignities.
Downing the last of his whisky, he slid off the armchair and onto his knees and gripped her gently rounded hips as he’d done a thousand times in his fantasies. In his fantasies, he pulled her knickers down with his teeth. Tonight, though, his greedy eyes wanted to see.
Slowly, revealing her bit by bit, he tugged the knickers down her hips and exposed her pubis to his avaricious stare. Public hair. A rarity in his world. Only a little, just enough to cover the V between her legs. It was sexy. Very sexy.
How many other men knew Gabriella refused to follow the crowd and go entirely bare, he wondered with a stab of antipathy before a bite of satisfaction cut through to know it no longer mattered. Gabriella belonged to him now. No other man would ever see her like this again.
Rubbing his nose to it…it was soft like a downy pillow…he inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the musk of her femininity. Soon, he would discover if she tasted as good. Soon, very soon, he would devour her.
He took his time, savouring the moment, and skimmed the lacy knickers down her supple, golden thighs and shapely calves and over the small tattoo of a dove in flight on her ankle. The toenails of her dainty, pretty feet were painted electric blue, the toes themselves clenched and digging into the hardwood flooring beneath them.
Tracing his fingers back up the smooth, buttery heaven of her legs, he clasped her waist and lifted her off the floor. Her eyes widened in shock at the unexpected, but she uttered not a word, not even when he sat her on the armchair. Her eyes, though, fired her loathing like a laser.
She thought she hated him? She didn’t know what hate was. But she soon would.
On his knees before her, he slid a hand between her thighs and parted one and then the other, opening her to him.
“Lean back and raise your knees,” he ordered thickly. He could barely breathe for the weight pounding in his chest.
Burning with humiliation, Gabriella obeyed, closing her eyes so she didn’t have to see whatever sick desire was reflecting from Tommaso’s hateful eyes.
She had never been so exposed before, not on any kind of level, and she clenched her jaw to brace herself for what was to come next, her ears straining for the sound of his zipper being pulled down.
He would be big, she knew that. He had to be at least six foot three, maybe taller, and powerfully built, with hands and feet that were definitely proportionate to his size. As much as she hoped his cock was the size of a shrivelled walnut, just so he spent his life in fear of a lover revealing it to the world and turning him into a laughing stock, she’d heard too many whispers from too many of the women he’d seduced.Hung like a horsewas a frequent description, one that always, shamefully, made her pelvis clench. How any woman could look herself in the mirror after voluntarily letting this cheating, misogynistic brute anywhere near her was something Gabriella would never understand, and whatever happened, she would never join their ranks. There would never be anything voluntary about what she did with him.
Tommaso might have control of her life and her body, but her body was nothing more than her shell. He had no access to her heart or her thoughts. She would be as compliant as necessary to keep herself alive and nothing more. She would never give him anything of herself.
The tickle of his beard brushed against her inner thigh, making her jolt, and when warm lips brushed the same spot of flesh, her lungs closed up.
Fisting her hands, she tried to draw breath, but it wasn’t just her lungs that had closed up. Everything inside her had clenched as tightly as her jaw and the fists she’d made.
He skimmed his mouth higher, the soft bristles of his beard grazing her sensitive skin. A giant hand cupped between her legs. Gabriella ground her teeth together as hard as she could and squeezed her eyes even tighter to stop herself from reacting. The hand drifted to her thigh as his mouth made contact, and a thick tongue slowly glided up and down the fold of her sex. She was barely aware that she was breathing again, her breaths coming in shallow bursts through her nose; all her concentration desperately focused on disconnecting her brain from her body…
Her head jerked and her eyes flew open at the unexpected sensation of Tommaso’s thick tongue penetrating her. His rough hands parted her thighs even wider, and he drove his flickering tongue deeper inside her, exploring her with the throaty sounds an animal would make as it feasted on its prey, and just as the animals from the wild buried their faces in their caught prey, she had the sensation that Tommaso was trying to bury his face inside ofher.
