She should have been embarrassed. She'd never been looked at like this, never been this bare in front of another person who wasn't a nurse or a doctor or a physiotherapist evaluating her range of motion. But the way he was looking at her wasn't clinical. It was the opposite of clinical. It was the gaze of a man who had just opened something he couldn't close, and knew it, and didn't care.
And she...she was helping him, too. She couldn't help it. Her hands found his buttons, his collar, the warm skin beneath the fabric that had been driving her mad since the elevator, and the sound he made when her fingers touched his chest—-low, involuntary, almost angry—-sent a shock of power through her that she had never, in her twenty-two years of life, experienced.
She could affect him.
This man who controlled everything, who moved through the world like it was a chess board and he had already calculated the endgame—-she had made him make that sound.Her.Chelsea Regis, with her provincial dress and her limp and her Bible study case, had reached through every wall this man had ever built and found something underneath that was alive and raw and shaking.
The discovery was terrifying.
It was also the most magnificent thing she had ever felt.
Her need for him had her caught up in waves of pleasure that she had no name for, and she was just following her instinct, andoh, the moment his weight pressed down against her, his skin against her skin—-there was so much of him, warm and solid and overwhelming, and her body, which had spent three years in stillness and five years in invisibility, was suddenly and violently awake to every point of contact. His chest against hers. His thigh between her thighs. His breath against her collarbone. The weight of him, real and present and not a dream, not something she'd have to wake up from.
A helpless sound of desire escaped her as his mouth moved down her body, touching, kissing, claiming every part of her, and she couldn't keep quiet. She tried. She pressed her lips together and then her hand over her mouth, and Olivio caught that hand and pinned it gently above her head, his dark eyes finding hers.
"Don't."
One word. An instruction. A world.
Don't hide from me. Don't muffle yourself. Don't be invisible here.
And Chelsea found herself obeying.
She let herself be heard as his mouth and hands learned her, and every sound she made carved itself into a part of Olivio's brain that he hadn't known existed. He'd been with women who performed. Who knew what to say and when to say it, whose responses were as calculated as a quarterly report. This girl performed nothing. Every gasp was startled out of her, every arch of her back was involuntary, every whisperedohwas the sound of someone discovering a continent she hadn't known was there.
It was wrecking him.
He refused to think about why.
He kissed the hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering at a rate that would have concerned a doctor. The smartwatch on her wrist glowed faintly against the sheets, its numbers ticking upward, and he didn't know what the numbers meant but he understood what they confirmed—-that this girl's body kept a record of everything it felt, and right now it was feeling him.
She trembled underneath him so hard that he actually stopped, his forehead against her shoulder, his breathing ragged. He needed a moment. Just one. Because what was building in him wasn't behaving the way it was supposed to—-satisfied by increments, manageable, subject to discipline. It was getting worse with every touch, deepening with every sound she made, and if he didn't get control of it now, he wasn't sure he'd be able to get control of it at all.
She made the choice for him.
Her hands, those gentle uncertain hands, slid down his back, and her body opened to him with a trust that had no business existing between two people who had met an hour ago, and the last of his control snapped like something that had been carrying too much weight for too long.
"Olivio."
He entered her in a single, irreversible movement, and she could only whisper his name because there was no turning back now. The sound of it—-his name, in her voice, breaking in the middle like a wave—-did something to his chest that he would spend the next several weeks refusing to examine.
There was a moment of stillness. Her breath caught. Her eyes were wide, shining, and there was pain in them—-he could see it, couldn't not see it—-but she didn't flinch away. She pulled him closer. Her nails dug into his back and her legs wrapped around him and she held on like someone who had decided that this was real and she was going to stay in it regardless of what it cost.
He began to move.
Her nails dug deeper into his back as the pain dissolved into something else, something that made her whimper and arch and forget every word she'd ever known except his name. She tried to muffle her cries but it was impossible, with the way he was moving, the way he was gripping her hips, the way his body was claiming hers—-
"Olivio!"
She came apart with a sob, pleasure engulfing her so completely that for a moment she was nowhere—-not in this room, not in this body, just somewhere vast and bright where nothing hurt and everything was warm—-and a moment later, her husband gritted her name out—-
"Chelsea."
And it started all over again, shudders rocking her body as she clung to him. It was just wave after wave, and as much as she tried to be present, it was just too much...and her eyes slowly drifted close even with her husband still inside of her.
Olivio's heart was still pounding in the aftermath. He gazed down at his wife, with her pale cheeks flushed pink even in sleep. Her lashes cast small shadows. Her lips were swollen from his kisses. The mark on her neck was already darkening into a bruise he should have been clinical enough to regret and wasn't.
A virgin, dammit.
