"What about you?" I asked, gesturing vaguely toward his lap.
He shook his head, brushing damp hair back from my forehead with gentle fingers. "This was just about showing you my world. About watching you."
I frowned, struggling to form coherent thoughts through the post-orgasmic haze. "But you participated. You didn't just watch."
A rueful smile touched his lips. "I told you, with you it's different." He traced the curve of my cheek with his thumb. "Everything is different with you."
Those words, and the raw honesty behind them, did something strange to my chest. This wasn't supposed to be real.This marriage, this relationship, all of it was just an arrangement of convenience.
So why did it suddenly feel like the most real thing I'd ever experienced?
Chapter 22
Rafe
Igrabbed her dress from the floor, holding the emerald silk in hands that weren't quite steady. My body throbbed with unsatisfied need, but I ignored it. Tonight was about showing Cecelia my world, not taking my own pleasure. Still, as I watched her sprawled on the leather couch, flushed and spent from her orgasms, my resolve wavered. I'd never wanted anyone the way I wanted her—raw and desperate and dangerously close to obsession.
"Here," I murmured as I held out her dress. "We should get you dressed and head home."
She didn't take it. Instead, her hand shot out and wrapped around my wrist, her grip surprisingly strong for someone who looked so thoroughly debauched. Her hair was a wild tangle around her face, her lips swollen from my kisses, her naked body bearing the faint red marks of my fingers and mouth. Something primitive inside me took satisfaction in the visible proof that she'd been mine, even if just for tonight.
"I'm not ready to leave yet," she said, her voice a throaty rasp that sent fresh heat to my already painful erection.
I swallowed hard. "Cecelia—"
"I'm not finished with you." Her eyes, those impossibly green eyes that haunted my dreams, held mine with a challenge I couldn't look away from. "You've shown me your world. Now I want to see you in it."
Blood roared in my ears, drowning out the sounds from beyond the glass where the couple was still lost in each other. "What exactly do you want?" I asked, fighting to keep my voice even, to maintain some semblance of control when everything in me was screaming to take, claim, and possess.
She released my wrist and rose to her knees on the couch, putting us at eye level. This close, I could see the flecks of gold in her irises, could feel the heat radiating from her body.
"I want to see you lose control." Her fingers found the top button of my shirt and slowly worked it free. "You've watched me fall apart three times now. I want to see what you look like when you do the same."
The second button slipped free under her nimble fingers. I could have stopped her. Should have stopped her. This wasn't what tonight was supposed to be about. But with Cecelia, all my careful boundaries were collapsing, all my rules were being rewritten.
"Do you know what you're asking for?" The words scraped the inside of my throat.
Cecelia just smiled and undid a third button, her fingers brushing against the bare skin of my chest. "I think so," she said, leaning forward to press her lips to the newly exposed skin. "I'm asking to see the real Rafael de Luca. Not the one who controls everything and everyone. Not the one who keeps the world at arm's length."
Her tongue traced a hot path up my sternum to my throat, and something inside me snapped. I grabbed her wrist and wrenched it behind her back, using it as leverage to pull her flush againstme. Her gasp of surprise vibrated against my lips as I claimed her mouth in a kiss that did not have a single note of gentleness in it. All the hunger I'd been suppressing, all the need I'd denied burst free as my tongue plunged into the sweet heat of her mouth.
She didn't pull away. Didn't even struggle. Instead, she pressed closer, her free hand tangling in my hair as she returned the kiss with equal ferocity. The taste of her flooded my senses, making me drunk on her in a way that terrified the part of me still capable of rational thought.
"This what you want?" I growled against her lips, yanking her head back to expose the elegant line of her throat. "To see me lose control? To feel what happens when I stop holding back?"
"Yes," she breathed, the word barely audible over the thundering of my heart. "Show me."
I trailed open-mouthed kisses down her neck, feeling her pulse race beneath my lips. Each heartbeat was a drumbeat urging me on, telling me to mark her, to claim her, to make her truly mine in ways that went beyond our paper marriage.
My mouth found the juncture where her neck met her shoulder, and I bit down hard enough to make her cry out. The sound was pure pleasure, a desperate, needy whimper that broke through the last of my restraint. I soothed the sting with my tongue before moving lower, dragging my mouth across her collarbone, down to the soft swell of her breast.
"Fuck, you're perfect," I muttered against her skin, releasing her wrist so I could cup both breasts in my hands. The weight of them, the softness, the way her nipples hardened against my palms—all of it sent fresh waves of desire crashing through me. "I've thought about these tits since the first time I saw you."
Her breath caught. "You have?"
I looked up, meeting her gaze. "I've thought about them," I confirmed, my thumbs circling her nipples in teasing strokes."About how they'd feel in my hands. In my mouth." I leaned down and took one nipple between my teeth, tugging lightly before soothing it with a swirl of my tongue. "About how my cock would look between them."
A full-body shudder ran through her at my words. And I sucked her nipple into my mouth, flicking my tongue against the hardened peak as my hand kneaded her other breast. The sounds she made drove me wild.
