But when she went to put him in her mouth, he stopped her.
“Not today,” he told her.
“But I want—”
“Don’t worry,” he said gruffly. “We have a vast menu to work our way through. But today I thought we’d keep it strictly traditional.”
A breath seemed to escape of its own volition. “Traditional,” she repeated. “There’s not one single thing about you that’s traditional.”
“It’s the missionary position that’s traditional, little saint,” he said, as he moved up her body and settled himself between her thighs. “But not usually the way I do it. Yet I haven’t been married before, either. It feels rather ceremonial, doesn’t it?”
And she could feel the head of his cock as he worked himself into all of her soft heat. It felt so good, just like that, that she was shivering already. Her body was filled with sensation, so bright and hot she hardly knew what to do with it, and before she could say anything at all, he simply thrust deep inside her.
There was a shock of pain. A hot, deep tear.
Giaco froze. She froze, too.
There was nothing save the thunder of her heart and that overly taut feeling deep inside her. The sense of him there, filling her. Changing her. Her body forced to shift to accommodate him, and it did.
That thought made it better. She experimented, moving her hips, and that was better still.
“Ivy,” he said, thickly. With a kind of sorrow. “Ivy, it never occurred to me—”
“Giaco,” she whispered fiercely. “Dosomething.”
So he did.
He started slow, a slick, deep slide. So slow that she was the one who got impatient as all of that heat grew inside her. She was the one who wrapped herself around him, crossing her ankles in the back and gripping him as tight as she could.
Until, eventually, he propped himself up on his hands so he could look down at her as he pistoned in and out of her body.
She loved it. She met every thrust. She lifted her hips to take more of him and it was like a wild flame, everywhere. Tightening. Tightening more.
Until, at last, he came down and gathered her close to him. Then he slid one hand between them and pressed down.
Hard.
And then there was nothing at all but stars. All of the cosmos, every constellation, and all of it somehow contained between them and in the two gold bands that marked them as married.
As husband, as wife.
Asone, at last.
Chapter Nine
GIACO HARDLY KNEW HIMSELF.
They stayed in bed that first night. The villa had been stocked for their arrival and he knew that he could summon staff if he wished. But the idea of having people in the villa with them did not sit right with him.
Not when his most unexpected wife—hiswife, a role he’d expected would be filled by some dullish sort of nun who he would have to work hard to pretend to fall in love with, but fate had given him Ivy instead—had shocked him with her innocence.
He felt…humbled. Altered in ways he was afraid to entirely examine.
Simultaneously unworthy to be in her presence, and yet certain that there was nowhere else he wished to go, nor would go.
A week into their honeymoon—that Giaco had decided to have in a place like Capri because it would lend itself to so many “accidental” photographs as they walked about the charming village and explored the island—they still hadn’t left the house.
What they had done was explore—lazily, urgently—the menu that he had mentioned. They rose only to shower, or sit in the bath, or find their way out to the infinity pool, where it seemed as if they could float on the horizon forever as long as they were touching. As long as they were always, always touching.
