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Colour high on her cheeks, she hugged the shirt even tighter around herself. Her forearm inadvertently pushed her breasts higher. “I’ll let you work that out.”

Unable to tear his stare from her, Mattia drank his coffee. It was lukewarm but tasted perfect. Tasted as perfect as Elvira did. He put the cup back on the table by feel alone.

Her throat moved before her mouth. Now there was strain in the forced brightness of her voice. “I should go wash your stink off me.”

He was struggling to breathe and had to clear his throat to huskily quip, “Don’t you want to wait and see if I drop down dead?”

“Do you feel like you’re going to?”

“No.”

“I’ll try harder next time.”

“You do that.”

Her chest was rising and falling rapidly. “I will.”

He opened his mouth to say something else; he didn’t even know what, but before he could work his lips to speak, some invisible force propelled him to her.

God help her.

Those were the words ringing in Elvira’s head before her chin was clasped, and her mouth caught by Mattia’s demanding lips, and suddenly she was wrapped in his arms again, sinking into a kiss that sent her senses reeling.

How could God help her from this, she thought helplessly as her mouth clung to his with matching hunger. All that time she’d spent while he’d been showering and dressing, doing her best to centre herself and find a measure of inner calm to see her through the coming hours, all undone with one look.

She could not believe the strength of her need for him. From the moment he’d stepped back into the living room, it was like she’d been touched by a spell that made her heart pound and her veins heat, and now it was alive in every cell of her body. A white-hot flame was licking a fever through her skin and veins, burning through her brain, and as their faces and mouths meshed and their tongues duelled, she scraped her fingers into his hair and lifted onto her tiptoes to compact her body even closer, and felt the outlined hardness of his arousal press against her abdomen.

Without breaking the locks of their mouths, he clasped her hips and lifted her into the air. She wrapped her legs around his waist without any thought, echoing the moves of earlier when they’d fought so passionately.

This time, there was no fight. Fighting was futile. There was no escape from this. They might as well try and fight the tide. In Mattia’s arms, she was his creature, and when he threw her onto the bed and tumbled down with her, the only scratches came from her nails scraping his skull as she held him tightly while their mouths devoured each other.

It was barely less frenzied than that first time, but so very different. Their first time had been driven by furious lust and desperation. This time, all desperation was driven by a feverish craving stronger than either of them.

Breathing heavily, he broke the kiss and lifted his chest from hers to pull his t-shirt off, before his mouth swooped back down.

Together, they undid his jeans and shucked them down his hips, Elvira using her feet to drag them down his legs. He kicked them off and buried his face in her neck, pulling the sleeves of the shirt she was wearing down her arms until she was as naked as he was.

A hand found hers. Fingers threaded through hers and squeezed tightly, and he dipped his face to take a hardened peak into his mouth. The sensation was so powerful she gasped, her gasp turning into a cry when he clamped his lips around it and sucked.

The hand not squeezing hers roamed her body, fingers trailing over and biting into her skin, his mouth and tongue licking and sucking her breasts, feeding the flames burning like a wildfire inside her, and when his fingers dipped between her legs she was so hot and ready that she jerked in reaction and yanked her hand from his so she could clasp his cheeks and lift his face. It wouldn’t take much to tip her over the edge. She wanted to plummet over that edge with him inside her.

Hooded eyes a darker green than she could have imagined found hers, lust thrumming like a pulse, and for a moment they just gazed at each other. She could feel the thump of his heart on her stomach, and now she was lifting her face, craning it to him.

Reading what she was asking of him, he hauled himself up her body until his face hovered over hers and his arousal jabbed hard at the opening of her sex.

Eyes locked together, he drove inside her, and for a moment she felt so full and complete that she closed her eyes to savour the feeling, moaning when he slipped a hand beneath her backside to lift her and deepen the penetration.

Close to delirious with sensation, she began to move with him, seeking his mouth for more of his dizzying kisses.

For a man who had to concentrate to get anything out of sex, Mattia found himself fighting the release his body craved. This just felt too good. Being so tight inside Elvira’s hot depths, feeling her inner muscles gripping him, the brush of her breasts against his chest, the entwining of her tongue in his…

He didn’t want it to end. Even the scratch of her nails over the plane of his back added to the fever.

They fit together perfectly. Every part of them.

His loins were tightening and thickening, but still he fought his release, but it was just too… everything. Her breaths were shortening, her throaty moans deepening, and now she was clinging to him, her thighs raised back as far as they could go, begging him with her body for more.

Fighting with everything he had to just hold on, he upped the pace, thrusting deeper and harder. Soon he was bucking into her in a frenzied mass of sensation until he felt her thicken and contract around him, and suddenly she was crying out, her body convulsing around him and he could hold on no more. With a loud cry of his own, he drove himself in her one final time and sank into the convulsions of his own release.