Page 19 of Captive in His Castle (The Martinelli Wedding #1)
Chapter Nine
D ante stood at the foot of the bed enclosed by the four-poster’s drapes and took a long breath. Dio , never in his life had he experienced heat in his veins and loins such as he was experiencing now or felt the beats of his heart so completely.
He’d had to force himself to stay in the dining room and eat his fill of the meal prepared for two.
The urge to chase after her had been close to irresistible, but he knew what Callie wanted, even if she was too frightened of her desires to admit it.
She wanted him to take the matter out of her hands.
She wanted him to take the control she’d kept tight inside her for so long that she didn’t know how to release it without losing a part of herself.
He pulled the drapes apart.
The bedroom light he’d turned on had been the soft night light. The little illumination it gave revealed Callie laid on her back beneath bedsheets pulled to her chin. Her beautiful eyes locked straight onto his. Defiance rang loudly from them. Defiance rang loudly from every inch of her .
Dio , had there ever been a more magnificent creature to walk God’s good Earth?
He took her in a long moment before he smiled and murmured, “Waiting up for me, my love?”
Her chest rose sharply, and her chin lifted. “Save your loves for someone who wants them and get on with it.” Her defiance wasn’t strong enough to mask the tremor in her voice.
“I love it when you talk dirty.” Slowly, he untied the sash of his robe, then shrugged it off and let it fall to the floor… but not before noting the widening of her eyes when it dipped down the length of his body.
Her chest rose again; large eyes fixed resolutely back on his face, the lock not breaking when he stepped to the head of the bed and pinched the sheets. In one swift motion, he pulled them off her.
Dio del cielo . She was fully, defiantly naked.
His heart pounding hot blood into his loins and brain, Dante took a moment to compose himself as he soaked her in.
Dio del cielo , she was ravishing. Every inch, from the head resting on the pillow and the hair spread around her like a cloud, to the breasts that were fuller and plumper than even his vivid imagination had anticipated, to the rounded belly and curvaceous hips, to the soft down of light hair between her thighs that proved once and for all that she was a natural blonde.
All ravishing. This was a woman unashamed of her womanhood, and damn if she wasn’t all the sexier for it.
Her throat moved, but she didn’t say a word. Didn’t make a sound. He hadn’t expected otherwise. His ravishing beauty was going to play the role of vessel… right until the moment he made her melt for him.
Climbing onto the bed, he gently parted her unresisting legs and knelt between them, taking another moment to just look at her. He could spend a life looking at this woman, he thought hazily .
He could never explain what it was about Callie Thomas he reacted so strongly to, knew only that she had a beauty deserving of immortalisation on canvas.
Taking each of her clenched fists in his hands, he raised them above her head. Her breasts lifted with the motion. His arousal jutted against the top of her thigh.
She didn’t move so much as a muscle in reaction, just continued staring at him with that unremitting defiance, her cheekbones taut, jaw clenched, chest rising and falling in rapid motion.
Holding her wrists loosely together with one hand, he glided his free hand down her neck and over skin so soft and buttery it felt like he should be able to sink into it. Lightly… very lightly… he covered a plump breast.
The rose-red nipple hardened beneath his palm.
With a featherlight touch, he traced circles around it before spreading his palm and fingers to take the heavenly weight in his hand, and then he lowered his face against her cheek and breathed her in.
It was as he filled his lungs with skin smelling faintly of delicate soap and that unquantifiable essence of Callie that he heard it: the faintest, subtlest hitching of her breath.
Callie squeezed her eyes tightly shut in a desperate attempt to stop the sensations penetrating her consciousness, a desperation that only increased when Dante’s lips skimmed over her cheek to her mouth in a slow, seductive quest. She clenched her hands even tighter to resist, to not allow him to seduce her lips apart, to not respond to anything but the voice in her head telling her to just hold on and that it would soon be over.
They were the same words she’d told herself all those years before, but in those times, it hadn’t been herself she’d tried so desperately to hold on to for, not in the way she was doing now.
In those faraway times, she’d tried to respond as she’d known her partner had wanted, and she had tried so hard, but the disgust she’d felt at every kiss and caress had only made her coil and tense more tightly into herself.
Here, in this bed, she was fighting to stop her body from responding in the way it so desperately ached to.
Dante’s touch…
Every mark of his mouth and every caress of her skin seared her flesh, uncoiling something deep inside her that she fought with everything she had to stay coiled and locked away, and when he released her wrists and traced his fingers down her arms, she was helpless to stop the shiver of desire trembling through her; could only pray he hadn’t felt it.
Just hold on , she begged herself.
Slowly, slowly, he caressed her face with his mouth, raining feathery kisses over her cheekbones, her nose, her tightly closed eyes, whilst slowly, slowly dragging his fingers down her ribcage and belly, down to her abdomen, slipping round her back to clasp her buttock before slowly, slowly sliding his fingers to her inner thigh and gently pulling it further apart.
She didn’t make a solitary movement or sound, not even when she felt the jut of his arousal so close to her opening that one tiny twist of her hips would allow him to drive inside her, and she gritted and clenched everything she could to brace herself for the moment of penetration that would surely now come.
Just a few minutes more of this hell that felt strangely like heaven to endure, and then it would be over.
But instead of driving inside her as she’d anticipated and prepared herself for, his lips brushed into her neck, trailing fire over the delicate skin, his mouth sensuously gliding over the frantically beating pulse at the base of her throat, the fire in her skin burning into a furnace as his mouth skimmed lower, to breasts that had never responded to the male touch before other than in revulsion .
He cupped them whole, brushing a thumb over each nipple before replacing his thumb with his tongue in slow, voluptuous strokes, bringing each peak to life.
Just hold on, she begged herself again, stifling a moan at the hot, agonising pleasure, clenching her fists so tightly that when he squeezed the plump flesh harder and deepened the strokes of his tongue, her nails were in danger of breaking the skin of her palms. When he covered a peak with the whole of his mouth, she could do nothing to stop her eyes from flying open, could barely contain a gasp from flying from her mouth.
Eyes squeezed shut again, Callie tried with increasing desperation to keep a hold of herself, but the attention Dante was lavishing on each breast, as if he were trying to consume them whole, was just too much, the intensity of the pleasure more than she could endure, and she had to clench her teeth to stop a cry of protest when he abandoned them, and clench her insides to stop her body from writhing.
Just. Hold. On .
But the voice was growing increasingly distant, the pleasure of Dante’s sensual assault driving it further and further away.
Lower his tongue teased, snaking over her stomach while his hands roamed lower too, sliding over her hips, the length of her thighs, back up over her midriff and ribcage to cup her breasts before stroking back down to hold her thighs in place as his mouth trailed ever lower still.
His tongue pressed against her most hidden feminine part in an act of intimacy she had never before permitted, the act more than any other that she’d recoiled from, and a sliver of fear snaked into her close-to-delirious mind.
Hardly able to breathe, almost paralysed with indecision, she opened her eyes, her instinct to throw herself off the bed and form a ball in the corner of the room fighting with another, stronger, brand new instinct to sink into the sensation .
He took possession of her secret woman’s flesh with a gentleness that was close to reverential and then slowly, sensuously, deepened the caress into an explicit exploration she was powerless to stop herself from yielding to.
His tongue flickered like a flame, one moment probing her most intimate self, the next slaving attention to her swollen nub, urging it to a full arousal she could do nothing to stop.
She was barely aware of her fingers gripping tightly to a pillow, barely aware that she was holding on for dear life in a fight against this endless, exquisite, torturous delight.
Sensation was building and pulsing inside her, each stroke of Dante’s tongue carrying her relentlessly along like a giant wave, the ebb and flow of each movement more powerful than the last until she reached the pinnacle and, with a silent cry, arched her back and fell headlong into a shimmering void.
Dante’s heart was hammering like a jackhammer, the beats so powerful he barely felt the arousal throbbing through him.
He’d never experienced anything like that before, Callie’s entire body tensing into a melting rigidity, and he’d opened his eyes to see the force of her climax almost lift her off the bed.
Only when she sank back onto the mattress did he kiss his way back up her exquisitely perfect body to cover her, his face hovering over hers, his arousal straining at the heated juncture of her thighs.