Page 22 of Seduced by Her Fake Husband (The Martinelli Wedding #2)
She understood it now. The only thing he’d done wrong was not being Gennaro.
In breathless silence, she soaked in all the features of the face she’d fallen in love with before she was even old enough to know what love was.
Her promise not to fall in love with him hadn’t been a lie because she’d already been in love with him, a love that had always been there, hovering out of sight, waiting for her to see.
Her feelings had been the monster of her childhood. Not Gennaro.
His eyebrows drew together, his black eyes studying her with the same intensity she was studying him. Suddenly terrified of just how deeply and absolutely she loved him and terrified he could see it, she fused her mouth to his and poured out all the words she could never say in a kiss.
There was a moment of hesitant resistance before his lips parted and his tongue slid into her mouth, and then his arms wound tightly around her.
In the beat of a heart, the flame between her legs went from a simmer to an inferno and suddenly the need to feel him inside her again; inside her, a part of her, was more than she could bear.
Kissing him with all the passion in her soul, she dragged herself fully on top of him and writhed until she felt his hardness at the juncture of where she most needed it to be.
He thrust up and slid his massive length inside her, filling her so completely that she cried into his mouth at the sheer bliss of it.
Their groins locked together. A hand speared into her hair, the other gripped her hip, and then they were moving together, the fusion between their groins as absolute as the fusion between their mouths.
The pleasure was so intense that when she sensed her peak approaching it was all she could do not to cry her disappointment that it had to end, and then she was crying, crying in ecstasy as sensation exploded and she exploded, the fingers on her hips biting into her delicate skin an added pleasure as Gennaro shuddered his climax deep inside her.
Gennaro gazed at the demon reflecting back at him in the bathroom mirror and dragged his fingers down the thick bristles of his beard. It felt like weight laced with barbed wire had been placed in his chest.
Luisa was still sleeping. He’d woken spooned into her.
He’d rarely stayed the whole night in a lover’s bed. The few times he had, leaving had been easy. Mechanical. He would wake up, get up and get the hell out.
Leaving their bed had never felt like a wrench.
He rolled his neck and breathed deeply and methodically. His chest was barbed but the rest of him felt tight.
Everything he’d sworn he would never do…
He hadn’t just ripped up the rule book but incinerated it.
He climbed into the shower and scrubbed himself hard all over, and wished he could scrub out the image of the way Luisa had looked at him when she’d told him he was the only man in the world for her.
Luisa opened her eyes to a suite filled with sunlight and an empty bed.
Yawning, she blinked the sleep out of her eyes and sat up. “Gen?”
There was no answer, but then she spotted his phone on his bedside table and the nibble of panic at his absence faded. He must be in the bathroom .
A quick check of her phone revealed it was closer to lunch than breakfast. They’d fallen asleep after the birds had woken.
Ignoring the messages that had pinged in overnight, she turned her phone off and laid back down to wait for him.
Her head was as full as her heart. Every minute of their night together replayed itself like a reel, from the moment she’d read seduction in Gennaro’s eyes at the ball to when they’d ordered room service at three in the morning and Gennaro had spooned ice cream over her breasts just so he could lick it off to when they’d eventually fallen into an exhausted sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
It had been the most fulfilling, terrifying and thrilling night of her life. The thrills from their lovemaking still lingered in her blood, but the terror, released when she’d been forced to confront the depth of her feelings for him, had quieted into dormancy.
The Gennaro who’d spent the night making love to her was not the Gennaro she’d spent two years living with. The Gennaro she’d found such incredible pleasure with had opened himself up to her. He’d let her in. And she’d let him in too.
She didn’t know what their future held, knew only that come Monday, she wouldn’t be able to bear saying goodbye.
Not now. Maybe she could endure it if she was still living in blissful ignorance of her love for him, but she wasn’t.
Her love for him had burrowed into every cell of her body.
She fizzed with it. And she fizzed, too, to know he had feelings for her.
Real feelings. Feelings that ran deeper than desire.
The bathroom door opened.
Her heart jumped and then flipped over on itself.
Scrambling back up, a smile she had no conscious control of fixed itself on her face before he even came into view. The smile dimmed slightly to find him fully dressed in black jeans and a black shirt, and then she met his stare and it fell away completely.
Luisa was looking at the Gennaro she’d spent two years living with, not the Gennaro whose arms she’d fallen asleep in.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
He closed his eyes briefly before slowly running his fingers through his hair and taking a seat on the armchair close to the foot of the bed. His black eyes found hers. The firm, sensuous lips that had kissed and caressed every inch of her body tightened. “I need you to leave.”
She blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“That I need you to go home. I’ve arranged for my driver to collect you – he’ll be here within the hour.”