Free Her Last Night of Innocence by India Grey Page B

window, and it fell across a bed. Gently he placed Kate down on it, feeling her body go momentarily rigid as he let her go.
    She breathed in sharply, struggling to sit up. An expression of exquisite desolation flickered across her face.
    ‘ Cristiano… ’
    ‘I’m here.’ He answered automatically, instinctively lowering his voice to a whisper in the velvety silence of the dark house.
    Her eyes opened. They were filled with anguish, swimming with tears. For a moment they fixed on his face with a sort of hazy, unfocused pain, and then they closed again, the tears silently spilling over.
    ‘Kate…’
    His heart faltered. Without thinking he lowered himself to sit on the bed beside her and pulled her against him, pressing his mouth against her hair and murmuring soothing sounds that were somewhere between English and Italian. Her hair smelled clean and sweet, and her body felt soft and voluptuous in his arms.
    Unlike his. His body felt uncomfortably taut and rigid.
    He lay very still, his teeth gritted against the huge, powerful waves of lust and want that battered against him, not daring to move, calling up every ounce of the iron self-discipline and will-power that had got him through the last four years. And then, very gently, he felt her pull back from him and raise her head, so that she was looking up into his face.
    ‘You really are here…’ she breathed.
    And then, as if compelled by primitive forces completely outside their control, their mouths met. Kate’s limbs were stiff, and chilled from sleeping in the cramped seat, but the touch of Cristiano’s lips against hers brought her to life again, until her body was flaming and fluid with want.
    She was still in some place halfway between sleeping and waking. Dimly she was aware of warmth, the scent of woodsmoke that filled the house, and moonlight spilling silver through the window onto the blissfully smooth sheets of a bed. But all of that was simply a background to the otherworldly ecstasy of his kiss. The anguish of the familiar dream still lingered, firing her with a fierce, focused passion, and as her fingers slid into his silken hair her senses reeled with the scent of his skin—carried in her head all this time.
    She clutched at his back and felt hard muscles moving beneath her palms as he tore his mouth from hers and gazed down at her with eyes that burned through the half-light.
    ‘Kate…?’
    It was a thousand questions in a single rasping word. She answered them by slowly reaching up and pulling off the jumper she had put on over her dress earlier that night. Her cheeks were still wet with the tears she had shed when she’d thought this was just another dream, another goodbye.
    She’d said goodbye to him so many times in her dreams these last four years and woken alone. But now he was here, and the sheer miracle of that fact made her uncharacteristically bold. She wanted him. She had wanted him for so long that her body cried out with an urgency that wouldn’t be hushed until he was inside her.
    Her eyes never left his face. It was set like granite—as cool and pale and expressionless as an effigy on a tomb—but she saw the flare of molten desire in his eyes and it made her blood quicken and sing. Reaching up, she began to undo the buttons of his shirt with shaking fingers. Delicious, desperate want was building inside her like a silent scream as, inch by inch, his olive-skinned chest was revealed.
    With a muffled curse he brought his hand up, trapping hers.
    ‘Is this what you want?’ he growled.
    ‘Yes.’ Her voice was a breathless shivering whisper. ‘I want you .’ Freeing her hands from beneath his, she reached up and took his face between them, speaking with ferocious longing into his eyes. ‘I want you to remember .’
    For a second they gazed mutely at each other, and then with a sort of moan of surrender he was pulling her against him as his mouth came down on hers. The quiet room was filled with the sound of their breathing,