Fiancée For The Cameras (Mills & Boon Modern)

CHAPTER NINE

M ONICA WOULD HAVE floated on the fluffy clouds of sensation from his kiss for the rest of the night, if not for Andrea gently lowering her to what felt like another cloud. It was his bed, she realized, her heart fluttering in her chest like a hummingbird’s wings. Then there was a sudden explosion of light and she scrunched her eyes shut, fighting it and the urge to hide herself.

“Monica?”

From his soft tone, she knew that he’d seen her momentary hesitation. His hands rubbed over her arms, gentling her. “It can just be a kiss.”

God, what a coward she was.

She opened her eyes to find him looking down at her. Her breath hung suspended in her chest at the sight of him like this, with her, for her. Out of the periphery of her vision, she took in the vast bedroom with all-glass walls on two sides, giving a delicious peek out into the night glitter of Milan. And inside, she was aware of the sheer luxury of the silk sheets under her hands, the vaulted ceilings and the airiness of the space. But all of it was a background hum to the main attraction, the man whose attention she held now.

This was not the Andrea Valentini that the world got to see, with his hair all mussed, and his thin, sculpted mouth just a little puffed up from her kisses, and his dark, dark eyes betraying his desire. This was the Andrea she’d conjured in her dreams and for a second, Monica felt a frantic pulse of panic thrash through her that she couldn’t handle him in reality, that she might not be enough to hold his attention for more than... Which made her even more desperate to grab this moment and enjoy it to the fullest. She shooed away all those niggles and, leaning back onto her elbows, drank him in, letting her senses fill her up with him.

He was a feast to her eyes with scruff on his cheeks, his shirt unbuttoned enough for her to see the shadow of taut olive-colored skin stretched tight over his chest. Unlike Francesco, who had been very proud of his gym body and his waxed chest and oiled muscles, Andrea was lean and taut. There was an effortlessness to his masculinity, a raw, innate confidence that established him as a natural leader.

“Any more doubts, bella ?” he asked, a twinkle in his eyes. But he wasn’t laughing at her; she knew that, too.

“Nope. Nada. Zilch,” Monica replied, sitting back up. Reaching him, she unbuttoned his shirt all the way and pushed it back onto his shoulders. His chest was covered in a smattering of hair. Fingers trembling, she traced the contours of his torso, from the corded column of his throat to the hard pectorals, all the while loving the graze of his hair against her palm. Just touching him made desire beat louder in her veins, and she never wanted to stop. Never had she felt this kind of desire to make a man crave her as much as she did him.

When she reached his leather belt, she hesitated, but slowly pushed on, undoing it first. His fingers arrested her. Bringing her hand to his mouth, Andrea pressed a kiss to her wrist. “My turn.” And then he tugged the lapels of her shirt up in his hands and tore them apart until the few buttons she had managed flew off and pinged on the cold marble floor.

“Will you let me do what I want with you, bella ?”

“You don’t have to test me anymore,” she said, watching him with greed.

He grinned then and bent over her, licking the shell of her ear. “When I found that you’d left the party without telling me, I was so angry with you. All I could think of on the ride over here was how I would torment you for leaving.”

Startled by the possessive edge of his words, Monica looked up. The intensity of his gaze only made her skin feel tighter. She rubbed her thighs together but didn’t find even a bit of relief. “You’re not going to scare me off. Do to me what you will. Just...tell me what I can do, too, please. I want to please you, Andrea.”

If he heard the doubts in her voice, he didn’t mock her for them. Bending, he pushed the shirt off her shoulders and took her mouth with a rough need she understood very well. Then he took her hand and brought it to his crotch.

A needy gasp escaped her mouth as she felt the hard length of his shaft against her palm. She instantly cupped him, driven by an instinct that told her everything about this encounter was going to turn her inside out, change her, ravish her.

But God, she was so ready for it, for him. “You are already blowing my mind, bella . I’ve been walking around with an erection most of the evening, like some uncontrollable adolescent.”

“I’m sorry for doubting you,” she said, clinging to his lips, breathing shallow.

“I’m sorry for making you doubt my desire for you,” he returned. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes. More than anyone in the world.”

His gaze gleamed with satisfaction. “Bene.”

When she thought he’d release her, he pulled her hands behind her, his scruffy cheek rubbing against her own. “Is that okay?” he whispered at her ear.

She was so lost in those dark eyes and his heated whispers that it took her a second to figure out he’d tied her hands behind her with the ripped shirt. Breath shallowing, she wriggled her wrists to find it was a very loose knot. The action made her thrust up her chest, and the sudden swamping heat on her skin told her she was bare to his intense eyes except for her lacy thong. Her nipples instantly puckered and goose bumps rose on her flesh. She let out a groan, unable to catch it.

“ Cristo, bella . You’re beautiful,” he said in simple words, but his tone said so much more that for the first time in her life, Monica loved being in her own skin. “Every inch of you is...gloriously made.”

And then he shocked her yet again by bending down and rubbing his scruff against her nipple. Arching her spine, Monica fell into the rough slide with a deep groan. One hand on her upper back, he held her still for his tender assault that continued to her other breast, her belly and then back up. Just when she thought she might grow hoarse with begging, he used his fingers and his lips and oh, God...his teeth.

Nipping and licking and suckling, he turned her into a writhing mass of sensation and pleasure. And then he moved down with his deliciously rough stubble and his wicked fingers and his decadent lips.

His filthy curse when he ripped the thong off her pinged over her skin; his scruff at her inner thigh made her writhe. The dig of his teeth at the fold where her hip met her thigh made her sob. His rough inhale at the top of her pubic bone, telling her that her scent was divine... She thrashed wildly to get rid of the knot. “Shh... bella , you said you would trust me, si ?”

His pupils were blown and with his nostrils flaring and his mouth damp, she knew this was an Andrea that she would never forget. She nodded.

He pinched her nipple between his fingers and said, “Good girl.”

A wealth of dampness bloomed between her thighs. And slowly, holding her gaze, he dipped his finger into her core and let out another filthy curse. Then he laved her wetness over her folds, tracing them with as much care as a cartographer charting new territory. “I want to taste you, Monica. Will you let me?”

Fresh tingles broke out against her skin as she stared at him. “I’ve never...” She flushed and tried again. “No one’s ever done that and I...”

“If you don’t want me to—”

“No, I do. I... You don’t understand, that is, I’m not saying this well and...”

He waited, with infinite patience it seemed, while his palms dragged all over her trembling flesh as if he couldn’t stop touching her. At least, that was what she told herself. And that gave her enough courage to see this through without mentioning what else was new for her. “I want to do everything with you.”

“Good girl,” he whispered again and with his words and kisses and caresses, he built her up into a frenzy all over again. Monica lost count of the times she thought she would splinter apart only for him to take away his hands and kiss her softly, tenderly, until she was not standing any longer at the edge. Over and over.

“Please, Andrea, I can’t take this anymore. Please, make me come,” she said, sounding both angry and begging. Her skin felt hot and damp, and she needed release so badly that she was close to sobbing. After all this time, after all the men who had called her frigid and boring and worse names, here she was, ready to sell her soul for an orgasm.

“Since you asked so well, mia cara .” His hands on her hips, he pushed her up the bed.

Monica slithered over the sheets, every inch of her eager to do his bidding. Then he was kissing her belly again and lower and lower, his hands pushing her knees apart scandalously wide.

Her thigh muscles trembled violently when he finally, finally, bent his head and licked at her folds. The shock of that quick, rough swipe had her arching her hips off the bed, chasing his mouth shamelessly. And he did it again and again, setting a rhythm to which her entire pulse seemed to beat. “I need words, bella . I need to know what you need more of, where you want me deeper and longer,” came his command in such gravelly tones that even that fueled her ascent.

So Monica told him, more voluble than she’d ever been when it came to intimacy; more abandoned than she’d ever been with another person; more demanding and brazen and alive and selfish than she’d ever been her entire life.

She told him she could take another finger after he thrust two inside her; she told him she was seeing stars when he hit some wildly responsive spot deep inside her, and she told him that she was so, so close that she couldn’t think or talk or maybe even breathe. She told him she’d never felt like this with another man and she told him that all she could see and feel and know was his mouth and his fingers and his breath whispering over her folds.

His fingers pumped with a delicious rhythm that pushed her on and on, and his lips drew on her clit with a subtle tug...and her climax broke through, thrashing her about into so many jagged pieces.

Tears pooled and spilled at the acute, unbearable ripples jerking through her pelvis and down even as her hips still chased that wicked mouth with a mindless greed. Finally, his mouth stilled. She was desperate to touch him as he kissed a soft trail up her body, praising her, telling her how much he wanted to feel her fall apart around his cock, and she fell back against the bed, feeling wrung out and yet already thrumming with fresh need.

She slowly came back to herself as he undid the knot at her wrists, and it felt like she’d returned not quite the same. Which was ridiculous because it was one orgasm—albeit, yes, the kind that she’d heard friends and colleagues rave about. Her throat felt raw with all the screaming she’d done, and her limbs felt as if they were filled of thick honey, and her heart still hadn’t returned to its normal pace.

When Andrea climbed up over into the bed, she instantly turned her face into the sheets, loath to reveal how much the orgasm had knocked out of her, physically and emotionally. God, he’d think her an idiot of the first order if he saw her tears. She pressed her face into the sweat-damp sheets, wiping away the wetness, feeling a sudden, strange shyness.

She rifled through one thing after the other that came to her lips, second-and third-guessing what she should say to break the building awkwardness, how she could speak to sound more confident and less...turned inside out.

“Are you okay, cara ?” he inquired softly, one hand rifling through her hair with a tenderness she wouldn’t have expected of him in a thousand years.

“More than okay,” she said, sounding half-feverish, half-delirious. She couldn’t blurt out how much she liked that he was still touching her.

It took her a few seconds, wrapped as she was in her own head, to realize that behind her Andrea had stilled. Except for those two fingers that moved over the scar on her waist with a compulsiveness that betrayed his usual indifference to most things.

“You really don’t like that scar,” she said, her tease sounding raspy.

“I don’t like what it reminds me of,” he said and then exhaled roughly.

Something about his tone made her desperate to see his expression. She jerked back on the bed, slipping and sliding on the now cooling sheets, to get a better look at him. Whatever teasing words she’d thought up disappeared because this intimacy was a punch to her gut. As much as the knowledge that he’d blasted through her defenses on more than one level.

Heat rushed to her cheeks as she met that dark gaze, the scene of just moments ago replaying in Technicolor in her mind. How she’d screamed; how she’d begged when he’d slowed down the pace; how she’d clamped her thighs around his head...and now the sight of those thin, sculpted lips that had woven such wicked pleasure through her.

“I know you know this, but she feels no lingering trauma from it,” she said. Mentioning his mother when she was naked should have felt awkward. But it didn’t. But then their relationship, if she could call it that, so far hadn’t followed any rules or conventions.

He took a long while to answer, his brows furrowed, his fingers still dancing over the scar. When he finally spoke, his mouth was flat with tension. “And you think that’s all that matters? That she is unhurt and trauma-free?”

Monica stilled, a cavern of longing opening up inside her.

He cared about her, in his own grumpy you’re-another-nuisance-I-have-to-look-after way. She had known that even before the whole episode with Francesco. But to hear it in his words, delivered with that grumpiness, made her chest expand like some secret hidden chamber had been opened. She covered his hand with hers. “I’m unhurt, too, Andrea. And here, with you. Like this,” she said, feeling the need to stretch and work loose the tightness in certain places. “And I know you will call me silly and pathetic and even twisted, maybe, but I met you and Flora and Romeo that day because of that accident, and you gave me a new life, and friends and almost-family, when I had nothing. And even without gaining all that, I would—”

“You would save Mama, I know, bella . You have little regard for your own safety.”

“Not true,” she said, inching closer and closer, pushing his shirt off his shoulders. “I know what I want and how I want it and I’m finally, thanks to you, beginning to flex my claws.” She rubbed the tip of her nose against his with a giggle, and that he allowed this...was a gift, too. “I just don’t stomp about, declaring and announcing and demanding that the world bend to my will and my wishes, that’s all.”

“Ahh...but in your case, I would make the bending to my wishes so worth it.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” she whispered, finally taking his mouth like she wanted to, reaching for this man who seemed to have somehow tunneled deep into her heart without her knowledge.

He was an explosion in her mouth as she poured every ounce of need she felt into it. Her kiss lacked finesse but was filled with a new frenzy she didn’t hide. He grunted into her mouth when she bit his lower lip, knowing already that he liked it a little rough, and she smiled, joy beating like a live pulse through her.

She gave in to all the overwhelming impulses, turned and stretched out like a lazy cat, and heard another rewarding grunt as her breasts rubbed against his bare chest. Flexing her newfound freedom, she sank into the stretch, while attached to him from chest to feet. The press of his thick shaft against her lower belly fanned out into a thousand flickers of fresh want and a near-painful ache where his fingers had been.

Leaning forward, she kissed his chin, and the sharp slashes of his cheekbones, and his thick brows and the scar that stretched out from his right temple to his mouth and lower. She trailed her mouth down to his throat and the notch there, across his chest and back up. Insatiable when it came to touching him, she registered the catch and release of his breath when she moved her mouth to the slab of his abdomen, those grunts and curses that flew from his mouth like punctuation marks to his pleasure. And it drove her on as she undid the trousers and pushed them down his hips. When his cock plopped into her palm, she pressed her thighs together and rubbed in a wanton gesture that did nothing to assuage her need.

She stroked him, slowly at first, marveling at the texture and shape and weight of him, and imagining how he would feel moving inside her; how he would submerge her in sensation; how he would own every inch of her dreams and wants.

His grunts and commands finally came to her past the deafening beat in her ears, and she squeezed him as he ordered her to, rubbed her thumb over the soft head, and when pre-cum pooled at the tip, she bent her head and licked at it without his command. It was strange and musky-tasting, and Monica needed another taste so she dipped her head again and closed her lips around his length.

It was uncomfortable at first, his girth stretching her mouth, but God, the rough, guttural grunts that fell from his mouth, and his fingers tugging at her scalp as if he was trying his best not to push her down and the instinctive thrust of his hips upward until he hit the roof of her mouth... It was the most daring and rewarding thing she’d ever done in her life.

She released him for a breath and took him in again, this time actually sucking a little more of him inside her mouth and laughing when he cursed, which turned into a hum when he filled her, which resulted in him telling her that she was such a “good girl” and Cristo , who knew her innocent countenance could carry such filthy spirit, and Monica wanted to stay in that moment forever and ever.

Two seconds later, she was on her back and heard the rip of a condom wrapper and he was lodged between her legs. Monica squeezed her inner thighs and her core muscles tight as if she could forever keep his hardness there, just there, where she needed it so desperately. One hand in her scalp tugged her head back, his lips playing and nibbling at her nipples, his hard hips bearing her down into the bed, and all that feverish longing she thought had been satiated came flooding back into her body.

Monica pressed up into him, arching into his touch when his lips moved up her neck, biting and licking and nipping, as if he meant to leave marks on her for days to come.

“I need you. Are you ready for me, bella ?” he asked, and she nodded, feeling frantic and frenzied enough to burst out of her skin.

“Words, Monica,” he said, his own breaths rough now, his thick shaft rubbing against her drenched folds. “Give me words and I will give you everything you crave, bella , and a little more that you won’t ask for.”

“I want you, Andrea,” she whispered, pushing her face into his throat with a craven possessiveness she shouldn’t feel, breathing the words into his skin, wishing she could keep the furor she felt from creeping into her tone and not caring at the same time. She bit his neck and pulled that pulse between her lips like he had done to her, and she felt the rewarding pressure of his body increase. “Like I’ve never wanted anything else in the world.” It was her truth and she felt a freedom in releasing it to this man who had broken through all her known and unknown defenses.

She could feel his smile in his kiss and even that sliver of arrogance only heightened her feel of him, her experience of everything he gave her. She gasped as he pushed her knee into her chest and then he was there, testing her readiness again with his fingers, probing slowly before he moved inside her with one smooth thrust until he was lodged all the way inside.

“ Cristo, cara . You will be the death of me,” he murmured, hard and still around and inside her, his hands gripping her hips.

A pinch of pain speared through her pelvis, freezing her for a second. She dug her stubby nails into his shoulders with a stubborn possessiveness, holding his rising body as her anchor until it passed. And it passed soon, thank God, submerged by a host of other, new sensations. Quickly enough that she could marvel at the feeling of utter fullness of having him inside her. Fast enough that she could feel those thick tendrils of pleasure uncurl all over again as Andrea pulled out, almost all the way, and thrust back in. If he wasn’t holding her captive with his lean, powerful frame, she’d have flown off the bed at the force of his thrust.

Monica bit her lip to stifle the moan that wanted to escape. His teeth dug into her shoulder and his free hand pinched her nipple and he was stroking in and out of her as if they’d never been apart at all, and it was such a symphony of sensations that she thought she might pass out for a second at all the different layers.

“Monica, speak, bella ,” he said, twisting his hips in some strange dance that stirred that spot inside her again. Every time he did it, pleasure unfurled in a thousand new filaments, as if she was lighting up from inside out. “Tell me you’re okay.”

She cleared her throat, but still her words came out as if from a deep, dark tunnel where words didn’t matter. Only sensations and pleasure and a strange sense of...belonging. One instance of good sex and God, she was ready to build a damned nest. “You ask for the impossible even here. Expecting me to talk right now is...unfair.”

“Shall we push you off again, bella ?”

Monica hid her face in his throat and whispered, “I don’t know if I can. Just please, don’t stop what you’re doing. Andrea...don’t stop.”

His mouth found hers and Monica lost herself in the kiss and in the rough slide of his hair-roughened chest over her sensitized breasts. Then, somehow, he notched his thumb at her clit and every time he stroked in and out of her, he hit that spot inside her and soon, she was climbing that mindless cliff again, desperate for release.

Her orgasm broke through her like a shock wave, out of nowhere, and Monica screamed at the near-violent intensity of it.

She heard his filthy curse as her muscles milked his shaft and soon, there was a new intensity to his thrusts. Monica closed her eyes and her awareness hit a new plane with the sounds of his body thrusting into her, and his guttural grunts and the scent of his sweat and cologne. When she opened her mouth, she could taste his sweat, and then he was shuddering and shaking and she wrapped her arms around him as he pinned her hips into the bed with his and gave a hoarse shout.

Their breaths were rough and harsh-sounding in the sudden silence, the air scented with sex, and he was a delicious weight on top of her, and Monica knew she would not forget this moment if she lived to be a hundred.