Passion and the Prince (19 page)

Beneath that pleasure, though, Lily was conscious of a deeper, sharper, keener hunger that had fed on and grown with each small measure of sensual delight until it was beginning to rage fiercely inside her. It was this hunger that she had always feared—this need within her to burn at such an intense heat with love for her lover that her feelings for him could destroy her. The need she had for Marco would never be satisfied by sensual pleasure alone, she knew. It went deeper than that. But for now she would think only of this pleasure and this intimacy, because it was for now that it and Marco would be hers.

Her response to him was magical—a miracle, given what she had endured. Marco struggled to contain and control his own desire for her so that he could concentrate on her experience and her pleasure. He wanted this to be perfect for her. He wanted it to be everything she hoped it to be. He wanted every touch, every sensation she had to show her a fulfilment that would set her completely free from the past.

He cupped her shoulder, stroking her warm, soft skin and then her breast, feeling her shudder and arch her body against his hand, her nipple taut and flushed with desire, her own hands reaching for his shoulders. He kissed the valley between her breasts and then the soft, sweetly fragranced slope, stroking his tongue against her nipple.

Immediately she cried out, her nails digging into his back and her eyes wide with wonder and delight as her breathing accelerated into unsteady swiftness. His own body ached and pulsed, his groin tightening with his need to grind it against her softness in an attempt to reduce the pressure of his desire. But this wasn’t about his satisfaction. Not even when he took the hard peak of her nipple into his mouth to suckle it slowly and Lily responded by crying out and gripping his hips, pulling him down against her open thighs. Her actions turned the soft, slow suckle of his mouth on her breast into a fiercely insistent rhythmic demand that came perilously close to making him lose control.

This was what she wanted, Lily acknowledged triumphantly as her body answered the demand of the sexually explicit rhythm Marco was driving into her with the possessive heat of his mouth. Deep within her
that same rhythm was pulsing its own growing need, telling her to wrap her legs around him and draw him down against her body.

His need to possess her, to claim her and fill her, had become an insistent drumbeat inside his body, but Marco knew that he could not give in to it. Not yet. Not until he had given Lily all the pleasure she deserved.

It was hard for him to go slowly and give her the time he thought she needed as he kissed his way down over her quivering stomach, following the path already taken by his hand which was now covering her sex. He stroked the soft mound with the pad of his thumb, and then when she gasped and moaned his name carefully caressed apart the neatly folded lips covering the swollen wet heat of her sex whilst he kissed the inner flesh of her thigh. He felt the shocked tremors of delight that ran through her.

Lily gasped in raw, agonised ecstasy. She couldn’t bear it. She could not bear any more of the pleasure that was shooting through her in fiery waves, driving her higher and higher with every erotic touch of Marco’s fingers and then his tongue-tip against the eager point of her desire. But even as she cried out her protest the dam broke, sending a series of pulsing quivers of release cascading over her.

Held fast in Marco’s arms, Lily clung to him as the last surges of pleasure filled her. Her voice thick and soft with emotion, she whispered her gratitude to him. ‘It was wonderful—everything I hoped for and more.’

Smoothing the damp hair back off her face, Marco smiled. ‘That was just the beginning.’ He loved her so much. Would always love her, he knew.

He kissed her slowly and deeply, taking time to rebuild her need until he was sure that her desire matched his own. Then he entered her slowly, carefully but firmly, stopping when he felt the shudder jolting through her.

But Lily shook her head and begged him fiercely, ‘Don’t stop. Please don’t stop now, Marco. I want you so much. I want this so much.’ She moved her body against his, gasping with pleasure when he responded, and she felt herself tightening around him, taking him, claiming him. The headiness of her own sense of wonder and triumph dazed her senses and filled her with erotic excitement.

She was all and everything he had been born for, Marco thought as he drove deeper and deeper into her, knowing she was moving with him, knowing that this time their journey was one they were sharing. Their discovery that their desire for one another, like their pleasure in one another, had no limits was a shared knowledge that had them exchanging kisses and touches and murmured words of praise and arousal until Marco felt his body tighten and surge and knew that he couldn’t hold back. But even as the first pulse of his orgasm overtook him he felt Lily’s flesh tighten round him, her cry of orgasmic relief mingling with his own.

Marco was still holding her close, his arms wrapped tightly around her. Hot tears scalded Lily’s eyes. She had thought that knowing him like this would make her feel better, but instead it had made her feel worse. The tears spilled down onto her cheeks.

‘You’re crying. Why …?’

‘Because I love you.’

The words had escaped before she could stop them,
and now Marco was looking down at her, his own expression unreadable.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I know you don’t want to hear that. I never meant to say it.’

Marco was holding her even more tightly, and his voice against her ear was raw with emotion as he murmured, ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it. There’s nothing I’ve wanted to hear more than that my love for you is returned.’

Lily pulled back so that she could look into his eyes. What she could see in them told its own story, but still she had to whisper, ‘You love me?’

And then she gasped with joy when Marco whispered back, between fiercely passionate kisses, ‘Yes, yes—yes a thousand times. I love you and I always will. Lily, you’ve freed me from the prison I’d built round myself. You’ve shown me, taught me to trust in my emotions as well as to trust you. You’ve made me complete. You’ve healed me and made me whole. I love you for all those reasons, but more than that I love you because I cannot do anything else
but
love you. You stole my heart the first time I saw you, even though I didn’t know it then. I fought against loving you. I tried to deny what was happening to me. I told myself that I would be a fool to let myself be controlled by my feelings. I told myself that I couldn’t trust you.’

‘Because of her? Because she hurt you so very badly?’ Lily guessed, cupping his face in her hands and kissing him tenderly. ‘I knew there must have been something—someone who had made you want to lock away your feelings.’

Marco removed one of her hands from his face and slowly kissed each finger.

‘It wasn’t Olivia’s fault—not really. My parents were caring, but of the old school. Physical intimacy wasn’t something they encouraged. Such behaviour wasn’t something they considered princely. When my governess took me down from the nursery to see them before I went to bed I had to bow to my mother and shake hands with my father.’

Lily’s soft, compassionate, ‘Oh, you poor little boy!’ was all the balm that childhood ache needed.

‘My governess and my school taught me that emotions were something that had to be controlled, not given in to. As a future prince I must be in control of them, not the other way around. I learned that emotions were dangerous. They certainly made me feel awkward, and contemptuous of the weakness of that awkwardness whilst I was growing up. Looking back now, knowing how I feel about you, I can see so much more clearly why Olivia might have wanted to rebel against that upbringing—and hers was much the same as mine. I should have been kinder to her—more understanding. What made it worse was that the woman in charge of the model agency that had hired her pretended to be on my side. She assured me that Olivia would be safe, and because of what I believed to be my right to having my opinions treated as important I was stupid and arrogant enough not to even question that she might be lying to me—which she was.’

That still galled him, Lily could tell. And why not? It would gall any man of pride. Marco was a proud man, and in her opinion he had a right to that pride, she
decided lovingly. There was more than injured pride in his voice, though—much more. There was also pain and regret and guilt, and it made Lily’s heart ache for him.

‘She procured young models for men under the guise of finding them work.’

‘And that was why you thought what you did about me?’

‘Yes,’ Marco admitted. ‘I told myself that you were two of a kind and kept on telling myself that—even when deep inside I knew you were nothing like her. But by then, of course, I had another and far more personal reason for not wanting to trust you. So I punished you for my mistakes and my own weakness. I misjudged you in so many different ways—over Pietro, over Anton—because I wanted and needed to misjudge you. It was easier and safer than acknowledging what I really felt about you. I thought I was being strong, but in reality I was being weak.’

‘Not weak, Marco. You could never be weak. You were doing what you had taught yourself to do. What loving Olivia and losing her in such a terrible way had taught you to do,’ Lily told him sympathetically.

Marco shook his head.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t love her. At least not in the way that you mean. She was more like a sister to me than a future wife. I have only loved and will only love one woman, Lily, and that woman is you.’

He meant it, Lily could see.

‘I was so afraid of loving you,’ she admitted. ‘I was afraid of being like my mother and loving a man who would only hurt me. And when you were so contemptuous of me, when you wouldn’t believe me …’

‘I hurt you,’ Marco groaned, kissing her again. ‘I hurt you because I was locked in a world where my emotions weren’t allowed to exist. But you aroused them, and when you did I had to reject what you were making me feel. I had to tell myself that I couldn’t trust you because I knew I couldn’t trust myself to resist you.’

‘But you saved me from Anton even though you didn’t trust me.’

‘You were so afraid. I couldn’t turn my back on you.’

‘And that is the man you really are, Marco. A man who can’t turn his back on those in need even when he believes he has very good reason to reject them.’

‘You give me credit where I don’t deserve it.’

‘No. You don’t give yourself credit here, and you
do
deserve it.’

‘I love you so much. So very much. I want you to marry me, Lily. I want us to be together for always. I want us to give our children—the children we shall create in our love for one another—the childhood that we never had.’

‘Yes, I want that too,’ Lily whispered beneath his kiss, as her senses and her body flowered into fresh eager longing beneath his touch.

T
HE
final sound of the bells ringing out from the
castello’s
chapel to announce their marriage were dying away, and the rose petals Lily had insisted on, instead of vulnerable doves being released, as their wedding planner had wanted were still drifting down from a perfect blue spring sky. The gentlest of breezes brushed the slender column of her wedding dress, its silk embossed with a traditional family design and especially made for her at the silk mill in Como in which Marco had an interest.

It had been a perfect day—but then every day since the day Marco had told her he loved her had been perfect in its own individual way.

‘So many generations of your family have married and lived here,’ Lily said as they stood arm in arm, watching their wedding guests.

‘And hopefully many more will,’ Marco told her, his hand resting deliberately against her body, where earlier that week the test Lily had done had confirmed their first child was already growing. A baby that would be born seven months into their marriage.

‘I just hope we’ve done the right thing letting Rick take the photographs and video of the wedding,’ she
admitted to Marco, watching her half-brother photographing a group of pretty girls who were amongst the wedding guests.

Pietro, Marco’s nephew, was assisting him. Once the misunderstanding over his modelling had been cleared up the two young men, so close in age, had become good friends, and were now work colleagues.

‘It was very generous of you to fund the film Rick’s going to make about the California wineries. His mother has told me that she intends to keep an eye on both him and Pietro whilst they are over there working on it.’

‘Your brother is a good man at heart. But enough of family. I can’t wait for us to leave for our honeymoon, so that I can have you to myself and show you and tell you how happy you’ve made me today, Lily. The happiest man in the world and the luckiest.’

‘We’ve both been lucky,’ Lily whispered back. ‘Lucky to have found one another. Oh, Marco if we hadn’t …’

‘We had to,’ Marco told her. ‘We were destined to meet and love one another. Destined to be together, and we always will be.’