Page 22

Laying it bristles up, her stare barely leaving his, she squeezed toothpaste one-handedly onto it.

Mattia would never have believed the act of brushing teeth could be erotic, but damn her to hell, Elvira made it so, and it wasn’t just because she was naked with rivulets of water dripping from her.

After she’d spat, she slowly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and held the toothbrush up to him in invitation.

He couldn’t even move his face to glare at her. Didn’t dare move his face. Didn’t dare move so much as a finger or toe.

Lust burned like fire through his veins. His vampiric mermaid was weaving that damned sensual magic around him, slowly encasing him in her spell.

She dropped the toothbrush into the sink and held his stare.

For the longest time they did nothing but gaze at each other until she came back to life and took a step towards him.

He took an automatic step back.

Her eyes pulsed. Her body moved but he’d barely registered the movement when her foot slipped in the water pooled over the bathroom floor. It was only the tiniest of slips, so tiny he might not even have noticed if not for the fact that when she tried to stabilise herself, the gun flew out of her hand.

Chapter Nine

Elvira’s heart froze. The world slowed to a crawl, allowing her to see with perfect clarity as her homemade gun sailed in an arc through the air, landing at the halfway point between herself and Mattia.

She didn’t even know why she’d been taking those steps to him. It hadn’t been conscious. Not in a brain-engaged way. She’d been gazing into those green eyes and her foot had taken a step closer to him before she was aware of it even moving.

She was still gazing into those green eyes when the world sped back up to its usual speed, and suddenly she realised what was happening at the same moment the spark of realisation hit Mattia too.

He looked down at her empty hand. She looked down at the silver handgun still in his grip.

Their eyes locked back together. A spark charged from one to the other, punching her heart back into life, and without another thought Elvira dived for her gun.

Her fingers had made only the lightest of contact with it when Mattia pounced, throwing himself onto her. There was no time to snatch back the breath winded out of her before she was being lifted into the air with nothing more than an arm around her waist.

It all happened so quickly. One second she was about to snatch hold of the gun; the next she was being twisted round so her back was pinned to Mattia’s hard torso, and he was kicking the gun out of reach. Both guns. While scooping her up, he’d dropped his own.

Elvira’s grandmother hadn’t taught her to be a fighter for nothing, but none of the self-defence she’d been taught entered her head. Instead, she lashed out with all her limbs, bucking and wriggling so violently his hold on her slipped. Escape, though, proved impossible. No sooner had her feet touched the ground than she was being lifted and twisted again, would have been hoisted over his shoulder if she hadn’t wrapped her legs tight around his waist to stop him. Now pulling at his hair, she bucked harder than ever, snarling frenziedly into his darkly furious face.

She had no comprehension of them even crossing the bedroom’s threshold, not until she was thrown onto the bed. Her ankles being so tightly locked on his back brought Mattia tumbling down with her, and now she was trapped beneath his hard body, slapping at him, hitting anywhere and everywhere, fighting with everything she had, lifting her head to bite his neck, her teeth barely razing his skin before he grabbed a fistful of her hair and pushed her head back onto the mattress.

She opened her lungs and screamed, not from pain but from rage, and swiped at his face. She felt her nails gouge through the skin on his cheek, but less than a beat later, his teeth bared with fury, he let go of her hair and grabbed her wrist, pinning it to the side of her head. Fighting harder than ever, she grabbed his hair with her free hand, this time pulling hard enough to make him roar.

Even through the red mist of her fury, she could see the deep scratches on his cheek, and as she yanked at his hair, she lifted her head again, intending to bite a chunk out of him, except…

God only knew how, but instead of her teeth sinking into his cheek, their mouths clashed, and before she even knew it was happening, their lips had fused together.

The shock of sensation was as powerful as everything else that had brought them to this point, and for the briefest of moments, barely the beat of a heart, they both stilled.

In that split-beat, all she could hear was the roar of blood in her head, all she could feel the heavy thump of her heart. Another split-beat later and their lips were clinging together, moving violently in a kiss so furiously deep and passionate that the world shrunk and Elvira’s senses were lost to the dark, dark taste and feel of Mattia Esposito.

And still they fought… but it was a different kind of fight, one she had no control over her reactions to, not even when he let go of her wrist and slid his hand between their abdomens. She was barely conscious of ripping at the buttons of his shirt or him shrugging it off, had no notion of her hand diving into the jeans he’d just unbuttoned until her fingers were wrapped around the thick, pulsing, rigid heat contained inside it.

He groaned into her mouth and kissed her even harder, tugging at the sides of his jeans and underwear until they were past his hips, and his arousal was free.

Wrapping her legs even tighter around him, she circled her hips, begging him with her body to take her. The feverish desperation to have him inside her was beyond anything; her body ablaze with a fire already past endurance.

Barely seconds after Elvira had tried to bite his cheek, she was cupping that same cheek while their mouths and tongues devoured each other, and gripping his tight buttock. Another second later, he drove his hard length deep inside her.

The sensation was so intense that white light flickered behind her eyes, but she was hardly aware of it, conscious only of Mattia, pounding into her in a frenzy of raw power that saturated every last cell of her body. So fierce and consuming was the pleasure that she had no awareness of her climax building before her body exploded and undiluted ecstasy ripped through her like a tsunami. The convulsions of her body were so strong they tipped him over the edge with her and, with a guttural shout, he made one last powerful thrust and collapsed on her.

And then silence.