Page 20 of Taken by the Irish Mobster
She goes rigid. Her fingers tighten around mine.
“Look at me.”
She rolls toward me until we are face-to-face on the pillows. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her lashes damp, and even wrecked with tears, she is staggeringly beautiful.
“We’re going to begin the physical side of this marriage,” I tell her. “Tonight.”
Three emotions cross her face in rapid succession—relief, wariness, confusion—layered on top of one another.
“But we do it my way.” I hold her gaze. “I lead. You follow. My first rule is that if anything frightens you, if anything hurts, you tell me and I stop. Immediately. No question. I won’t be angry or disappointed. Can you do that?”
She nods. The tension in her shoulders drops a fraction. This is a structure she comprehends—rules, order, obedience. The knowledge galls me, but I’ll use it to give her what no one has ever given her.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
She is quiet for a long moment before she answers, “Yes.”
I release her hand and bring my palm to her face. My thumb traces the line of her cheekbone and over her bottom lip. Her eyelids flutter at the contact. “Then let’s start here.”
I kiss her.
The press of my lips against hers is soft, tentative—giving her every chance to pull away. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t respond either. Her mouth is closed, uncertain, a door she doesn’t know how to open.
“Follow me,” I murmur against her lips. “Do what I’m doing.”
The second kiss, her mouth softens. The third, her lips part a fraction, and I take the invitation—angling her chin upward, deepening the kiss, tasting the salt of old tears on her lower lip.
The fourth kiss breaks us both wide open.
Her breath rushes out against my mouth, warm and shaking, and her hand comes up to rest on my bare skin. Her fingers curl against me.
I’ve kissed women. Plenty of them. Socialites, high-powered businesswomen, mafia princesses, polished women who knew exactly how to angle their mouths and when to sigh. None of it—not one encounter—felt like this. A current runs from her mouth through mine and into the marrow of my bones. The sensation is electric, disorienting, a charge that rewires every nerve I have.
I draw away an inch. Her eyes are half-open, unfocused.
“Was that your first kiss?” I know the answer, but I ask anyway.
She nods. “I was never allowed to be alone with a man.” Her voice is a whisper. “You are the first person to kiss me. The first person to hold my hand.”
The first everything.
A possessive heat ignites at the base of my spine and spreads upward through me. Not desire alone—older, more territorial. Possessive. She is mine. Every first belongs to me. Every gasp, every shiver, every discovery her body is about to make—mine.
The ferocity of my own thoughts should alarm me. I’m not a barbarian. I don’t do savage caveman.
Except, apparently, I do.
My kisses migrate from her lips to her throat. My lips graze the hollow where her pulse beats wildly. I press my mouth there, letting her absorb the warmth of my breath against her skin. She swallows hard. I kiss lower—the ridge of her collarbone. When I reach the soft dip between her gorgeous, full breasts, her breathing changes, becoming shorter and sharper, but she holds herself motionless.
I move to the curve of her breast. Her nipple tightens before I reach it, taking it into my mouth and flicking it with my tongue. When my lips close over the peak, her body responds. Her whole torso flinches—a full-body jolt she tries to suppress.
“Don’t fight it,” I murmur against her skin. “Whatever you feel, let it happen. Nothing you do here will be wrong.”
A strangled sound escapes her, bitten off at the end.
I kiss lower. Down the plane of her stomach, which contracts under my mouth. Over the jut of her hip, where I let my teeth graze and she gasps audibly. Down the inside of her thigh, where the skin is softer than anything I’ve touched in my life.
She tenses when my shoulders settle between her legs. Confusion radiates through her. Her thighs lock and her spine becomes rigid.
