Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 by Carol Marinelli (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

her finger. No blessings, however sanctified, could change who they were.

And yet.

He carried her into the villa and took her straight to his private suite. It was a Greek daydream of archways to welcome in the sea and the sky. Everything was white and blue and then, there in the middle, his wife with her hair like flame and eyes of the brightest gold.

Like a treasure.

By the time he set her down gently at the foot of the wide, low bed, Balthazar was so hard, so greedy for her, that he was surprised she hadn’t already burst into a thousand pieces with the force of it.

“Let me tell you how I want you to audition,” she said, though she had to reach out to him to keep her balance and better still, she sounded breathless.

He found he liked that more than he should have. That no matter what—no matter the truth of things and the dark reality he would return to as soon as he did something about the hunger that was tearing him apart—he got to her, too.

“I find I have a particular take on the role,” he told her, his voice dark. The greed in him like its own, beating pulse. “Why don’t you tell me how you feel about it once I’m done.”

This time, when he set his mouth to hers, he had no intention of stopping.

He kissed her, deep and long. He got his hands in her hair, scattering the pins she’d used to secure it to the top of her head. It wasn’t enough. No matter how he angled his head, no matter how close he held her, he wanted more.

He wanted everything.

Balthazar didn’t understand this drive in him. This need. The dream and the greed, the feelings that battered at him, over and over, when he had been so certain for so long that he had none—

He felt as if something in him had broken. Yet as he held Kendra in his arms, he had the strangest notion that he had never been more whole.

That wasn’t something he could take on board then, so Balthazar spun her around instead. He watched the deep, jarring breath she took as he worked to pull that dress up the length of her newly voluptuous body, then off.

Then she was before him in only a bra that wrapped around her back, holding her breasts as if on a shelf, and a skimpy pair of lace panties that made his mouth water. Her back was to him, so he indulged himself without worrying how his face might have been betraying him.

He put his mouth on the nape of her neck, then made his way down the tempting line of her spine. He removed that bra as he went, his hands trailing behind his mouth to graze her sides but not quite making it around to the particular temptation of those perfect breasts, now much larger than before. Not yet.

He found the small of her back and hooked his fingers in the lace he found high on her hips, then tugged it down as he bared the whole of her to his view.

Crouched there behind her, he turned her around so he could inhale the scent of her arousal. Sugar and heat. Then he indulged himself completely by licking his way directly into all of her soft, wet heat.

She jolted against him, making a shocked sort of sound that only made the greed in him worse. He was sure there was another lightning strike. He felt it go through her, and him.

Beneath his tongue, she quivered, but that was not enough. Not nearly enough.

Could anything be enough? something in him asked.

He wrapped one arm around her hips and pulled one of her legs over the width of his shoulder, opening her to him. Completely.

And then he devoured her.

She was sweet and he was savage. And the noises she made as she arched back, offering herself to him, pulsed in him like light. Like heat.

Like that greed he thought might never leave him.

He felt her convulse against his mouth, her body jerking as she sobbed out something incoherent that he thought might be his name.

And even as she shook, Balthazar was moving. He hauled her up into his arms again and then tumbled the both of them down into the embrace of that wide mattress.

She was still shaking, still making sobbing sounds, and for a moment he lost himself all over again in the slide of her flesh against his.

Skin to skin, head to toe, at last.

Balthazar felt as if he’d never had a woman before. As if he never would again. As if she was the beginning and the end of everything—and all he wanted to do was get closer.

Everything was heat and delight, a dark and encompassing glory.

All he wanted was that everything, even if it killed them both.

He rolled to his back and pulled her astride him. He watched, breathing hard already, as she braced herself against his chest, looking something like intoxicated when he knew she hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol.

For that matter, neither had he—and that meant the spinning in his head was entirely due to Kendra.

He waited for her to shift herself into better position, to sheath him on a downward stroke he could almost feel already, but she didn’t.

It was as if she was trying to focus on him. Her hair tumbled around her shoulders like another lick of flame. Balthazar wanted to taste each individual freckle he could see in that sweet spray across her nose, and more across her shoulders.

She was busy breathing, so he held her for a moment. This woman who had come to him twice, both times at the bidding of men he despised. This woman he had taken from that cottage in France. This woman he had married and would call his wife, and who would be, no matter what else she was or became in time, the mother of his child.

For the first time, Balthazar let