She could feel the warmth pulsing inside her, the increasing pressure spreading outwards. She didn’t dare move, but she whimpered in delight, tightened her muscles against her coming climax.

Dominic abruptly withdrew his fingers, closed her legs, rolled back on his heels.

She cried out, sobbed in frustration.

‘It’s all about control, Katherine. You’ll thank me when you finally come.’

When her breathing eased and her body calmed, Dominic leisurely unfolded from his seat on the floor, rose to his knees and opened her legs again.

The second he slid his finger inside her, she felt the first tiny spasms ripple through her, hard dizzying pleasure instantly magnifying into a flame hot glow.

‘Jesus, Katherine.’ He slammed her legs together. ‘Have you no fucking control at all?’

She could hardly breathe, the pressure inside her so intense, she could have wept in frustration. ‘Let me come!’ she wailed.

‘Hopefully, you can still tell time,’ he snapped. ‘A minute left. Watch the fucking clock.’

She stared at his massive erection, straining upwards, flat against his stomach. ‘Do I get that then,’ she said, trembling with lust and anger, ‘or will you have some other lesson for me?’

‘I said ten minutes. That’s what I meant. And yes, you’ll get this.’ He flicked a glance down.

‘Maybe I won’t want it.’

‘You haven’t been paying attention, Katherine,’ he said softly. ‘I doesn’t matter what you want.’ Smoothly rising to his feet, he pulled over a red silk-covered bench similar to one in Mr Mendosa’s watercolour, and shoved it in front of Kate. ‘Bend over that and hold on tight. I’m going to fuck you. You have my permission to climax now.’

She quickly followed instructions because even resentful and vowing revenge, he had what she desperately needed. Standing up, she bent forward, clutched the sides of the small bench, and waited, flushed and trembling for her reward.

Casually surveying her plump pink bottom, Dominic shoved the chair aside, moved up behind the unresisting Miss Hart, guided his erection to her pink, dewy cleft, and placed his hands lightly on her hips. ‘Move back a little,’ he ordered. ‘A little more,’ he commanded because he could; she’d do anything he asked right now. ‘There, that’s good. Ready?’

She came before he’d completely penetrated her – instantly, noisily, without restraint and at some length, in a staggering number of violent spasms that jolted her and pleased him, lit up the pleasure centres of their brains and continued to play out as he held himself rooted deep inside her until every quivering trace of her orgasmic frenzy died away.

Then leaning forward, he whispered against her ear, ‘See, it is better if you wait.’

She softly groaned, a low, blissful pleasure sound – answer in part to his comment, in part sumptuous response to his erection shifting inside her as he moved.

‘You want more? Is that what you’re saying? Or if you want me to stop, I’ll stop.’

‘Don’t stop.’ A frantic whisper.

‘So you do want more.’

‘Yes.’

His voice was a low growl, hers a frenzied, suffocated breath.

‘You don’t have a fucking choice anyway.’

‘I don’t care,’ she confessed, dizzy with longing.

‘It wouldn’t matter if you did.’ His thighs forced hers farther apart, his grip on her hips hardened and driven by a mindless obsession, arrogance, a perfunctory view of legalities and past promises, he growled, ‘Because you’re mine for six more days.’

She began shaking.

‘You’ll like what I’m going to do to you,’ he said more softly, making sure the edge was gone from his voice. ‘I promise.’ And lifting her bottom a fraction to ease his downstroke, he set out to deliver on that promise, slowly penetrating her tight, always hospitable body, moving gently, in and out, all the way in and out until she was liquid, yielding, until the sensitive flesh-to-flesh friction was silken and smooth, until she was matching his rhythm with her usual feverish impatience, breathing hard, gasping at the extremity of each deep, plunging thrust. Urging him on.

He obliged her, slowly, masterfully, using all his virtuoso skills to bring her to another screaming orgasm. Then one more. And yet another in which he joined her.

He liked that she was greedy for sensation, immoderate in her desires. He even liked her eagerness. It gave him the opportunity to teach her restraint. But she also gave him pleasure in other ways. Sweeping her hair aside, he bent and gently kissed the nape of her neck. ‘I’m going to keep doing this, make you come over and over again.’ For selfish reasons, because she made him feel something deep down – in his spine, his gut, in the tips of his fingers where his nerve endings shimmered – a delight in living he hadn’t felt for a long time.

‘Katherine, look in the mirror.’ Her grabbed a fistful of curls and gently tugged. ‘Look,’ he whispered. ‘See how the pearls swing from your nipples when my dick hits bottom in your cunt? There – like that.’

She whimpered at the riveting impact so soon after climax, shut her eyes against the spiking tremors, then sighed as renewed bliss washed over her in monstrous waves.

‘You have to look.’ He stopped moving inside her. ‘Or I won’t let you come again.’

The brusque warning dispersed the warm afterglow, but four orgasms and a largely sleepless night induced a certain lethargy. Her eyelids rose by slow degrees.