Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you,
You are care, and care must keep you;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Peppe turned from the window, a smile playing over his lips as Nina finish reciting the poem. Thomas Dekker, one of the many assigned for his class on Renaissance literature and art this summer. Nina hummed the tune from The Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” Peppe loved The Beatles. She clung to these small details he offered like cellophane.
Still wrapped in sheets like one of Botticelli’s models, Nina preened in the bed, ignoring the crumbling plaster overhead. This apartment might have been falling apart, but it felt like a palace when her lover was in it.
“Very good,” Peppe said, ever the professor, even after sex. “Full marks for you, principessa.”
Nina stretched, allowing the worn linens to fall from her limbs, drawing him to her like a moth to a flame.
“All right, Professor,” she whispered as he returned to the bed and brushed the hair from her face. “Your turn to recite a little poetry.”
“There are many kinds of poetry, my principessa.” His voice was a hummingbird’s wing as it found the curve of her shoulder and set her skin aflutter. “Let’s explore another.”
The knock at the door, brisk and quick, shook me out of my daydream. I turned from the floor-to-ceiling window of the Grace Hotel penthouse, from which the Lower East Side spread, cooking with the rest of the city in the summer heat. The room was air-conditioned, but even so, my silk shell was sticking to the back of my neck. I needed to get these clothes off. I needed a cold shower
But I needed something—someone—else more.
“Nina?”
His voice pulled me to him, and before I could help myself, I was skipping over to the door and yanking it open like a child on Christmas morning. There I found the man who had stood in court and charged my husband with counts of racketeering, trafficking, and bribery.
It had been only a few weeks since the last time I had begged Matthew to see me one last time, but it felt like years. In this room. Where it all started. For one final night.
We can’t do this again.
So wrong.
The last time.
He had said them over and over again as he peeled the garments from my worn body like he was unwrapping a gift. Breathed the words as he set my skin alight with his touch. Whispered them against my lips before taking kiss after torrid kiss.
Still, he had meant them, and so had I.
Still, we were here.
He looked as dapper as ever. A man straight out of any woman’s fantasies, somehow belonging as much to an older time as his own. I’d seen this light gray Ferragamo suit before. It was the sleek, almost mod Italian cut he generally preferred, immaculately tailored to make his waist trim and his shoulders impossibly broad. A straw fedora—always a fedora—was tipped rakishly to one side as he looked me over with sooty, dark green eyes.
Matthew Zola, assistant district attorney.
Zola to friends, Mattie to his family.
But to me, he was just my Matthew.
I frowned.
His smile immediately morphed into a mirror image of my own. “Not exactly the welcome I was expecting, doll.”
“What’s your middle name?” I asked. “I just realized I don’t know.”
For some reason, I hated that I didn’t know. I wanted to know everything about this man who had somehow taken one half of my heart for his own.
The smile reappeared, roguish and slightly crooked over gleaming white teeth. Matthew resembled a pirate in many ways, most particularly because of the chiseled jaw and the graze of black over cheeks that he usually kept clean. He was also very observant, seeming to catch every stray glance of mine.
No one could read me like this man. Considering how trained I was to be unreadable, he might have been the only one to do it at all.
Or perhaps he just undid that training.
“I…well, I don’t have one, actually.”
I frowned more. He chuckled.
“Truly?” I asked.
“I have two first names, though.” He tipped his head. “Italian custom, according to Nonna. They get two first names, but no middle name. If this were Italy, you’d see them marked on the census with a comma. Matthew, comma, Luca Zola. But here it just looks like a middle name on my birth certificate.”
I reached out and fingered his lapel, then ran my touch over the collar of his polka-dotted shirt, the bright red tie. Matthew wasn’t the most well-dressed man in the city—not on a civil servant’s salary, and not with secondhand suits like this from his sister’s consignment shop. But he might have been the most stylish. Unlike most men I knew, for whom clothes were perfunctory uniforms, Matthew was like a character from one of the old movies he loved so much. With a good tailor and interesting textiles, he managed to blend quality and fashion together in a way that was anything but cookie-cutter.
“So.” His voice lowered in a way that made my toes curl. “You going to invite me in, doll? Or do I need to toss you over my shoulder?”
Suddenly, I had a hard time swallowing. Nearly six months I had known this man, and that particular growl never failed to have the same effect. Undoing each one of my careful reserves. Unweaving my—
Control yourself. It was a mantra I’d practiced my entire life. The creed of the de Vrieses and their ilk. Never show emotion. Never show vulnerability. Never lose control.
That was the problem with Matthew. He undid those knots with a single word and had since the moment we met.
So, I realized with sudden clarity, why fight it?
That’s right. I didn’t have to. Not here. Not with him. For a fraction of time, I could just let go.
So I did. The hand around his lapel tightened, and I yanked him to me with an ardor that knocked his hat to the ground as the door slammed shut behind him.
He didn’t even seem to notice. As my fingers slid into the shining thickets of his dark hair, his lips found mine with similar force. He walked me backward into the suite, hands sliding up and down my body. It was always the same with him, the way he explored me each time like he’d never seen me before. Never touched me.
“God,” he breathed after he took one kiss, then another, and allowed me to take the same. “I thought this would never come.”
Our tongues warred with each other like this was the first time we’d ever given in. Six months after we had started our affair, it was still like this. It didn’t matter how many times he took me, in how many ways. As soon as he was done, that craving came right back again.
A pirate indeed. I was a new world, and he was here to pillage it.
“How long do we have?” I wondered as I pushed his jacket from his shoulders.
He was hot, like his skin was burning up. His shirt was slightly dewy, an effect of the heatwave ravaging the city. But it only made his scent—something musky mixed with the subtle cologne he used and the more typical odors of coffee and paper—that much more alluring.
“Ninety minutes, maybe. I have to be in court by four, and the trains are running late again. God, get this thing off,” he snarled, more at the jacket than at me as he shook it off with a snap onto one of the chairs. “The city is an absolute fuckin’ sauna. Ninety-eight degrees this afternoon, and they say it will get up to a hundred tomorrow. In June, do you believe that?”
With reluctance, he stepped away to continue undressing on his own. I used the opportunity to catch my breath and get us both glasses of water from the bureau. The cool glass pressed to my lips, I watched him pull off his tie, then his button-down shirt, shoes, and socks with neat precision until he was standing in just his gray pants and a white tank undershirt.
I licked my lips. I knew very well what treasures were underneath that thin layer of cotton, but the in-between was nearly as enjoyable. The man made simple undergarments look like couture. Especially when sweat caused them to cling to his sculpted body just…like…that…
“Nina.”
I continued to stare. The tight muscles flexed, guiding my gaze over his flat belly, down to the waistband, then to the—
“Nina.”
I blinked and colored. Lord, he had caught me again. “Yes?”
He raised one dark, rakish brow. My cheeks heated even more as his fiery gaze slid up and down my body. After spinning class, I’d slipped on a demure white sundress appropriate for the heat and a pair of nude sandals that wrapped around my ankles. My hair was blown out and tossed around my shoulders, but with a bit more volume than usual from the humidity. It was even starting to curl a little at the ends.
Nothing special. But the fire in Matthew’s dark gaze made me feel like I was practically naked.
“Well, you got me here, beautiful,” he said. “Now what are you going to do with me?”
I couldn’t reply. I could barely remember my own name when he looked at me like that.
“Thirsty?” he asked as he spied the water in my hand.
I looked down at the glass and back at him. “Like you said, it’s very warm.”
He closed the space between us, and for a moment I fought the urge to run. I had tried it before, and to my delight, he had stalked me across the room like a panther tracking its prey. When he pounced, I had forgotten my name completely.
Well…I had the same power. If I wanted to use it.
I jiggled the ice in my drink, then pulled out one cube and held it up to my mouth, tracing around my lips, delighting in the dilation of his eyes as he watched.
“Nina…” His tone was equal parts warning and praise.
I sucked on the ice cube, then trailed it down my neck and over the swells of my breasts. This wasn’t a particularly revealing dress—none of mine were—but it was flattering and showed enough of my chest that Matthew could complete the picture using his imagination. And I already knew that was quite avid.
“Sweetheart,” he growled. “It’s been five fuckin’ weeks. If you don’t drop the ice and get the fuck over here, I’m going to—”
“You’re going to what?” I interrupted gently.
He didn’t bother to answer, instead closing the space with two long strides, grabbing the glass from my hands, and upending the entire thing over my chest.
“Matthew!” I shrieked as the ice and water soaked my dress, causing goose bumps to fly up everywhere.
But before I could shout again, his mouth, hot and hungry, closed over mine, shuttering my cries. One hand slipped under the hem of my dress to find my backside, the other found my breast and squeezed. Our tongues coiled together all over again before he broke the kiss and looked down.
“I knew you weren’t wearing a bra.”
I followed his cocky inspection. The water had made my dress completely transparent. “How could you have possibly known that?”
“Because.” Both hands now closed over my breasts. “I know this body like I know my own. I know its shapes. Every peak”—his thumbs drifted over my erect nipples, making me shiver—“and valley.”
I watched transfixed as he leaned down to take one nipple into his mouth through the soaked silk. He sucked, using his teeth to lightly worry the sensitive nub.
I gripped his hair even tighter. “Matthew.”
He moved to the other side as he plucked at the buttons down the front of my dress. “Hmm?”
“Matthew, p-please.”
Lord. I never stuttered. Just like every de Vries child, I had been taught to enunciate perfectly. But he brought that out of me, just like everything else.
Matthew stood straight again just as he undid the last of the buttons, then peeled the fabric to survey his spoils. “Perfect,” he murmured.
I pulled back enough to allow the dress to drop to the floor.
“I should pick that up and lay it to dry,” I said. I didn’t move, though. I was shameless, standing before him in my heels and a pair of nude silk panties.
“You’ll do no such thing.” Matthew’s voice was thick with desire—just like the bulge in the front of his pants. He looked like he was two seconds from tossing me backward onto the bed.
God, how many nights had I fallen asleep dreaming of that exact expression on his face? In front of him, I was the center of the universe. Nothing existed other than the two people in this room. Two bodies aching for each other.
“A work of art,” he murmured as he had time and time again.
He never ceased to make me feel so much more beautiful than I really was.
I tipped my chin up, giving him a view of the neck he loved to praise as swan-like, though I was no pinup. Thin rather than curvy, but he loved me just the same.
Or so he had said. Once.
Matthew stepped toward me, but just as he was about to kiss me again, he stopped. “What’s that?”
“Hmm?” I was too ready for his touch to even notice his change in tone.
“That. Nina, what the hell is that?”
My eyes flew open in panic. I had taken such care before coming, but perhaps the ice water had washed away some of the cover-up. Perhaps our kisses had made the one on my lip that much worse. Or maybe the bruising on my thigh had gotten worse…
Relief flooded me as I realized he was staring just above my left breast.
“Oh, that. You gave me that.”
Matthew reared. “I gave you that? It’s been five weeks. I remember dropping a few hickeys here and there, but…”
He drifted off, as if our last encounter rendered him speechless. I knew the feeling.
He shook his head. “But nothing that would look like that after five days, let alone five weeks. The whole area is yellow, like a bunch of bruises almost done healing. Jesus, doll, you look like someone’s been smacking the shit out of you.”
My cheeks reddened. The tightening in his voice told me he was suspicious. He didn’t need to know how correct that was—some days, anyway. But not about this, at least.
“I—I might have helped it along,” I admitted.
Matthew raised a brow. “You helped it along.”
Sheepishly, I nodded. “I did.” I pinched the skin lightly, demonstrating how. “See? I wanted the reminder of you.”
Matthew frowned. “You wanted my…”
“Mark. Yes.”
It sounded so vulgar, so barbaric, but that’s how he made me feel. Matthew was in full inspection mode now, and I was torn by the desire to keep him from looking for other flaws—flaws I did not want him to examine—and the need to feel him close. Thankfully, they were both solved the same way.
I slipped a hand around his neck again and pulled him closer, so we stood only inches apart. His nose touched mine, and he nuzzled me with a sweetness that ached.
“I can’t stand this.” I ran my nose over his neck, then bit softly, enjoying the shivers it produced all over his body. “Don’t you know I want your marks everywhere?”
He shuddered. I shuddered. For a moment, I imagined what it would be like. How it would feel if I didn’t have to spend twenty minutes in the mornings slathering makeup all over my body to hide the evidence of my home life. How it might feel to spend an entire night together with nowhere to go the next morning. To wake up with the knowledge that the day would continue together, and the day after that, and the day after that…
What it might be like to live with my daughter again?
He looked equally despondent. “Nina, maybe we shouldn’t—”
“Please,” I interrupted before the sadness became too unbearable. “Please, Matthew. I know this is just for today. But I told you—I need you. I’m begging. Mark me again.”
Like an animal, he growled and yanked me close so my almost-naked body was flush with his. His erection pressed against m
y thigh through his pants as he set his teeth to my neck.
“With fucking pleasure.”
He whirled us around, and then I was flying through the air and landed on the bed with a very unladylike shout. With swift, efficient movements, Matthew removed the rest of his clothing, then fell on top of me. Caging me with his arms, his smooth, muscled chest, his sleek, solid body.
“Your legs, baby.” He dropped kisses over my face, then moved around to take my earlobe between his teeth. “Wrap them around me.”
Obediently, I hooked my ankles around him, causing the heels of my sandals to dig into his backside.
Matthew hissed, but with more pleasure than pain. Instead, he pressed against me, teasing between my thighs. His teeth bit harder. I arched in his arms.
“Is this what you want, Nina?” he asked, moving his mouth over my neck, my chest, my breasts, and around again, sucking hard everywhere before releasing the skin from his mouth with a pop.
I gasped for air, but at the same time felt like I was breathing again for the first time all week. “Yes, Matthew. Oh, please.”
He slid into me, and I arched against the intrusion. He was big—bigger than anyone would expect of his inch or two over six feet. Enough that it usually took a moment or two for me to get used to him.
His teeth bit into my neck, and I squirmed.
“Do it back,” he ordered as he thrust even deeper. “Mark me too, baby. The way you know I love.”
My hands slid over his shoulder and I dug my nails in, pulling them up his back hard enough to leave trails. He arched and moaned from the pleasure and pain.
“Fuck,” he grunted, losing the last vestiges of his gentlemanly control. “Fuck, just like that!”
I panted like a dog in heat as he started to move. But as pleasure vibrated through me, another thought echoed along with our hot, deliciously animal instincts.
The same I’d heard since the first time I’d met him. Since the first time I welcomed this man into me.
Not lust, though we were coated in it.
Not love, though that was always there too.
As we gave ourselves up to the rhythm that was so instinctive, I was convinced it was written into my DNA. The world melted into oblivion. Matthew was no longer Matthew Luca Zola, brother, uncle, grandson, assistant district attorney currently prosecuting my husband. And I was no longer Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries Gardner, second grandchild to the de Vries family, mother, and wife of an alleged criminal.
The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2) Page 6
