by Lynne Graham
Slowly, she turned into a languorous weight on his muscles. Sinking his fingers into her thick hair, he whispered sweet nothings in Italian. “You’re human, bella. Not horrible. What might have been taunts us all.”
Her fingers dug into his muscles, her mouth open against his shoulder. “You were right, you know.”
“About what?” he whispered.
“I’m impulsive. I’m… I run away from hard situations. I take things on for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes, I’m…”
“What, Alessandra?”
“I’m scared, V. So much.”
“About what, bella?”
She took a bracing breath. “What if I’m not the right person to raise Charlie, V? What if that jealousy I initially bore for him translates into my future actions? What if he can see it in me? What if he ends up believing I don’t really love him? What if you were right, and I haven’t thought this through completely?
“He’s so scared right now. Only seven years old and he’s been through so much already. I can’t be another person who lets him down.”
The fear in her voice cut Vincenzo deeply. With rough movements, he turned her until she was looking into his eyes. With her own puffy from her tears, her hair a ragged mess, she was still the most real thing he’d ever laid eyes on. “Listen to me, Princess! You came storming back into this marriage just for him. Your love for him shines through in every word, every action. Trust me—he knows it.
“You don’t know how amazing it is to see your strength, cara. You hated asking me for help, yet you did. Fighting me with everything you had. For Charlie. He’s incredibly fortunate to have you.”
He pressed another kiss into her hair, loving the silky tumble of it. Breathing in the essence of this woman who fought to do the right thing even when she was terrified. “It made me see things in you I’ve never seen before.”
She stilled in his arms, her mouth a warm heat against the hollow of his throat. Her fingers dug into his muscles, but he welcomed the contact. “Like what?”
He shrugged, loath to share his doubts. Doubts she’d created in him.
“I thought of what a ferocious mother you’d be to any children we have,” he finally answered.
She moved out of his arms and the loss of her warmth, her softness was acute.
He swallowed the urge to pull her back into his embrace. “You’re one of those women around whom families are built. Your loyalty…staggers me. You give back everything you receive a hundredfold.”
“And yet you would change the very core of me.”
“No,” he said with careful emphasis. “I only reminded you that I had a right to your loyalty too.”
She looked away and then back, and he noted the resolve in her eyes. He could practically see her emerge from this bout of intense grief, bent but not broken. Ready to take on whatever came next. And that determination aroused him as much as the beautiful dress offering him flashes of long, honey-colored limbs.
“Do you think we made a mistake?”
He didn’t need to ask her to clarify. “No.”
“I don’t want to think of…us having children for a long time. Not until things are…settled. With Charlie. With us.”
“That’s fair,” he said softly, swallowing away the instinctive protest.
“Would you forgive me if I did something like that?”
“Like what?”
“If I cheated on you, like my mother did to Steve. If I slept with another—”
“No!” His answer bounced off the walls and the floor, increasing in volume until it was reverberating all around them.
The idea of losing Alessandra—to anything, much less another man… He felt shaken up from the inside. On levels he didn’t understand. A few months ago, he’d been unaware of her existence and today—he had no words for all the feelings she evoked in him. Only that she was coming to mean so much more than he could ever have imagined.
Too much.
He took a deep breath. “What is it that you’re trying to achieve with these ridiculous questions, bella?”
Defiance glared at him from those golden-brown depths. “Establishing boundaries, I suppose.”
“That question is moot, Alessandra, because I don’t believe you would ever do such a thing to me.
“Strip me bare of every rule I’ve ever lived by, si.
“Drive me crazy with your stunts to protect those two bastards from me, si.
“Make me pant after you like a damn dog in heat, si,” he bit out, with a self-deprecating shake of his head. “But to cheat on me is to cheat on the life we want to build with each other—so, no, bella, that’s not you.”
And in that moment of vulnerability, of giving voice to things he’d never admitted before, even to himself, Vincenzo knew exactly how much she was changing him. Antonio had been right to worry.
From the first day he had met her, she had bowled him over with her beauty, but even more with her generosity, her integrity, her constant attempts to open herself up to others.
Alessandra made him want to be a different man. A better man.
A man who could open himself to the possibility of a relationship with his brothers, a man who gave others the second chance that he’d never been given. A man who could even consider forgiving the woman who had directly ruined his life, who had so thoroughly broken his mother’s heart that she’d never recovered from it.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. His path had been set so long ago that he didn’t know how to choose a new one now. He didn’t know how to be a man whose every waking thought was not filled with taking everything that had been denied him. How to be the man who had to face all the things he’d already done in the name of revenge.
“I was insanely jealous of Anna. How much she’s a part of your past, a part of your present.”
He wasn’t shocked by the sudden turns their conversation took anymore. Neither did he derive any kind of satisfaction from the revelation. It had been a power trip to learn how much he affected Alex. But that was before. Before he realized that it worked both ways. Before he’d begun to view himself through her eyes. “She’s firmly in my past. You’re my future.”
“I want to trust this so much. And not just for Charlie’s sake. I need to believe in this marriage, V, in you.
“I want to stop caring about everything else. About Leo and Massimo, about BFI, about the entire world. I want what you promised me on the island, our life together.”
His chest felt like it would burst open, so much emotion filled him. “All you need is to take a step toward me, bella, that final step.”
“Then why does it feel like defeat?”
He shook his head. “I want your surrender, bella. Not your defeat.”
Some unnamed emotion glittered in her eyes. Pulling the damned dress away from those legendary legs, she crawled toward him on her knees, flashes of bare golden flesh toying with him.
Her hands on his knees pushed them apart and she moved close, intoxicatingly close. The tips of her breasts brushed against his chest, her flat belly against his. Her fingers directed his hands to her thighs with no hesitation. The silk of her skin under his calloused fingers, the incredible scent of her teasing his nostrils… She was a feast he’d been denied for far too long.
“Alex, bella, we don’t have to do this tonight, when you’re still grieving—”
“No, I need this tonight. I need this now.” Her hand moved to his neck, then upward to sink her fingers into his hair. Her warm lips skated over every inch of his face, branding him, staking a claim. “I don’t want to think. I just want to feel.”
Her breath was a warm benediction against his other cheek. He felt engulfed by her. Every moment, every day, she was beginning to own another piece of him. His breath began to come in harsh pants, as if he was trying to catch up to her. And he
had a strangely feverish feeling that he would forever be trying to catch up.
“But sometimes I wonder if you’re the devil or an angel,” she whispered, the words flickering over his skin as she shifted that gloriously lithe body closer. And closer. Her lips descended toward his, her grip on his hair getting tighter. Until his head was tilted up to look into her eyes.
“All I care is that you’re mine.” That first press of her mouth against his, after so long, sizzled right through his skin. “Please, V…say you’re mine.”
Words came and fell away from his mouth as she looked deep into his eyes. He considered and threw away platitudes that had no meaning, lies that would damage the surrender she was giving him. Surrender he wasn’t sure he deserved.
And then they came, so easily, slumbering awake from some deep place he didn’t even know existed within himself. They burned in his chest, lit a fiery path through his throat as he tried to process the weight of the feeling. Of how unprepared he was for them.
“I’m yours, bella. Like I’ve never been anyone else’s.”
She came at him like a wild storm then, pushing into him, pressing into him, shaking the very ground he stood on. Her mouth… Madre di Dio, in all the wildness, her mouth was a lush escape. A warm invitation to heaven.
“And I’m yours. All of me is yours,” she whispered frantically against his mouth, a benediction he hadn’t even known he’d been waiting for.
Vincenzo cupped her hips, eager for more of her taste. He growled when she sank her teeth into his lower lip and then swiped that wicked tongue over it. Desire pounded at him, urging him to pull the flimsy dress up and away, until he could reach the hot apex of her sex. Patience was a hard-earned battle as he buried his mouth in her neck. The warm, sweet taste of her skin calmed him even as it aroused him, and he nipped at it with his teeth.
She rocked her hips into him at that, making him uncomfortably hard in his trousers. “I missed you, bella. I missed this with you,” he whispered, licking the tiny mark on her neck. “But I’ll be damned if I do this here, on the floor like an eager schoolboy when I can think of a hundred different ways of torturing you for all the months I’ve waited.”
Her laughter enveloped him. She clung to him as he easily pushed them both off the floor. He was stunned at how much he had missed that laughter of hers too. The open joy she found in the most intimately carnal things he did to her.
“I would have much preferred the floor if for nothing else that it clearly says you can’t wait until we get to the bedroom to have me.”
“Ah…but I want to take my time with you. You cut our honeymoon disastrously short and there’s so many things we still have to discover about each other, si?”
She shivered at that and he took her mouth roughly, thrusting his tongue into the warm cavern of her mouth. His muscles burned with the need for more… More contact, more friction, more of her. She and him… It had never been just sex between them.
Antonio had seen it. Had warned him.
And yet, Vincenzo couldn’t even imagine controlling this somehow, much less walking away from it.
CHAPTER NINE
“I’M YOURS, BELLA.”
Alessandra hugged those words close as Vincenzo deposited her on her bed and devoured her with those penetrating eyes. The luxurious sheets were cold against her skin, a startling contrast to the heat pouring off the man, looking down at her as if she were his downfall and salvation all at the same time. For long, painfully pregnant moments, he did nothing but look at her. Pushing up on her elbows, Alex returned his stare without hesitation.
Like I have been never been anyone else’s. Those quiet words resonated around them, explosive in the silence, though she knew they had been given reluctantly.
Her breath hitched in her throat as urgent hands landed on her knees and pushed them indecently apart, making space for himself between her legs. The silk of her dress whispered sinuously against the sheets as those very same hands found her buttocks and pulled her to the edge of the bed. Until his hips kissed her inner thighs. His fingers dug into her bottom as he tilted her up. Until his erection glided against the hottest part of her.
Alex thrust involuntarily, the shape and weight of that hardness making her feverishly delirious for more. Fingers clutching the sheets, she let out a moan when Vincenzo rocked against her, his hips doing that wickedly erotic thing that had made her go crazy that first time.
Hungry gaze holding hers captive, he pushed aside her flimsy thong and traced a finger up and down her wet folds. Circled the hot place she needed him to touch without quite giving in to her.
“Please, V,” she whispered, desperate for the clawing under her skin to subside.
“You mean this is better than your new technological friend?” It sounded like a tease, but the fire in his eyes told her it was anything but. His hands cupped her knees. Bent over her like that, he looked like a warrior intent on plunder.
Alex could barely hold the whimper at the loss of the acute pressure. “You never let me finish the story that night,” she murmured now.
“Si?” His tongue licked at her mouth, his flat, hard abdominal muscles gliding temptingly against her wet folds. She slid up and down on the bed, and he rewarded her with a movement of his own.
Alex groaned, her lower belly corkscrewing at the contact.
“Finish it now, Alessandra.”
The quiet command sank into her pores. Alex opened her eyes and smiled. “I had an orgasm that night, yes. But it felt empty without your whispered commands in my ear, without your body pushing down on me, without the warmth of your skin against mine… Nothing feels as good as you do, V. Nothing in the entire wide world.”
His answering grin, full of wicked charm and self-satisfied arrogance, was so devastatingly gorgeous that she reveled in it.
And then his hand drifted down again, down her belly to that aching place, rubbing the sensitive bundle of nerves with those wickedly clever fingers. His thumb drew erotic circles while he thrust a finger inside her.
“Cristo, I’ve missed this warmth of yours,” he said, his gaze devouring every dazed expression in her eyes. “Make those sounds for me, bella.”
His fingers moved again with a mesmerizing rhythm that lit up every nerve center in Alex’s body. When he bent down and took her mouth in a sensual tangle of a kiss, she clung to him, her body writhing under him, chasing that rhythm.
“Tell me what you need,” he asked, like he’d done every time they made love. Every time, he learned her body by making her learn her own. Every time, he pushed her to new discoveries about herself and what she liked. “Tell me what will make this all the sweeter for you, tesoro.”
“Touch me here,” she said, cupping her aching breasts. Just imagining his mouth there had sent her off the edge that night she’d had her empty orgasm.
“Pull the straps down.”
Alex raised her hands automatically, every cell in her body attuned to his demands, ready to surrender to his every wish. Slowly, with movements that made those gray eyes darken into something indecently erotic, she hitched each index finger under the straps and flicked them off her shoulders. But the straps didn’t fall all the way down and she locked them about her elbows by stretching her hands toward him.
“I want to touch you first,” she demanded in a husky voice, knowing that once he got his hands on her flesh, her all too willing flesh, she was going to be cast into a vortex of sensations. Of need and pleasure.
If she wanted to take a little of him, wanted to ensure he was as far gone as she in this, she needed to do it now. She needed to touch, caress, kiss, every inch of him before he took over.
“You haven’t tormented me enough, bella?” he said, his thumb tracing her collarbone, while the other dipped into her wetness, and out, in a mesmerizing rhythm that threatened to steal her resolve.
Fingers on his wrist
, she stilled his hand. “I want to be more than a participant in this. I want to take something from you too.”
He dipped his head in a sudden movement and took her mouth in a rough kiss that mocked his control. “You think I haven’t given myself to this…to you?” he whispered against her mouth, his breath melded with her own.
“But whatever you give,” she said, pressing her face into his throat, tasting his skin, “it’s not…”
He didn’t let her finish. As if he knew she was about to say. That whatever he gave, it wasn’t enough until she had his heart.
She couldn’t bear to look at him, to see the answer in his eyes.
And he… For the first time since she’d known him, Vincenzo didn’t meet her gaze. He capitulated. Lost the battle, she knew, instead of the war.
Long lashes hiding the expression in his eyes, he brought her hands to his shirt. “Then do what you will with me, Princess.”
Alex blinked away at the hotness that threatened behind her eyes. She was going to live for what she did have.
Him.
This.
She was going to build the family she’d never had. She was going to give it her all, regardless.
She didn’t hesitate as she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it out of his trousers. Almost frantic with the need to touch, she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and ran her hands, palms down, from the tight muscles in his shoulder to his jutting collarbone and then down, tracing the ridges of his chest to the rock-hard muscles of his abdomen.
Up and down, left and right, she zigzagged her hands, her cold hands, over his warm, taut skin. Though he stayed still, she didn’t miss the way his breathing became shallow, even harsh, with each path she traced on his skin. Pushing herself up, up, she followed the path her hands traced on his chest and abdomen with her mouth.
He tasted of sweat and salt and something so gloriously masculine that she whimpered. This close to him, each breath he inhaled and exhaled hit the upper curves of her breasts in a tantalizing rhythm that had her nipples tauten, begging for more.
