by Tara Pammi
Even if she didn’t ask it, even if she didn’t demand her due, Vincenzo knew there would soon be a day when he would not be able to pay it.
* * *
How had Alex forgotten how transformative sex was between Vincenzo and her? The magic that seemed to be created when they came together? The rightness of it?
It was what had driven her to marry a man who’d been a complete stranger.
Alex whimpered at the emptiness as he pulled out completely but was rewarded not a moment later, when he climbed up onto the bed, on all fours, a primal need etched onto his stunning features. A drop of sweat dripped from his forehead and plopped onto the swell of her breast and his hungry eyes followed it. As if she were prey, and he meant to consume her.
And then he was back on her again, over her, inside her, around her. His weight on top of hers both a safe haven and a vortex of thrill at the same time.
He yanked her closer and thrust inside her, a deep growl rumbling out of him. Alex cried out at the welcoming hardness, at the incredible friction. She was lifted off the bed, hands on her buttocks pulling her up until she was astride his lap. The bare economy with which he arranged her to his liking, the strength in his lean corded limbs only amplified the thrall he had her under.
Alex wrapped her arms around his damp back, feeling him everywhere inside her in this position. The rub of her breasts against his chest, the intimacy of locking gazes with him deepened her pleasure to an unbearable level.
He was so hard and pulsing inside her, his breath warming every inch of her neck, his scent—a sweaty, masculine combination that filled her very senses. Their mouths locked again in a devastatingly hungry communion that she knew now would never be enough. She held on to him as if she could hold his heart to hers this way. She wanted to stay like that forever, in his arms, surrounded by him, and let time stretch from this moment to the next and the next.
Alex buried her face in his shoulder. Damp, soft, warm, he was an explosive taste on her tongue.
“Look at me, bella.”
She squeezed her eyes closed tighter, afraid of what he would see in them. Afraid of the wide chasm of need that opened up inside her when he held her like this, when he moved inside her.
“Please, V. Finish me off, won’t you? I want to come so desperately I feel like I’ll die if I don’t,” she said, imbuing every inch of want that thrummed through her into her words.
“I won’t move inside you while you hide away from me, bella,” he growled, a vein of tension in his voice. Every inch of him was taut under her fingers. He strummed a line of music on her bare back, his mouth at her temple. “I have become used to seeing myself in your eyes, Alessandra. I have become used to drowning in your gaze.”
Her head jerked up at the pure need in those words.
So she let their mouths tangle, their tongues lap at each other, their teeth nip at each other until it was hard to tell where she ended and where he began. His heart was a violent drum against her breast, his body a damp, sleek fortress of demand as he thrust up.
With each grunt of his, Alex moved up and down while need corkscrewed in her belly.
She let the sounds and scents that their bodies created together lead her on and on until no rational thought was possible. Vincenzo murmured, “That’s it, Alex. Stay with me.”
And then he was pressing her back into the bed, and holding her down with the thrust of his hips. Alex gave herself over to it as he rode her body hard, chasing his pleasure.
Alex opened her mouth against his bicep and dug her teeth in, knowing what he liked. Wanting him lost to this madness like her. “Faster, please, V,” she sobbed, her release an ephemeral breath away.
Her legs draped over his shoulders, his pelvis rubbed sinuously against her in exactly the right place every time he thrust.
“Touch yourself, bella. Come with me,” he commanded, and Alex moved her hand down from his chest to the apex of her thighs.
Eyes wide-open, she held Vincenzo’s gaze, and the emotion she saw there pushed her over the edge. “Oh,” she whispered, on and on, again and again, into his damp skin as her release flung her open wide.
There was nothing like the magic of her climax when he was inside her, something he made them both work for every time. Nothing like being swept up by the storm of pleasure that drove him toward his own.
Her release continued in short pulses. Vincenzo deepened his thrusts—once, twice, thrice—and fell onto her with a fierce growl. Her name on his lips was a crooning whisper that settled like a blanket of contentment over her naked skin. Alex wrapped her arms around him and held on, as if the physical act somehow guaranteed more than that. As if...
No, she wasn’t going there. This was all she needed. She’d chosen this path, she’d chosen him, and she’d stick to it come what may.
He stayed on top of her like that, for long, perfect moments. “You okay?” he asked finally.
Alex turned toward him and smiled. “More than okay,” she whispered, and he took her mouth in a rough, snarly kiss that warmed her all the way to her cold toes.
CHAPTER TEN
VINCENZO CAME AWAKE with a start.
Falling asleep anytime before predawn was such an unusual thing for him that he felt disoriented for several minutes after opening his eyes.
Restful sleep had always been impossible for him. For the longest time, he had forced himself to stay awake to keep an eye on his mother, afraid that she might do some irreparable damage to herself if he fell asleep.
Once he had achieved a measure of financial freedom to hire a round-the-clock nurse to ensure his mother’s care, it had been too late. His insomnia by then had been entrenched, a by-product of the numerous nights he’d spent through relentless years, building his fortune.
After that, he had a financial empire to rule.
But now, after only a few nights here in the villa, he was so used to the warm, languorous weight of Alessandra’s limbs vined around him that sleep came easily. To go to bed without her now seemed like a dreary prospect, even temporarily.
The thought disquieted him enough to rouse him completely. With slow movements, he disengaged her long limbs from his.
He swept a lock of hair away from her face and ran his fingers lightly over those blade-like cheekbones, his heart a strangely weighty thing in his chest. She moaned and rolled and the duvet slipped, offering glimpses of a smooth silky shoulder and the upper curve of a breast.
Instantly, he felt the answering tightness of his own body. Cristo, it had been six days since he’d found her in that conservatory, and they’d spent most of those six days burning through the heat between them.
It showed no signs of abating. He had been insatiable, and she’d been there with him every step of the way. Wrenching himself away from the temptation she offered, he pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt, made his way out of the bedroom.
The long corridors were quiet, the marble cold against his feet. He was not surprised when he arrived at the huge study, the seat of Leonardo’s power, the seat from where centuries of the masters of this revered dynasty had used their power.
To this day, Vincenzo still hadn’t figured out the older Brunetti, the true heir to all this. Massimo was more open, full of a caustic wit that made even Vincenzo smile. But in Leonardo... He could see shades of himself.
“Imagining yourself here?” came a voice behind him.
He turned to find Greta Brunetti standing just inside the door, her shoulders stiff.
“Imagination is for dreams out of your reach. This chair, this study, this house...it’s all within my grasp already. If you must know,” he said, surprised at his own rancor spewing into his words, but continuing anyway, “I was wondering what I would wreck first. This study, or the tall towers of BFI.”
She paled, and he felt a glimmer of regret. Only a glimmer.
“What
do you want, Mr. Cavalli?”
Her formal address raked at something inside him, but he refused to show it. “The time for action is long past for you,” he said, leaning against the massive dark oak table and crossing his ankles.
Her claw-like hands folded tightly against her midriff. “It’s never too late to realize one is wrong. Never too late to make amends.”
Shock drenched him, stealing away his anger. “Ah...it’s your fear of destruction speaking.”
“No, it’s not. Whatever you’re planning, it has little effect on me at this stage in life. But Alessandra, if I could do anything to—”
“She’s mine. I won’t give her up for anything in this world. She made her choice again not six days ago. She makes the choice to be mine every night,” he threw at the old woman shamelessly.
“I know that. I’ve already lost her respect, and that’s worse than anything you can do to me. But I ask you to remember that she’s an innocent in all this.”
“My mother was an innocent too.”
“I did what I thought was right at that time for my family. For years, I put up with my son’s antics. Tried to patch up his actions, dealt with the consequences. I had become hardened to everything else—I had no mercy or kindness or even love left in me, because he drained it all away.
“I only did my duty by Leo and Massimo. I...starved them of affection—”
“They had a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, shelter against storms. I had nothing,” Vincenzo threw at her, his chest rising and falling.
Not even a childhood. That was the price he had paid for her mercilessness.
He had never been allowed to be a child.
Her chin jerked down, and the old woman looked away for long, painful minutes. He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I will grant you that your grandsons are not the monsters I thought them.”
Alessandra’s faith in Leo and Massimo had not been bought with all this wealth or by favors, Vincenzo was learning with each day.
It was a hard pill to swallow: the genuine affection she shared with both men, being here in the seat of the family’s power for generations, being the outsider.
But worse was the realization—like a shard of glass stuck in his throat—that that affection, that bond with the Brunetti brothers, should have been his too. To see them over the breakfast table, to understand the easy camaraderie between them, to feel like the outsider when he had just as much right to that bond with them... It was a special kind of torment.
Alessandra’s hope that somehow he could cross the divide between them and build that bond with them—now, after everything he’d done to bring them down, after all the bitter hatred he’d nursed for them for over two decades... It was just that—a naive, pathetic hope that he refused to indulge in.
“That was despite my presence in their life,” Greta added softly, and Vincenzo turned to her with a frown. “You are under a grand delusion if you think Leo and Massimo had a nurtured upbringing in this home.
“After dealing with Silvio’s cruel antics and the fallout for so many years, I had nothing left to give them. They grew up to be honorable men, despite their abusive father and me.
“It was only when I married Alessandra’s father, Carlos, that I realized...how many mistakes I had made. How I had let my son and his actions change me into this...bitter woman who had not even a kind word for her grandsons.”
Vincenzo refused to indulge the thin thread of sympathy that reverberated within him at the woman’s words.
Nothing, nothing could forgive what she’d done to his mother and him. This was all Alessandra’s doing. The blasted woman was changing how he saw things, was undoing him at a cellular level.
“Per piacere, Vincenzo, do not...hurt Alessandra.”
“I’m to believe you care for her that much?”
“Si, I do. She gave me a chance to be someone else. To redeem myself. To...find love in my heart again. Please...”
“Promise me you won’t use me in this battle of yours?” Alessandra had asked him just before they’d danced at Antonio’s party.
And he’d given her his word. And yet, if he could end this war he’d waged all the sooner, all the more cleanly, by using her, if he could avoid the total destruction he’d originally planned, wouldn’t she ultimately be grateful to him? Wouldn’t she understand why he’d done it?
His thoughts ran away from him like a runaway freight train before he could hold on to one and process it.
If, once he’d pulled apart BFI, he left this house intact instead of bringing it down—this house that she loved so much, this house that had been her safe harbor... If Alessandra and he could build that family of theirs here, if they could have a fresh start in this place where once his dreams had been crushed... Wasn’t his revenge still complete?
Wasn’t justice served then?
“If she’s that important to you, then prove it to me,” he said, pushing away the quiet voice of conscience that threatened to take over if he let it.
Her skin whitened to such deathly paleness that Vincenzo felt a twinge of remorse. He had hated this woman so much for so long, and yet she looked like nothing but a husk of the person from his memory, who had with one merciless decision, ruined his childhood, his mother’s sanity.
The years in between should have etched that hardness she had showed them that day onto her face and yet, her eyes shone with conviction. With love, he realized, a cold chill taking over his skin.
Love that Alessandra had created in this old woman’s bitter heart.
Love and something like the longing that he had glimpsed in Alessandra’s eyes when she looked at him.
It was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen. Because he was beginning to realize he didn’t deserve it. It amplified into an urgent drumbeat in his blood—this need to finish what he’d started soon. Before it was too late.
“How?” the old woman asked, pulling him out of his own murky thoughts.
“Ask your grandson to step down as CEO of BFI.”
“Leonardo has worked far too hard for far too many years to just give up now.”
“Then make him.”
“It’s not—”
“Throw your support behind me at the next board meeting.”
The old woman swayed on her feet and reached for the support of the table. “If I back you, Leonardo will lose the controlling majority.”
“It is a far better fate than what I had initially decided for them both.”
Her eyes held his in a defiant challenge, an almost mirror image of the resolve he spied in his own eyes. A resemblance that he wanted to deny at any cost, and yet it was there. “For two centuries, only a Brunetti sat on that chair.” A hint of that Brunetti arrogance crept back into the woman’s words, her spine straightening. “It’s against tradition—”
“The choices you have are very simple,” Vincenzo said with a shrug. Any doubts he might have indulged in washed away at the flash of that Brunetti arrogance in her eyes. “Either keep BFI intact by throwing your support behind me or see all of it torn into pieces like I initially planned.
“With the first choice, you might even save Alessandra some heartache in the process. That’s what you came to ask me for, remember? That I don’t hurt Alessandra in all this.”
“And you would use my affection for her this way?”
“Your words, your actions created the man I am today. You only have yourself to blame.”
“This will break her heart. You’re truly—”
“My father’s son, si? So I have been told. You’d better not tell her then.” He refused to think of what would happen if Alessandra found out. He refused to let it sway him when he was so close to being done. Cristo, he so badly wanted to be done. He wanted that future life with Alessandra to begin right now. “Alessandra has already chosen me. Ch
osen a future with me,” he said, letting the old woman see his victory. “If I take over BFI, this can all be over for her too. She won’t feel so caught up between her past and her future.”
He left the room without looking back, a sort of desperation filling him to see Alessandra in that bed. To hold her. To reassure himself that she...
He felt dirty. As if he completely deserved the loathing he’d seen in the old woman’s eyes.
He reached the bedroom, and only then did air fill his lungs. He stripped fast and got back into the bed. Like clockwork, Alessandra reached for him and burrowed into him. Only then did his heart slow its savage race.
“Did we make a mistake, V?”
Had she asked him that only a few nights ago?
And he realized with a sinking dread that the answer was yes. He had made a mistake. He had involved a woman who deserved far better than him in his life. He had tangled with a woman who deserved to be loved, to be worshipped. Who didn’t deserve to be used as currency against the woman she loved.
But as Alex wrapped her long limbs around him, as she pulled him over her sweet temptation of a body, as she took his mouth in a warm kiss, as he lazily thrust into her and built them both up into that delicious frenzy again, Vincenzo didn’t even consider for one second if he could give her up to fix the mistake. Release her from his life.
He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
Because she was his. Not the prize he’d once so foolishly thought her. But so much more.
His salvation and his sanctuary.
* * *
Alessandra was still riding the high of the evening as she walked into the New York penthouse, put away her portfolio, stripped and went into the shower in quick succession. Her skin tingled as she thought of seeing Vincenzo again after four long days apart, of returning the favor he had done her in the one way she knew he would appreciate.
The warm spray from the powerful jet invigorated her as she smiled, anticipation building like a current inside her.
