And then came the moment he’d been waiting for: the gazebo. He inched his body down slowly as he continued to stroke his hand along her arm until they were face-to-face.
He pulled her chin toward his face, and he placed the softest of kisses on the tip of her nose.
“Do you know the moment I knew I’d fallen head over heels for you?” he said.
She stared into his eyes, shaking her head almost imperceptibly. It was a start.
“When I saw you, this tiny, beautiful woman hiding behind that drab outfit, giving that bouncer a big heap of shit. You were probably the only woman there not trying to parlay her looks into something. Instead, you were just being you. Beautiful, maddening, vexing, you.
“Really?” she said, her voice elevated in a tone of hopefulness. “You didn’t think I was just the most insufferable jerk?”
He kissed her lips softly. “Oh, maybe a little bit,” he said. “But I admired your moxie. You don’t see it too much in those circles. And when you called me a miserable pig. What a blow to my fragile ego that was! I loved that you dared say that, to a complete stranger, no less. And the next day at that show. Oh, God, was I bored. I was only there to cheer on Sandro’s girlfriend Gia, so there I was hoping to find a seat near you—”
“You looked awfully comfortable next to that woman you came with,” she said with a pout.
“Did it work?” he said. “I hoped you’d see me with her, maybe stir up a little jealousy in you.”
“You did that on purpose?”
“Of course. All I wanted was to learn more about that sassy reporter with whom I was instantly smitten,” he said. “In the meantime, I was stuck watching that dreadful show, with those sullen-faced models dressed like they were going off to war. And all I could think about was the upcoming qualifying matches for the World Cup and whether Monaforte would be good enough to land a coveted berth in the tournament. Well, that, and you. I’d found you so very intriguing, so yeah, I was mostly thinking about you.”
“Can I be honest with you?” she said.
He nodded, his hands grazing along her body as he pulled her closer to him. “I would hope that you would be.”
“I felt so insecure covering Fashion Week,” she said. “I was just this plain reporter, up against these legendary beauties and all of the beautiful people who go along with it. Understand, I was totally fine attending press conferences with political leaders and things like that. None of that intimidated me. But to be surrounded by these perfect women, and me, well, not so perfect. I just felt diminished professionally, having to cover this event that seemed so shallow. But when I met Taylor and we became friends, well, I realized I was the one who was being shallow, making false presumptions about people based on superficial knowledge I had.”
“So that explains your feelings about Taylor, but what about me? Clearly, you weren’t warming up to my charm without a fight.”
She sighed. “I guess I presumed you were just some fashionista trustafarian,” she said.
“I’m not even sure what that is, but it sounds like something you’d need antibiotics for.” He grinned at her.
“You know, like a rich kid resting on the laurels of his wealthy family, only in the fashion world,” she said. “But of course, that wasn’t fair of me, was it? It took me a while to realize that you were an actual flesh-and-blood human being—albeit a disturbingly handsome one—with feelings and foibles, who loved and lost and loved again. And I realized—almost too late—what an idiot I was on so many levels and that the biggest thing I was afraid to lose was your trust. Because how can you ever trust someone who might one day reveal their deepest, most private secrets? I couldn’t do that—fail both you and me.”
“Oh, yeah, you with that interview,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the things you were asking me. I mean you really wanted to bury me, didn’t you?”
She stuck out her lower lip in a pout. “I was kind of being a jerk. But does it help to know I realized it before it was too late to do anything about it?”
“It’s a good lesson to learn,” he said, rubbing his thumb on her hand affectionately. “Can I ask you something?”
He was circling kisses on her face and he knew he was distracting her, but that was okay.
“I suppose.”
“When, exactly, did you know you were falling for me?”
She thought for a minute. “At the fashion show, when you gave me that wry smile and the wave.”
“You mean when you stuck your tongue out at me?”
She grinned. “Well! I had a funny way of showing my affection.”
“Speaking of affection,” he said, reaching his hands beneath her T-shirt and deftly lifting it over her head. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers as one hand found the front latch to her bra and unsnapped it. He groaned.
“Larkin,” he said, breathless. “Come here, you little vixen.”
He opened his mouth to hers and their tongues met while her hands slipped his sweater off. She worked each button of his shirt, until finally, chests bare, they were skin to skin.
“Will you forgive me if I might have to rush things this first time?” he said, gasping a little. “I’ve been waiting so long, I just don’t think I have the patience I should for such a special occasion.”
She smiled. “You might give new meaning to the phrase ‘someday my prince will come.’”
He laughed and rolled her over, unbuttoning her jeans and skimming then down over her legs, tossing them aside. Once he quickly discarded his own, it was just them, their bodies pressed together, their mouths melded as one.
Luca thought back to the signs that his horse would be calmed: visibly relaxing muscles, lowering of the head, releasing of the breath, and—finally—showing interest in the very thing that had scared them.
He parted Larkin’s legs with his knees, settling himself between her warm, wet center. She reached her hand down and helped him stroke her with his hard length.
“You good with this?” he asked, licking along her lips.
“I couldn’t be better,” she said, helping him slip inside of her, where he remained for a minute, deep inside, relishing the feeling of it before slowly withdrawing and plunging back in.
He reached down and stroked Larkin as he moved in and out of her, his other hand playing with her nipple while their mouths remained locked, their tongues tangling as their bodies joined together.
Larkin’s breathing became heavier and she wrapped her legs around Luca, pulling him in as deeply as she could. He gave three hard thrusts and let go just as she tumbled over the edge, the two of them locked in an embrace as he pumped himself into her.
They lay like that for a while, together, relishing their warmth, their bodies spent.
Finally, he slipped from her body and lay next to her. “You doing okay?” he asked as he dragged his fingers along her torso.
She smiled. “Couldn’t be better.”
Chapter Thirty
Sometime in the middle of the night, they found their way to Luca’s bedroom. Later, as dawn broke, Luca gratefully discovered Larkin lying next to him, their limbs tangled together.
“You stayed,” he said, planting a kiss on her breast before his mouth settled over her nipple. “I was so worried you’d pull another runner.”
“Whatever would make you think I’d run scared like that?” she said with a wink as she shifted her way down the bed, kissing and licking a trail to his cock, which was happily awaiting her undivided attention. She wrapped her hand around his hard length and spread her lips over the head, teasingly pulling him into her mouth in small increments.
“You’re killing me,” he said.
“They don’t call an orgasm la petite mort for nothing, you know.”
She continued to suck and lick and take as much as she could into her mouth until he pleaded for mercy. Only then did she climb up his body and straddle him, sliding herself over his hard length, taking it slow and savoring it.
If this is a little death, I guess I’m all for it,” Luca said, groaning.
~*~
The two spent the entire day in Luca’s apartment, taking breaks only to catch a nap or grab a meal, which, conveniently enough, was delivered right to his apartment.
At dusk, Luca called Isabella, just to make sure she’d done everything she needed to do.
“Little brother, I’ve got your back,” she said. “She’s going to absolutely die.”
Little did she know they’d been dying all day long in the best of ways. La petite mort, indeed.
“I owe you one, Bell.”
“Not at all, Luca. It’s on me. Knock her dead.”
Larkin came back to the living room. “Who were you talking to?”
“Nobody,” he said. “Just my sister checking in. All good.” He looked at her pointedly. “I have something I’d like to show you, if you wouldn’t mind coming downstairs, though.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “I’m kind of looking a little slovenly in my T-shirt and jeans.”
“You look beautiful, Larkin,” he said, kissing her on the tip of her nose. “Just the way you are.”
He grabbed her hand and ushered her down the hall. They took a back staircase, which led to a door that opened onto an Italian garden, still beautiful despite the onset of fall. They walked through the maze of greenery and just past it, Luca closed his hands over her eyes.
“Now, you have to just trust me,” he said. They turned a corner and walked another hundred or so steps, and he opened a door, helping her through the doorway.
“Okay,” he said, removing his hands from over her eyes. “You can look now.”
Larkin opened her eyes to see the most breathtaking thing she’d ever laid eyes on: they were in a glassed-in gazebo, ablaze with the light of hundreds and hundreds of candles.
“Luca!” she squealed. “This is impossible! You did this? For me?”
She spun around the room, taking in the warm glow of the candles, the breathtakingly beautiful striations of the late-autumn sunset, and this man—this man she’d refused for too long because she couldn’t imagine she was good enough for him.
He held out his hand to her. “Care to dance?”
She reached out her hand as he pulled her toward him and she nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder as he settled his hands at the base of her back. Slowly, he guided her around the gazebo as the full moon began to rise.
“Bet you didn’t know I had my own gazebo,” he said. “The French call them the l’orangerie. Of course, Sandro’s is a limonaia. Oranges, lemons, I’m an equal opportunity fan of these things. After all,” he added, “what better way to woo a somewhat stubborn reporter?”
She sighed. “So you want to know when I thought maybe I was falling in love with you?”
He looked at her, eyes wide. “You mean you admit that you love me?”
She smiled. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “But I give up. When?”
“When what?” she said, giggling, playing coy.
“When you knew you were in love with me.”
She hit him playfully. “I didn’t say I was in love with you, but I thought maybe I was falling in love with you.”
“Semantics,” he said. “So when was it?”
“When you knew all the details of the gazebo scene,” she said. “Right down to the pinecone.”
“I guess it took you a while,” he said. “Because I knew it pretty much all along. Which is why I orchestrated that interview with you.”
“I wanted to kill you.”
“But then you wanted to, uh, not kill me.”
She laughed. “Yeah, that. I really didn’t want to kill you.”
“Until you ran scared.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Forgive me?”
He pulled her closer and spun her around. “You were never going to actually conduct an interview with me, were you?” he said with a broad smile.
“You were never going to actually give me one, now were you?” she said, that sphinxlike grin on her face.
“But I’ve got so much more I’m happy to give you if you’re game.”
“Any game that involves you, I’m in.”
~*~
Thank you so much for reading A Court Gesture! I hope you enjoyed it! If so, please help others find this book:
Help other people find this book by writing a review.
Sign up for my new releases email so you can find out about the next book as soon as it’s available and get fun giveaways.
Like my Facebook page.
And I love to hear from readers! Let me know what you think about my books! You can write to me at [email protected], and visit me on the web at www.jennygardiner.net.
I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know the characters in the It’s Reigning Men series! And no worries, I am planning some other stories in the series, but I also decided to spin it off into a new series called The Royal Romeos, featuring the winemaking Romeo family from the Chianti region of Italy. You met Alessandro Romeo in A Court Gesture, and I hope you’ll read on to see what’s been happening with Sandro since you met him in Milan with Luca....
RED HOT ROMEO
Chapter One
Alessandro Romeo was enjoying a beautiful sunset, sipping his Negroni, neat, on the terrace of his winery’s palazzo that overlooked his family’s vast estate when he noticed a fat curl of dark smoke trailing skyward on the other side of the sprawling Tuscan manor home. Quickly setting his drink aside, he raced down the terrace steps, rushed through a gauntlet of tall, narrow cypress trees and across the Italian garden in front of the palazzo as the acrid smell of smoke grew stronger and blackened clouds of it enveloped more of the once melon-colored late-day sky.
In the distance, he spotted a tiny white sports car racing down the estate’s long, cypress-lined driveway just as he finally came upon the source of the now choking smoke: his beloved Lamborghini Aventador Superveloce—a cool half million dollars of premier driving pleasure—sizzling away with the crackle of fire and lick of flames that were embracing his dream car and turning it into a veritable conflagration.
“Aiuto!” Sandro shouted, calling for the farm hands to help, if not to salvage his burning car, then at least to keep the vehicle from exploding and injuring anyone. “Help! Bring water, prontissimo!”
The Cantine dei Marchesi Romeo was a vineyard with many employees still working into late afternoon trimming back grape leaves, so within a minute several workers had arrived, directing hoses and buckets of water to try to douse the fire until all that was left were the charred remains of his beloved sports car. Sandro felt grateful that at least they’d stopped the fire before the car exploded.
“Vaffanculo, si strega,” Sandro said, shaking his fist in rage toward the now long-departed car he’d seen racing away from the scene. Fuck off, you witch. It didn’t take much to deduce who’d torched the thing: he’d just seen the taillights of his hot-tempered on-again/off-again girlfriend Gia Sandretti’s convertible trailing down the long drive. The woman had already resorted to plenty of other extreme ways to express her irrational jealous rages, including recently impaling him with the heel of one of her Manolo Blahniks—which resulted in five stitches to his arm—so he knew immediately this bore her telltale fingerprints.
He’d tried to extricate himself from the relationship more times than he could count at this point; it hadn’t been but a few months into dating her that he knew she had a streak of green running through her like a river of toxic waste. Alessandro couldn’t so much as inadvertently glance at another woman, even in a magazine, without Gia flipping out on him, which meant the usual stream of foul language spewed at him alongside crazed accusations and the occasional hurled glass object or other breakables.
By nature a genial and fun-loving guy, he’d put up with it, thinking that eventually she’d find her way to another man to harass, but as much as he
tried to let her go gently so as not to trigger her impetuous fury, she simple wasn’t getting the hint.
Sure Gia, a stunningly statuesque dark-haired brunette, was gorgeous, but he hadn’t taken to calling her Crazy Gia for nothing. And the last thing Sandro needed in his life was a drama queen fashion model with no self-control who acted more like a secret police interrogator than a lover.
Sandro had met Gia at one of the many social functions he normally attended as principle of the world-famous Cantine dei Marchesi Romeo winemakers. His was an Italian family with a history of six hundred years of wine-making and roots that reached back to the days of Italian nobility and the famed house of Savoy. His family had immediate ties to the royals of neighboring Monaforte as well, as his uncle Enrico, Duke of Santo Miele, was married to that country’s Queen Ariana.
Officially Alessandro’s title was Marchese Alessandro Romeo, but he tended to downplay that archaic terminology except when necessary at official events, where the cachet of the royal title helped with his family business. Or as was more often the case in the past: when it helped him pick up beautiful women.
No doubt it’s what drew Gia to him in the first place, aside from his handsome good looks. He wore his thick, wavy dark hair to near his shoulders, often pulled back in a ponytail, and sported a neatly-trimmed goatee beard and moustache that proved irresistible to many women. His sincere, brown eyes caused them to swoon even more. Throw in a royal title, a famous family name, and plenty of wealth, and Sandro was a delicious catnip that most women simply couldn’t resist. Except when it came to nutters like Gia, who seemed to want to push him away all while clinging desperately to him as if he was a gangrenous appendage. But this was the last straw with her; this time he would file a police complaint and ensure that she was no longer allowed anywhere near him or have anything to do with him. Enough was enough.
A Court Gesture Page 14
