Smudges of flour dusted her bared forearms, her white apron, and most notably from the large wooden rolling pin she clutched confidently in one hand, in prime clobbering position.
“Get out,” she said to Liam. She squinted up at him, not caring about the way she had to arch her neck to do so, not caring that Liam was more than head-and-shoulders taller than her.
“Madam, please, this isn’t what you think. I would never…”
“Go,” Mrs. Rosselini said. She shook the rolling pin for emphasis, some flour dust floating and eddying to the floor.
Even my heart melted at that. And no matter how part of me would feel oh so satisfied at watching him catch a couple good whacks, I knew that wouldn’t be right.
Even I couldn’t help but smile at the sudden maternal display.
“It is okay, Mrs. Rosselini. We were just having a discussion. It’s okay. But thank you, really.”
“You cannot trust the handsome ones,” she said, still squinting up at Liam, who still wasn’t certain how to react to her, “My husband, he was handsome. But the handsome, it goes away with the years. Then you see what is left behind. Yes, then you will see.”
She prodded Liam in the shoulder with the rounded handle of the pin. It left an irregular flour smudge on the fine tailored jacket that had me cringing.
Liam could have easily shooed her back down the stairs, rolling pin or not. But he didn’t. And then I got an inkling of what I would see should the years ever take from him his “handsome,” as Mrs. Rosselini put it.
In order to defuse the situation I had to get up and lead Mrs. Rosselini back to the door, assuring her as she went slowly down the stairs that I could take care of myself. She smelled of fresh baked bread and the icing sugar she used on some of the pastries.
“Take it,” she said, offering me the rolling pin, more flour dust floating away from it.
“I will be fine,” I insisted, waving away the offer. I listened with some amusement as she mumbled a few particularly colorful Italian curses as she rounded the corner. The door to her shop opened and closed and I knew Liam and I were alone again.
My anger rekindled when I turned and saw Liam there still. There was the ghost of a smile on his laps. Enough of one to stir the embers of my anger.
“That was… unexpected,” Liam said, his anger also apparently deflated in the face of Mrs. Rosselini’s display. He wiped at the smudge of flour on his jacket.
“Next time I won’t send her away,” I said.
“So there will be a next time, then?”
I grabbed my messenger bag from my bed, slung it over my shoulder. The weight of the books had it biting into my skin, but I didn’t mind. Seeing Mrs. Rosselini disappear at the bottom of the staircase had given me an idea. And Liam here was a perfect excuse to leave my suddenly cramped flat.
“Not any time soon. I am still angry with you,” I replied.
He’d moved so that he stood in front of the door, so that I’d have to get past him to leave. I shouldered him aside, Liam taking a step back to maintain his balance. I grabbed the latch and yanked the door open.
“Don’t go,” he said.
“Don’t try and stop me.”
He grabbed my upper arm as I set foot on the landing, his grip not quite painful, but close.
“Let me go,” I said, baring my teeth.
“I’m not letting you slide back into your rut, all comfortable in your misery again. I care about you, Emma.”
I tugged at his grip, but he held firm. That fire started inside of me again. No one, it seemed, could make me run as hot and cold as Liam Montgomery could.
“Let. Go!” I said, tearing savagely.
“Not until we finish this conversation.” He tugged me closer. Close so that I could smell the musk of his aftershave, see the wild glint in his baby blue eyes, the way his pulse pounded in his throat.
I grabbed the loose knot of his tie, squeezing it so hard my knuckles went white. I couldn’t believe the nerve he had, not letting me go, grabbing me like that. Looking at me with eyes so blue they should have been frozen but instead burned with an incredible intensity.
I don’t know who pulled the other closer, me or him. Maybe it was both of us at the same time.
In any case, it came to the same result. One moment we stared each other down, the next I felt the heat of his mouth pressed against mine, his arm snaking around my waist to pull my body against his.
I kissed him just as hard as he kissed me, pulling his bottom lip between my teeth and relishing the way he groaned when I bit down on him.
That fire inside me I’d mistaken for rage earlier was something else. Desire. My inner thighs burned with the heat of it.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I said, my chest and shoulders suddenly heaving as I gulped in air, trying to meet my body’s increased demand.
My breath hitched in my throat when I felt how much he wanted me, too.
“Keep telling yourself that,” he replied.
“Just shut up and kiss me.” I grabbed the back of his head, my fingers squeezing cruelly when I pulled his face to mine again.
He wrenched my messenger bag off my arm and threw it to the other side of the room. Then he started tearing at my clothes. Rather, we began tearing at each other’s clothes.
His jacket dropped into the flour dust on the floor, not caring about it one bit. He popped the button on my jeans and then shoved his hands down the back of my pants, manhandling me, picking me up off the ground, his fingers digging hard into my ass with the sudden ferocity of his desire.
Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach out and swing the open door shut before inquiring eyes could see what all the commotion was about. More surprising, I remembered to throw the deadbolt into place as well.
But then all bets were off.
He had me stripped down entirely seemingly before I could blink again. His mouth found my throat, leaving a trail of hot, wet love nips that traveled down to the spot where my shoulder joined my neck, all the while trying to strip out of his own clothes.
It was like all those pent up feelings, all that angry and frustration, all chose that moment to burst out. And there was only one thing to quench that fire.
He managed to shrug and step and shake out of everything without dropping me. My legs fit so perfectly around his waist, and he held me there effortlessly.
I’d already thrown his hair into disarray, running my fingers through it as our faces moved this way and that while we kissed.
And then his mouth moved lower, enveloping one nipple so hot and erect it hurt. I sucked in a breath at the heat of his mouth, at the way his tongue rubbed against my sensitive flesh.
He wasn’t stingy with his desire, either, moving from one nipple to the other, then kissing up between my heaving breasts. His lips moved up my throat, then found my mouth again even as he bore me down onto the bed.
It creaked alarmingly beneath us, but didn’t give. Not that I think it would have mattered. We nearly beyond any sort of control by that point.
Every instant we spent not together tore at me. My need was real, palpable. Painful in its intensity. I nearly took him right then and there, and damn the consequences.
He, somehow (I still don’t know), pulled his mouth away from where he worried at the sensitive skin of my throat. “Where?”
I managed the barest of nods towards my tiny nightstand which had somehow not fallen over when we fell onto the mattress.
My back arched beneath him, my body writhing and my hips grinding back against the mattress. Every instant without him inside of me was agony. Delicious, suspenseful agony.
He found the foil wrapper in the narrow drawer of the end table. Tearing it, he rolled the contents down his length.
Then I grabbed him and guided him inside of me, impatience demanding immediate action. He groaned at my touch, the noise deepening into a growl as he sunk himself into me.
My ankles locked at the small of his back, keeping him ca
ptive inside of me. My back arched again as he filled me, the feeling of it bordering on that razor line between pleasure and pain.
His arm shot around my waist, keeping me arched like that while his mouth again slid down to envelope one nipple and then the other. He sucked until I hissed, then moved to the other.
I ran my fingernails over his broad shoulder blades again and again, every tingle and shudder of pleasure he wrung from me makes me scratch him harder. He liked it, the strong muscles of his core slamming our bodies together again and again, pounding me into submission beneath him.
When I came I grabbed my pillow and stuffed it into my mouth, stifling the scream and the little groans and whimpers that followed.
Liam tore it away from me so that he could kiss me, riding me hard through my climax.
Given the intensity of our flaming passion, it lived a short life. We writhed together until again every muscle in me began clenching as my second orgasm wracked my body.
Liam lost control then, too, flinching at the intense pleasure of that moment, throbbing inside me again and again.
He rolled off me perspiring and shaky, his arm hanging over the side of the narrow bed. I was in worse shape, my toes refusing to unclench, beads of sweat rolling down from my temples, wetting my hair, darkening it with moisture.
“I think we understand each other, now,” he said.
“I think so,” I replied, rolling onto my side. He put his arm beneath my neck, and I rested my cheek against his chest.
Right away I heard it. Thump-thump, thump-thump. As strong and vital a sound as I’d ever encountered. Also comforting and real, so real. Liam was there with me.
Not the Mr. Liam Montgomery the world saw, the billionaire playboy who seemed to go through women like a scythe through wheat, or the Liam who’d taken the business world by storm.
No, none of the ones the public could claim familiarity with.
This was the real Liam, the one left when you stripped away all those facades. This was the Liam who’d tried to find the wisdom hidden in the bronze eyes of Marcus Aurelius, the Liam who’d held me while I shared the most painful experience of my life with him.
And this Liam was mine. Just as surely as I was his.
Chapter 10
Isabella and I sat at one of the tables in the quad outside the building where I had a class coming up in half an hour.
It was a nice day. Lots of sun. Slightly cool with the encroachment of fall. More a threat of coolness than an actual presence. The air even had those hints of the changing seasons in it.
Lately, over the past week, I’d found myself observing people more. Watching the way they interacted, the little intricacies of their lives.
The Romans around me, for instance, they seemed to be always doing one of two things: eating or arguing. Sometimes both at the same time. It was clear to me why so much history happened here, why so much art had been created on between, and around the city’s seven hills.
They were a passionate people, and they let it show. When I say they spent so much time arguing, I don’t mean that as a criticism, either. They did it in a loving way, and more often than not those arguments ended in laughter, or food. Both, usually.
Mercurial was the best term I could come up with. They flowed from one extreme to the other quickly and smoothly.
It was beautiful, really. So beautiful it was almost frightening, and definitely overwhelming. But then again, I’d begun to learn that just because something was frightening or overwhelming it didn’t mean that I couldn’t stand up to it.
“Again, you look so happy,” Isabella said. I realized that she’d been studying me while I’d been studying everyone else around us. Today was English day, the crude, Germanic language lent a lyrical quality by her accent.
I looked at her. “What does it mean when your heart skips a beat when someone steps into the room?”
She blinked as though the answer were as obvious as the smile on my face, and I suppose that it was. “Love. What else could it mean?”
My heart did more than skip a beat when Liam walked into the room. It broke free of the constraints of my ribs and danced. It did its best to launch itself up my throat.
But then, Isabella’s answer frightened me. It wasn’t possible to fall in love with another person so quickly, was it?
“I think I may have,” I said.
“Have what?”
“Fallen for him.”
“I am happy you have finally seen this,” Isabella said, a small smile parting her perfect and full lips. Out here under the Roman sun she seemed to glow.
It was such an apt term, I realized. Falling in love. Just closing my eyes now was enough to give the barest hint of vertigo, as though I stood on the lip of a tall cliff and could sense the gulf of empty air so close to me.
And while that, too, was frightening, it was a tempered fear. I knew that Liam would be down at the bottom of any drop to catch me, and I, him.
But at the same time, it seemed as though all I needed to do was jump and I’d be flying away, soaring through the clouds. Like nothing could drag me down.
No one ever said that how you feel has to make sense.
“How are your courses?” Isabella said, deliberately ignoring a handsome, dark-haired young man who’d tried to get her attention.
That single question was enough to put some lead weights into my wings. I grimaced.
“Not great,” I said.
Isabella frowned, dark eyebrows knitting together so that a small dimple formed between them. “How could that be? Haven’t you been working harder?”
“Yeah, I have.” Tendrils of worry formed in my stomach to accompany the lead in my wings. “That paper on Giulio Romano came back with a sixty.”
Isabella blinked again. The dimple between her eyebrows deepened. “That cannot be correct. Maybe your mind saw a nine and flipped it to a six?” She made a quick flipping motion with her forefingers.
“No, it was definitely six-zero.”
I understood her confusion. I’d had her read that paper for me. She’d given me a few tips for revisions that I thought really made the work stand on its own legs. I’d been expecting an 85 at the very least. And like I said before, Isabella was at least as smart as she was beautiful, and a grad student to boot. She knew her stuff and she’d given good feedback.
I’d pretty much gone into shock when I got the essay back.
“And this is not Dr. Aretino’s course, yes?”
“And there’s the rub,” I said. She quirked an eyebrow at my idiom, so I filled in, “That’s why I’m so confused.”
I had that course with Professor Giovanni Di Cenzo, not Dr. Aretino. I’d had my highest mark in that course, and I’d been hoping that getting an awesome grade on this paper would nudge my average that much higher so that I could stay in the program.
“There must have been some mistake,” Isabella continued.
I shook my head, “That’s the thing. I went to see Professor Di Cenzo at his office hours and he said there was nothing wrong with the grade. And that he’d been expecting better work from me.”
Her lovely eyes narrowed, her full lips compressing into a thin line. “I will go to him and make sure he knows that he has made a mistake.”
Then she stood up, apparently preparing to storm Professor Di Cenzo’s office then and there.
And while it warmed my heart that I’d apparently made a friend here willing to stand up for me like that, I also knew it wasn’t her battle to fight.
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to stifle a laugh and only half-succeeding, “I’m going to go over the paper and the assignment tonight and then prove to him that the paper is worth more than a 60 at his next office hour.”
I figured that would be it. That maybe he’d been in a bad mood while marking, and that perhaps I’d put him too much on the defensive when I went to confront him about it.
However, I couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that there was more to it than a few
simple lapses in judgment. But then again, I was trying to be happy, trying to be reasonable.
“Make sure that you do,” Isabella sat again. It was implicit in that statement that if I didn’t, she would.
A quick glance at my phone showed me that time had managed to sneak by quite quickly and stealthily. There was also a text from Liam saying that he looked forward to seeing me today after class.
A winking smiley-face concluded his message, and I wondered what he was up to.
“Gotta go,” I said, re-shouldering my messenger bag even as I tapped out a quick reply to Liam, “Class.”
“Please tell me how he reacts to your list,” Isabella said.
“Will do.”
It was only a few steps out of the quad and into the building. The air conditioner had been set too cold and I shivered as I moved from the warmth of the outside air into the cool embrace of the hall.
Though that wasn’t the only cause of my shiver. I’d spent several hours writing up a list of 10 possible extra credit assignments that Dr. Aretino could choose from, if he hadn’t come up with any by now.
If he chose any at all. I knew that college wasn’t like high school. Professors weren’t teachers with your best interest at heart. You couldn’t count on them to take pity on you.
I also knew that Dr. Aretino liked me. Far more than was appropriate, of course. But if he truly cared about my academic performance, he’d give me another chance.
Or so I hoped. I planned on presenting him the list after this lecture. A lecture I’d studied my butt off for, intending on impressing him with my knowledge, on proving that I wasn’t just begging for a pass.
I entered the lecture hall with about five minutes to spare. Pretty much all the other students had already seated themselves. I also noticed that the air conditioner was much less intense, though this was a mixed blessing.
It wouldn’t be good if I ended up sitting in my seat near the end of the lecture sweating bullets.
My nerves died when the lecture started. As usual, Dr. Aretino stuck to his normal style of the dynamic discussion, presenting us with slides and facts, posing questions, allowing the students to interject and to argue with him on points.
Italian Kisses: A Billionaire Love Story Page 11
