Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3)

by Fanetti, Susan

  His head was tucked in the crook of her left shoulder, his teeth nipping at her skin. In a fleeting lucid moment, she gasped, “Don’t mark me too much.”

  “Not too much, no.” He chuckled and bit down.

  Feeling like she’d go nuts if she didn’t get off, she let go of his right knee and put her hand between her legs. But he released her right breast and grabbed her hand. “Ah-ah-ah. That’s for me.”

  “Then fucking do it. Please.”

  “I love it when you beg. Do it again.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He released her left breast, too. When she went for herself with her left hand, her grabbed that and brought her hands together, clasping them in one of his. Then, with his free hand, he traced very light, slow, circles on her bare belly, making all of her muscles throughout her entire body quiver and clench. “Theo, Jesus Christ.”

  “Beg me, beautiful. I want you to beg me.” He blew lightly in her ear, and a shiver moved down her neck and over her chest.

  “I’m going to make you pay.”

  “I hope so. Beg.”

  “Get me off. Please.”

  He released her hands immediately, shoving his left hand between her legs and inside her—one finger, then two. His right hand returned to her breast. And his teeth latched onto her shoulder. She didn’t care anymore whether he marked her.

  His hands were rough, pumping and flexing inside her, twisting and pulling on her. He went at her hard and fast, and Carmen could hear her grunts and cries echoing against the marble walls. The water sloshed against the sides of the tub. She felt his growling breath vibrating against her back and on her neck.

  Suddenly, he let go of her breast again. Before she could complain, he shoved another finger inside her, and then his other hand was between her legs, too. On her clit. He rubbed her roughly, his fingers moving with speed and pressure.

  She came so hard she nearly literally passed out. Her vision went dark and sparkly, and sound seemed to pull inward, becoming indistinct and intense. She threw her head back, colliding with his shoulder, and went instantly limp while his hands were still moving on her.

  “Carmen? You with me?”

  She heard him unclearly, as if she’d slid under the water. But she was lying back on his chest. His hands were out from between her legs, and he was holding her gently now, brushing loose strands of hair from her face.

  “Yeah. I nearly passed out, I think. I think I’m drunk.”

  He chuckled. “I know you are.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Not yet. I’ll catch up.” He smiled down at her. Damn, he was pretty.

  She flopped her head to the side and spied her empty champagne glass. “I’m thirsty.”

  “You want more?”

  “Yes. I want more champagne and more you. More everything.”

  He sat up a little, bringing her up with him, lifted the magnum out of the bucket, and refilled their glasses. As he handed hers to her, he said quietly, “You can have all of me, beautiful.”

  His eyes were serious, and there was something going on in what he’d said, but Carmen was taking a break from thinking at the moment.

  She drank the cool champagne down all at once and set the glass aside again. Turning around, making the water slosh finally over the side a little, she knelt between his legs. “Okay, round two.”

  He was still drinking from his glass. At her words, he smiled and made to tip the glass up and drink it all, but she put her hand on his arm. “No. Go slow.”

  After a quizzical look, he nodded and took only a sip. As he drank, Carmen leaned in and bit his nipple. He jerked, and a drop of champagne landed on her cheek. She thought it was champagne. It might have only been water; they were in the bath, after all.

  She bit and licked and kissed all over his chest, over his shoulders, down his arms, and as she did so, her hands circled his cock, working it as hard as he’d worked her.

  He was so thick that her fingers didn’t touch—or even close, really—when she wrapped them around him. It gave her a massive sense of power to squeeze and slide and pull on his hard cock, watching his face while she did so. She’d always loved giving hand jobs and blow jobs, when the guy’s pleasure was entirely in her control. Theo was especially responsive. He didn’t just lie there and wait to come. He made noises, said dirty things. He touched her. He writhed and flexed. He showed her exactly how she affected him. It was sexy as all hell.

  Whether it was the rush of power she felt watching him close in on a climax, or the champagne and the earlier wine, or the dim, cozy light of the room, or lingering heat of the bath and the literal and figurative steam in the room, Carmen was starting to feel woozy with need again. When Theo finally drained his glass and set it down—the tension in his arms making the action clumsy and abrupt—she released him. On his groan of frustration, she straddled him, taking his cock into her. Her own cry escaped her despite her intention to be in control. He just felt so fucking good.

  She’d surprised him, and he arched his head backwards with a groan. “God, Carmen. Fuck.”

  She yanked him forward again by his hair and kissed him, shoving her tongue between his teeth. As she ground down on him, trying to get him as deep as she could, feeling him reach every single part of her, he growled and jerked his mouth from hers. Then his hands were in her hair, grabbing for the elastic and pulling it free. He pulled roughly, taking some strands with him. When her hair was loose over her shoulders, he wove his fingers into it.

  “I love your hair so much. So black and thick. I want to be tangled in it and never set free.”

  He tugged her forward and kissed her, shifting under her until he was up on his knees. And then he fucked her, hard, pushing her away, his hand between her breasts, forcing her backwards, to drape over his arm. Screw control. She relaxed and went with it, bowing back so that the top of her head went into the water and her hair floated all around, like a net.

  In this position, he pushed constantly against the most intensely sensitive spot in her body. He rose up higher, got deeper, moved faster, and the water sloshed around them. The room dimmed by degrees as each wave of water doused more candles.

  They were both grunting like beasts, the sounds rebounding, ricocheting. He bent over her and took a breast in his mouth, sucking it deeply, nipping at its tip, and Carmen again came hard enough to arrive at the edge of consciousness. Theo came right after her, while she was still throbbing. Then he sat back abruptly, keeping hold of her so that she went with him and ended up resting on his shoulder. He combed his fingers through her hair as they caught their breath.

  “I love you, Carmen.” His voice was strained. “I love you. I love you.”

  Jesus. Her head spun and spun.

  She wanted to do the thing that felt good. For once, she wanted to follow the path of want and leave should behind.

  When she opened her eyes, the first things she saw were the pendants around his neck. So she put her hand flat over them. Fuck them. Fuck Maggie. Fuck the past. Fuck her family. Fuck grief. Fuck fear. Fuck should. Fuck it all. Just fuck it blue.

  His heart beat under her palm.

  “I love you, too.”

  ~ 10 ~

  It took Theo a while to convince himself to open his eyes the next morning. But even before he did, he knew he was alone. He’d gotten used to sleeping with a partner again, and the bed felt different—even the air felt different—when he was alone. He lay still and listened; the room was quiet; only the pastoral sounds from the balcony broke perfect silence. She wasn’t here at all.

  It was Sunday, though. She must have managed to get to Mass.

  Theo was fascinated by this deeply rooted faith in Carmen. She was a contradiction, it seemed. Her personality was not beatific in the slightest. She was impatient. She expected the worst from people. She was guarded and cool at first meeting—and beyond. She swore like a sailor and blasphemed without a blink. She sinned without compunction—she was sinning like crazy with him. And
yet she prayed regularly. Just quiet moments, closing her eyes for a few seconds before she ate, things like that. And she tried never to miss Sunday Mass. When he’d asked, she’d simply shrugged and said she didn’t know any other way to be.

  Theo’s ideas about faith and religion were more academic, he supposed. He was interested in the symbolism. He didn’t disbelieve, but he didn’t often think of it, except to be curious about others’ faiths. Maggie’s beliefs had been of a more Eastern persuasion. Not Buddhist, exactly, but spiritual in that quiet, inward way. They hadn’t focused on religion in their parenting of the boys. Theo had always felt a light rub of guilt, or maybe incompleteness, about that. Nothing he could put his finger on. But he’d been raised with just enough religion to make him notice.

  His mother had taken him to a Lutheran church in Cheyenne sporadically. She’d taught him the bedtime prayer and insisted he kneel at his bedside every night until he’d grown old enough to put himself to bed. She’d put a crèche under their little artificial Christmas tree every year. She’d spoken sometimes, usually when things were hard, about ‘God’s plan,’ but she hadn’t really taught him a faith, not in any intentional way. Not in the way Carmen had been taught. He’d come to think of the Catholic Church in Carmen’s life as he’d come to think of the family she would only talk about obliquely—the image he had was of tendrils coiled around her ankles, holding her in place.

  Whether they were nourishing roots or constricting bonds, he wasn’t sure.

  He rolled over, waited for the room to settle again, and cracked open his desiccated eyeballs. Fuck, they’d had a wild night. Parts were foggy now, but as he levered himself to sit, he looked around, and his memory cleared some. The room service cart was still in the room. The table was heaped with the leavings of their dinner, and, mingled with the familiar aroma of their sex, the room smelled vaguely of beef. Two empty wine bottles. A nearly-empty bottle of bourbon. And the silver champagne bucket, now on the nightstand, full of water and the magnum upended in it.

  Little wonder his gut felt like his liver had abandoned ship.

  She’d said she loved him. After that first time, in the bath, she’d said it again and again. A lot of the night might be faded around the edges, but that was perfectly clear. Things were different between them now. She’d taken that armor off. And now, in the sober light of this new day, they’d need to figure out where they went from here.

  Sober.

  He knew he was drinking too much. He hadn’t skidded down the slope yet, but the incline was getting steep. Carmen was drinking a lot, too, and he had a thought that he was to blame, in some part, for that.

  But not today. Today, they’d go out in the sunshine and enjoy their last day in Avignon together, and they would do it with clear heads and open hearts.

  His left shoulder itched oddly, and he brought his hand up and scratched absently at it, hissing when instead of an itch, he found a sharp pain. He looked down and found a perfect, oval impression of Carmen’s teeth—in some depth and detail—and a long streak of dried blood down his arm. Further inspection showed blood on the sheets, too.

  He laughed, wincing at the spike of pain it brought to his forehead. Well, she’d said she’d make him pay.

  ~oOo~

  “71 Rue de la Lavande.” Carmen sat back in the seat of the taxi as Theo closed the door.

  “Wait—what? Why there?” For weeks now, she’d been staying with him, and Eli had been staying with Rosa. He’d expected her to give his address.

  She turned her head slightly toward him but didn’t meet his eyes. “I want to go there.”

  “Carmen? What’s going on?”

  She didn’t answer.

  They’d had a wonderful day on Sunday. She’d gotten back from church, looking good, looking relaxed, and he’d been dressed and ready. While she’d been gone, he’d had housekeeping take away their room service detritus, and he’d swallowed down a handful of aspirin with two cups of coffee.

  They’d spent the day just wandering and talking. They’d had a good lunch, and later made out to a decided ‘R’ rating against the wall of a building in a quaint little alley. Then, after dark, they’d eaten by candlelight in the courtyard restaurant of the hotel, with just a couple of drinks. They finished the night in bed, being a great deal more gentle—and sober—than the night before.

  They hadn’t exchanged the words all day, but he’d told her he loved her again as they were falling asleep. She hadn’t responded. Last night, he’d thought nothing of it.

  But today, as they’d packed and traveled, returning to Paris, Carmen had been quiet and distant. She hadn’t ignored him; she simply hadn’t engaged.

  But since they’d stepped off the train, she’d been ignoring him. He was pissed. And hurt. And scared.

  When she gave her address and not his, the lining of his stomach turned to lead. He knew what she was doing. He knew it.

  And fuck her for it.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. Paltry protection. “Don’t behave like a teenager, Carmen. Answer my fucking question.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Theodore.”

  “Then grow a spine and say what’s on your mind.”

  She shifted in her seat, turning toward him to the extent the seat belt would allow. “What’s on my mind? Here it is: I’m done playing house with you, Theo. That’s what’s on my mind. I want the taxi to drop me off at Izzie’s apartment, and that is where I will stay, on my own, until it’s time to go home. This trip was for Rosa and me, and I wasted almost all of it with you. It’s over.”

  She turned back to face front, as if the conversation were over, too. The driver was paying a lot of attention to the rearview mirror. Theo glared into it until the driver looked back at the road. But they had an audience for this, no way around it.

  Feeling sick, Theo stared at her profile. She seemed made of marble suddenly, cold and hard. But even from the side he could see a host of emotions rioting in her eyes.

  He had a few options. He could do the thing that he most wanted right now, and shout at her. He could try to reason with her, get her to talk about what was scaring her so badly—because it had to be that. It couldn’t be that she didn’t care. They’d been together long enough, and he was perceptive enough, that he knew she cared. He’d believed her when she’d told him she loved him. He’d thought things were different between them, that they had opened up at last. That she had opened up. And now she was afraid. He was sure of it. So he could try to open her again.

  Or he could let her go.

  He didn’t want that. This summer, he’d come alive again. He hadn’t even known he’d been dormant.

  He chose reason. “Carmen, don’t do this. Talk to me.”

  She didn’t respond.

  He tried again, unfastening his seatbelt and sliding closer to her. She turned and scowled, but said nothing. “I know you’re scared, beautiful girl.” He brushed her face with his fingertips as he spoke, and she flinched away.

  “Don’t call me that. You don’t know what I am. You don’t know me.”

  “I do. I know you.”

  “No. I made sure of it.”

  They were in the Arc de Triomphe roundabout, and the complicated, erratic traffic there usually made Carmen nuts, even as a passenger. She hadn’t noticed this time. She was intent on Theo, her eyes hostile. He knew a lot more about her than she thought. Maybe that was the way through.

  “I know you, Carmen. I know you don’t like people. I know the way people drive this roundabout makes you tense. I know you use movies for metaphors at every opportunity, and that you hate musicals but somehow seem to have seen them all. I know you like Jason Statham best as an action hero and that you think Michelle Rodriquez is hot—a tidbit I’d like to explore more someday. I know you prefer meaty fish to flaky fish. I know you prefer red wine over white, and you prefer a Bordeaux above all. I don’t know what the difference is, but I know you do. I know you like Lilith Fair music. I know Virginia Woolf is yo
ur favorite author and that you will finish Infinite Jest someday even if it kills you, because you’ve taken it on as a challenge, and I know you don’t back down from a challenge. I know makeup makes your eyes itch, so you don’t wear it.” He smiled, remembering their first morning together. “And I know what you look like in the morning when you do.”

  That made her blink, possibly falter a little, but then she recovered. “That’s surface bullshit. All of it. That’s not who I am.”

  “Of course it is, Carmen. It’s exactly who you are. It’s how you see the world. I know you think in symbol and image, like I do. I know you are drawn to serious subjects told with wry humor, like I am. I know you think and feel deeply about what you read and see and experience—like I do. And I know that’s why you say you don’t like people. Because you feel everything so much, so much more than most. Like I do.”