For a moment, I panic. He lied, I think wildly. He is married and this is some weird setup where his wife is okay with him cheating and—
A large man wanders out of the parlor, and for the first time, I notice the thick smell of cigar smoke and hear the low hum of serious male chatter coming down the hallway.
He puts his hand on the small of the woman’s back and gives her a kiss on the cheek. He glances at me. “Matteo’s new toy?” he asks her, as if I’m not even there.
I bristle, and the woman playfully slaps him. “Excuse my husband,” she says apologetically. “He’s a brute.”
He grunts and gives her another peck on the cheek, keeping his eyes on me. “I call a spade a spade is all,” he says. “A toy’s a toy.” And then turns on his heel and stalks back into the parlor.
His wife has the grace to flush, but I still decide I’m done. If that’s the kind of company Matteo keeps in his own house? I might as well go down to the shop and have one of Jimmy’s boys tell me how they feel about a woman running for president.
But as I turn, the woman slides in front of the door, blocking my escape.
“Matteo will be so upset if you leave,” she says in a whisper, and her voice is laced with a very real fear. “Please. I don’t want him mad at me—or my husband. Please don’t go.”
Her hand is on my wrist now and her eyes are wide and pleading.
“Please, Jessica. Please stay.”
“I have enough doubts about being here,” I point out. And being called a toy by someone who is friends with Matteo only confirms them. “So I should really go—”
“Go where?” a cold voice says from behind me.
The woman quickly lets go of my wrist. “Matteo,” she says, smoothing a smile on her face. “I was just helping Jessica get oriented in the house.”
“I doubt that very much, Gina, since you were actively restraining her.” Matteo’s footsteps get closer, and when I finally will myself to turn around, I’m faced with six feet three inches of muscle and irritation, blue eyes glowing amongst the dim but colorful light of the foyer.
I swallow.
He’s angry.
And angry Matteo is a very frightening thing indeed. Frightening…and disturbingly sexy in that custom suit and tie that probably cost more than a year of my rent.
Gina is not immune to either component, her voice trembling with both desire and terror. “Pauly was just teasing her, and she took it the wrong way. That’s all.”
“So it’s Jessica’s fault?” he asks dangerously. “Is that what you’re saying?”
I suddenly understand why Gina begged me to stay—having Matteo angry with you is like having a hurricane angry with you. You knew that if you survived his fury, you’d still be left with nothing but splinters and debris. I have no doubt that Matteo could shatter homes and lives better than any storm if he put his mind to it.
Poor Gina. Trying to protect her husband and herself from the storm.
I put a hand on Matteo’s chest, and instantly, I feel his fury go still, his anger dissipate. He looks down at me, and I see the same man who was turned on by the idea of my being pregnant with his baby. Lust and protectiveness settle on his features, a mix that only serves to make him more handsome—glinting eyes and a set jaw.
“It’s okay, really,” I say. “I’m here now, and you’re here too. I’ll stay if I can stay with you.”
His eyes drop down to my lips, and then his hand slowly covers mine, sliding it to the side ever so slightly so I can feel his heart beat against my palm. “Gina, tell Pauly to grab Jessica’s bags from her car. I’m going to show her the house.”
6
Jess
Matteo shows me around the house, which is surprisingly modern on the inside. Sleek dark hardwoods and a remodeled floor plan give the downstairs an open feel, although several rich period details remain—delicate wood trim and tiled fireplaces and wall sconces with bronze scrollwork. We pass briefly by the parlor opening where several men are gathered around a coffee table littered with metal chunks, smoking cigars and talking, and it isn’t until Matteo is guiding me to the stairs that I realize the metal chunks on the table were guns.
Guns.
Guns have been around all my life—the boys and most of the shop’s clientele are big fans of guns—but never have I seen them so carelessly piled in one place, never did I expect that place to be the house of my child’s father.
“Matteo,” I ask quietly as we reach the top of the stairs, “can you explain to me why a financial advisor has that many guns in his house?”
Matteo lifts a shoulder in a shrug as he steers me down the hallway. “They aren’t my guns,” he points out. “They belong to my friends.”
“The gates…the security cameras…”
“I like my house to feel safe. Your room’s right here, by the way.” He pushes open a wide door, which opens into a palatial bedroom, and I mean to continue our conversation, but then I stop as I walk inside the room.
I am positive a couple other bedrooms in this house must have been annexed to create the large open space, which only contains a dresser and neatly made king-sized bed. Soft gray walls, dark hardwoods and large windows make the room feel just as airy and new as any sleek loft or penthouse, and the room opens directly into the largest bathroom I’ve ever seen, studded with one magnificent clawfoot bathtub.
I step farther inside, impressed, and then notice the cufflinks on the end table. Why would there be cufflinks in my room? Unless he’s having me stay in his room…
But before I can turn to face Matteo to ask him, he steps behind me and slowly walks me over to the bed.
“This was my great-grandfather’s house, you know,” he says, a hand gently brushing my hair over one shoulder. And despite everything, despite the guns and my uncertainties and this strange old house filled with strange people, I shiver. Because Matteo can do that to me. Make me forget everything but how my body feels when I’m around him.
“He built it himself, only a couple of years after he moved here from Sicily,” he continues. “My grandfather inherited it. They both had arranged marriages with girls from the old country. Politically important matches were common at the time to shore up alliances between families…and to keep territory wars from starting. And it worked. No territory wars, only good business. This house became a symbol of the Moretti family’s power.”
Fingers drift across the nape of my neck, and goosebumps erupt everywhere across my skin. My core thrums to slow, pulsing life, sending heat and need rushing to my cunt.
“And your father?” I ask, to force myself to focus on something other than his touch. “Did he inherit it too?”
“My father was a reckless man, Jessica. A gambler. A drunk. He lost this house and every cent of money the family had, then drank himself into an early grave by the time I was ten. My mother left long before that.” A finger trails from my earlobe to my neck, a movement I long to feel on the inside of my thighs.
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
The zipper at the back of my shell dress tugs and then purrs down my back. Matteo is making me so eager, so sensitive, that even the cool air on my back feels sensual.
“Don’t be. My grandfather took me in. Taught me about the Morettis, about who we used to be in this city. And every day, he’d take me walking past this house, which was just a vacant, rotting husk by that point, and make me swear to get it back. To remake the Moretti name again.”
“And so you did.”
The zipper reaches the small of my back and then his hands are at my shoulders, sliding the dress off of me. “And so I did.”
“No politically important marriage though,” I tease. “You haven’t caught up with him yet.”
The dress falls to my feet with the soft whoosh of crumpling silk.
“We’ll see,” he answers cryptically. “Spread your legs, princess.”
What is it about this man that makes me so obedient? So willing? So hungry to do anything he as
ks of me?
I’m about to take a step to the side like he wants, but apparently I take too long for his taste, and he roughly kicks my feet apart. I gasp, now off balance, and then his hand is on the back of my neck, forcing me to bend over the bed. His other hand finds my pussy and cups it hard over my silk panties.
The pressure radiates everywhere, up through my clit to my nipples and the tips of my fingers, and I moan into the bed.
“That’s what I thought,” he says in an amused purr. “Wet already. I can feel you through your panties.”
I’m trying to buck against his hand and add friction to the pressure, but he merely laughs and removes his hand altogether.
I cry out in disappointment. “Matteo, please!”
“Princess, I’ve been wanting you for two days, and there’s no fucking way I’m letting you come on anything other than my cock.” A large hand slides around and pinches one of my nipples through my bra cup. They’re so sensitive from the pregnancy, and I make a noise of both pain and pleasure. “Climb up on the bed. Now.”
I scramble up on the bed, the heat in my core growing into a bonfire, and I can barely keep myself from reaching down to rub out an orgasm myself. It would only take me a few seconds with as hot as I am right now, but I know that Matteo would not be pleased at all.
He stays standing, unknotting his tie with deliberate care. “On your back, panties off. Keep your bra and your shoes on.”
I do as he says, watching as he shrugs off his jacket and unbuttons his shirt, toes off his shoes and tugs off his socks. Soon, he’s only wearing his suit slacks, and I drink in every inch of his rich, olive skin, of his wide chest and flat abs. And then I drink in the way his abs form a deep V leading into the low-waisted pants, where a thick erection strains against the fabric. He’s so male, all hard muscle and lean body without a single ounce of softness or gentility about him, except maybe his full lips, which are curved into a smirk as he watches me watching him.
He slowly unbuckles his belt, drawing the leather through the loops with a delightfully dangerous noise, and I lick my lips. Still smirking, he drops the belt by his feet.
“Not when you’re pregnant,” he says, his voice full of dark promise. “But someday, I’m going to see what that ass is like when it’s all hot and pink and stinging.”
Fuck yes, you are, I want to say, but I’m trembling so much now that I can’t even try to force the words out.
He unzips his pants and lets them fall to the floor, and then I’m rewarded with him naked in the bright light of the afternoon. I long to touch those hard, muscular thighs, dusted with the same dark hair that trails down from his navel to his cock, which bobs thickly in the air as he crawls onto the bed.
“Open your legs,” he commands, and they fall open, just like that.
God, who have I become? I think of how disgusted Nate was when he found my vibrator, how he only wanted to have sex in the dark, in complete silence. A small giggle catches in my throat when I think about how appalled he’d be if he saw me now.
“What’s so funny?” Matteo asks, reaching down and sliding a finger inside me. He doesn’t do it to make me feel good, he puts it in to make sure that I’m wet enough, and then satisfied, he pulls it out. With no other preamble, he grabs my hips and shoves roughly inside.
For a moment, I see nothing. Just static. He’s so big, so thick, that my body has to stretch and adjust to him to take him in, even with as ready as I am. He pulls out to the tip and then thrusts home again, and this time I take him all the way to the hilt.
I shudder—discomfort and my building orgasm tangling together—and he grunts as he repeats the movement. “Yeah, that’s it,” he mutters to himself. “That’s what I needed.” His eyes close for a moment and then open again, and those blue irises zero in on me. “I asked you a question earlier, sweetheart. What was so funny?”
It seems so stupid now, but Matteo’s dick is the only thing I can focus on or think about and so I can’t find the mental faculty to demur or lie. So I tell the truth. “I was thinking about my ex-boyfriend.”
A whiplash of anger cuts across Matteo’s face and his eyes grow dark and furious. In an instant, he’s on his knees, lifting my hips up to meet his insatiable need, and it’s so deep like this, so deep and painful, except that my nipples are harder than ever and my clit is throbbing like a thing about to burst.
“You’re thinking about your ex?” he growls. “Are you thinking about him right now?”
“No, no, I—”
He stabs his cock in deeper. “What about now?”
I moan. “No.”
With his huge hands curled around my hips, he jabs into me over and over again, so deep and so hard.
“Tell me why you were thinking about him when you’re in my bed,” Matteo says, jealousy and ire coloring his voice. “Is his cock bigger than mine? Is that it?”
“I don’t think anyone’s bigger than you,” I breathe.
He likes that. His eyes flare with pleasure as he grinds out a short, harsh, “good.”
More thrusts, the broad head of his cock shoving into my deepest places. “Then what is it?” he asks. I can tell he’s still jealous, burning to know, and for some reason, the fact that he feels envious of my mental attention is strangely touching. He’s proved before that he’s not the casual playboy I’d pegged him to be, but still, I’m so unused to this kind of possessiveness and intensity, the kind that can’t bear the idea of any other man inside my head.
I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I like it.
But I do.
It makes me feel wanted. It makes me feel claimed.
“I was just thinking he’d be horrified if he could see me now,” I whisper to Matteo. It embarrasses me a little to talk about how Nate treated me. “He thought I was, um, deviant.”
Matteo’s thick brows draw together and the powerful movements of his hips still. “Deviant?”
I wet my lips, a gesture that makes Matteo’s dick jump inside of me. “Yeah. He thought I was messed up for wanting the things I did…you know, in bed. It’s one of the reasons he said he cheated on me.”
I can’t read the expression on Matteo’s face after I say that, but I think a see a flash of something worse than anger. It’s something cold and detached and determined. I shiver, wondering if I’ve displeased him somehow, if that coldness is for me.
A frown tugs on his mouth when he sees my shiver, and then I’m flat on my back again, his entire body stretched over mine. “Your ex is a fucking idiot,” he growls at me, his hips moving again. I widen my legs as much as I can, welcoming him into the cradle of my thighs, wishing I could get him deeper and closer.
“For what it’s worth,” he says in a rasp, his eyes trailing from my face down to my breasts where my nipples poked through the fabric of my bra, “you’re a fucking dream in bed. I can’t get enough of you.”
And then he drops his mouth to mine, claiming it with a searing kiss, and my chest expands like a balloon. We kissed once or twice the night we met, but this is the first kiss we’ve shared since then, and something about it is different. Intimate and full of feelings that I can’t quite put into words.
He catches my lower lip between his teeth as he changes the angle of his strokes to hit my clit on the way in, and within seconds, I’m squirming underneath him, writhing under that wide, hard, sweaty body, caged in by his muscular arms and pinned into place by that insistent, demanding cock.
He lets go of my lip and murmurs against my mouth. “Say it when you come.”
Say it.
His name.
Matteo.
It doesn’t take long, not with the base of his cock strafing past my clit on every downstroke, and then my body ignites for him—rapid-fire waves of release chasing each other out from my pussy, squeezing around his cock.
“Matteo,” I utter, completely lost in the heavy bliss, and he swallows his name with a kiss, stealing my breath and my moans as I continue to pulse and clench underneath
him.
“God, you make it so tight for me,” he mumbles, breaking our kiss and burying his face in my neck. “Like you’re fucking made for me.”
I can’t speak, can barely breathe I’m so strung out from my climax, and then with a sharp groan, he drives into me a final time and erupts, his lips pressed to my neck and his abs tensing above me.
I hear him hiss a low mine mine mine against my throat as he fills me with himself, as he pumps me full of his cum. He throbs hot and wet inside me for what seems like an eternity, and when his body finally starts to relax on top of mine, I can’t help myself.
I tell him, “Yours.”
He lifts his head and meets my stare. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t mean it,” I whisper. “We barely know each other. But…”
He traces the line of my jaw with a calloused thumb. “But your body knows what your mind is afraid to see. You belong here. In my bed.”
“Yes.” The word is quiet and pained, but sincere. I do belong with him.
“You’re doing something to me,” he admits gruffly, the thumb moving from my jaw to my mouth, tugging down on my lower lip. “You’re making me feel out of control.”
I smile, thinking of the last two times we’ve had sex and how he’s dominated me so effortlessly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you out of control, Matteo.”
He pushes his thumb inside my mouth and I wrap my lips around it, sucking hard. His pupils go wide, his voice ragged when he says, “I think we need to fix that then, don’t you?”
7
Jess
After another round of rough, earth-shattering sex, I crash into a deep sleep and don’t wake up until late that night, mussed and groggy. My eyes seem to take forever to open, as if my body wants me to sleep for another seventeen hours before I force it out of bed, but when I finally manage to wake up all the way, I notice the moonlight pouring in through the windows and Matteo’s tall frame blocking the doorway. There’s someone in front of him, another man, I think, but in the dark it’s difficult to tell.
Made for Him: A Mafia Baby Romance Page 4
