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I was alone in the Tuscan countryside, where I knew absolutely no one, and with only a textbook understanding of the Italian language.
“You mentioned someone tried to . . . hurt you,” he said, so darkly a little shiver dragged nails down my spine. “Where did this happen?”
When he finally turned to face me, the light slapped across his features almost violently, sending them into stark relief. I gasped and took a step away from him. “Because,” the beautiful man before me practically purred. “Tonight, I feel like playing the hero instead of the villain.”
Petite in a way that made me feel as if I towered over her, but with a femininity that cut through my annoyance like a knife, eviscerating it with a single look from those long-lashed eyes. In the harsh yellow light cast from the Ferrari, they seemed dark as ink and filled with feminine mystique.
What was surprising was the little bubble of tenderness that had taken up residence in the hollow casing of my chest. This girl was not my family. She was not a friend. She was an inconvenience I could barely afford, given the contents of my trunk. Yet I felt moved to help her.
wanted to curl her tight into my side and use my body to shield her from all the horrors of her Italian dream turned nightmare. For the first time in my life, I wanted to be someone’s knight in shining armor.
His face was all planes and angles, with the hard jut of a square jaw and slightly pronounced chin that made him seem imperious, especially matched to the arrogance of those thick brows, arched over eyes that were brown but pale. Light as sunlight caught in maple syrup, clear and completely unmuddied. It felt almost wrong to call eyes like that brown, as mine were. They were piercing, cutting through me as I lay there, like hot knives pinning me to the bed.
Intensity was exactly what I had been searching for in Michigan, what I’d been yearning for my entire young life. I had a voracious appetite for life that urged me to crack it open with my bare hands and suck out the marrow, messy and violent with satisfaction. It was a kind of savagery I’d always had to temper back home. That was the way my Italian stranger looked at me then.
“Oh,” I said without thinking. “You’re beautiful.” His expressive brows slammed down over those clear eyes. “A man is not beautiful.” “You are,” I insisted. “Not like someone from a Renaissance painting. Like, well, like Dante’s angels, maybe.” “Nothing about me is heavenly,” he argued again, crossing his arms defensively, but there was a tiny curl in his mouth that said he was enjoying this. Enjoying me.
Ragazza, Eat. You were too skinny before this sickness. Now you make a very pretty skeleton. I will be back in two hours. Call if you need me. RR
“He’s been very nice to me,” I admitted. “Not everyone would have helped me the way he has.” “Not even Raffa would have helped someone the way he has helped you.” I frowned at her quip. “Are you implying he isn’t usually a nice person? Aren’t you friends?” Martina laughed that barrel laugh again. “He’s my boss, I guess you could say. And he can be . . . kind. He’s just not known for it outside his family and small circle of friends. You are the exception, it seems.”
Guinevere was giving me the fleeting chance to live out a different side of myself, and I was going to take it. And that was a secret I’d take to my grave.
“I do not believe I have ever had a woman try so hard to get away from me before,” I mused, and watched a mixture of horror and amusement wash over her expressive face. It was rather entertaining.
I knew I was royally fucked the moment she twisted slightly to pull a pillow behind her back and then faced me with a beaming smile that brought out dimples in both cheeks.
“Because the kindness does not stem from the good of my heart,” he admitted, voice rough and textured enough to abrade my skin. “The moment I saw you like a deer trapped in my headlights, I saw you with the eyes of a predator.” I swallowed thickly. “Predators usually hunt their prey.” “Si, but I do not intend to kill you, cerbiatta.” His finger traced the strap down to the sweetheart neckline and tracked daringly over the edge of my breast exposed above the fabric. I watched up close as his eyes went from amber to bronze, dark with hunger. “I only intend to eat you.”
She seemed to awaken an oddly intoxicating mix of protectiveness and arousal in me that I hadn’t felt before in any of my thirty-four years, despite having countless partners.
If I had to spend one more moment in a confined space with this siren, I was going to lose my infamous cool and do something we’d both regret. Like press her reverently to the window and kiss her until she trembled.
Do not fuck with me or mine. When I’d decided that Guinevere was mine, I was not sure and didn’t linger on. The point was, it had happened, and I wasn’t the kind of man to worry about why.
There was this inarguable sense that I had known her before. Or, maybe, that I had been waiting for her all this time without knowing it. Could a stranger feel so immediately like a friend?
“Silly?” I echoed. “Si,” she said with a sharp nod. “Sciocco.” “She ridicules me in my own tongue,” I murmured, once again shocked by her gumption. “You know, most women would thank me for looking out for them.” “Maybe you should spend the day with them instead.” She smiled sweetly, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and got out of the car. It gave me time to lock down my grin before I followed suit and joined her at the door to the flats.
“It means beguiling. Enchanting. And for a man like me, that is dangerous. I cannot afford distractions, but here I am in this ugly apartment feeling . . . unsettled because you are suggesting I will not see you again when all I want is more of you.”
When she pressed her thumb to my pulse, it felt as if a loop closed between us. Our hearts, when I took a moment to observe, beat in perfect bass-note harmony.
I sucked in a deep breath when Raffa brushed his thumb down the center of my fabric-covered groin, pressing into the damp spot at the apex. When he pulled away, I almost protested, but my words died on my tongue when he pressed the tip of his damp thumb into his mouth and sucked it clean. “Hai un buon sapore come immaginavo,” he said. “You taste as good as I imagined.” “Like apricots?” I teased, surprised by the confidence I felt, half lying in my seat with my wet underwear exposed and my taste on Raffa’s lips. “Like sin,” he corrected. “It is addictive.”
“What do you want?” I asked, stripped of my usual shyness by our proximity and the simple but devastating act of sharing the taste of me between our lips. His eyes shuttered, but when I cupped his cheek in one hand, he answered, “To be the man who deserves that look on your face.” “What look?” I asked, afraid of the question—and the answer—but not enough to take it back. “Like I could pull the stars from the sky for you if only you asked me to.” “And would you?” His sigh sounded almost resigned as it feathered over my mouth. “Troverei un modo.” I would find a way.
Devilishly handsome, powerful, kind, and complicated enough to keep my mind busy like a Rubik’s Cube, with endless combinations of enticement.
In response, I leaned back on my hands to expose my chest entirely, hair shifting down my back, breasts raised. His gaze flickered up to mine, warm with pride. “Do you know how delicious it is to watch you be brave and bold like this? It makes me want to worship you on my knees.”
“I like the sound of being yours,” I told him boldly, running my thumb over his bottom lip, loving the contrast of the silk against his stubble, almost a short beard now. “But for the record, I do not need you to protect my honor.” “For the record,” he countered as we pulled through the automatic gates into the courtyard of the palazzo, “I will protect you from anything that comes for you in any way that it comes.”
Raffa put the license back into his pocket before reaching out to palm my throat, thumb rubbing over my pulse point. I’d never been held like that before. It felt proprietary. A necklace of ownership. My pulse kicked into a sprint, and my chest tightened. I liked it.
No one insulted the women in my life and remained unscathed.
Tonight, you will come back to the palazzo with me.” “Yes,” she agreed. “But I’m afraid I don’t have any pajamas at your place.” Cazzo, her coquettishness was making me hard just as we pulled up to the valet drop-off for the gala. I put the car in neutral as we waited in line for the valet and slid my hand under her hair to pull her close. “You can sleep in my cum,” I offered graciously and then ate the little gasp straight off her tongue.
“Going to come. Be a good girl and lick every last drop.”
“Cerbiatta mia,” he grunted as I ground down on his upstroke, using the roughness of his pubic hair to rub against my clit. “La mia donna. La mia stella cadente.” My little fawn. My woman. My shooting star.
“You are so good for me,” he praised, pushing me even higher into a space that felt like floating through a light box. “So sweet letting me slap this pussy before I fuck it.”
