More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 29 - January 29, 2023
“What? Do I still have pomegranate juice on my mouth?” “I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.
“No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather possessive of the sound.”
“One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”
“No, lottatrice,” he murmured as he angled his nose over the shell of my right ear. “I’ll hold yours when I finally fuck you. Eat it off your tongue when I kiss you as you beg me for more.”
“Si,” he agreed gruffly. “That’s why I know I’m the one who will finally make you melt.”
“No, but I am, and I rarely lose.” He ran the tip of his nose down the side of my ear and feathered his lips against the sharp edge of my cheekbone. “Let me show you passion, Elena. Let me teach you how to love again.”
“Not all love is romantic,” he pointed out rationally, staring into my fearful eyes. “I don’t think you’ve had enough of it to know that, but I’m offering the love of a friend and the love of my body. The love of a man who can see you are not hateful. You are not villainous. You are misunderstood. And Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m fucking undone by the beauty of you.”
“I don’t want to be loved,”
Dante seemed to yield over me compared to the length of time I’d known him. One month of constant contact and I was in danger of throwing away everything I knew just for one single kiss. “Let me love you anyway,” he suggested.
They say there is a thin line between love and hate. The moment Dante Salvatore twisted his hand in my hair and yanked me in for a savage kiss, I knew he had just pushed me over that invisible line into something infinitely more dangerous than hate.
The kiss tasted like the smoke, but not because of my anger. It tasted like the ashes of my once solid self-control. Because I knew this wouldn’t be the last time we kissed.
At that moment, every single atom in my body was owned by him. One kiss. For one kiss, I risked it all. My career, my family, my freedom. And my life. But, Dio mio, I’d do it again and again if it meant feeling like this. So alive I burned.
“This is on pause,” he growled, his thumb stroking possessively over my thudding pulse point as if each beat spoke his name. “Now that I’ve had that red mouth, I’ll need it again.”
“That sounds almost as good as please,” he told me in that smoky voice that made me high. “Not quite as good as your laughter, though.”
He looked like an invitation to sin on an altar, the worst decision a woman would ever make, but the wicked gleam in his eyes promised he would make it worth her while. “I’ll try my best to make sure your judgment lapses again,” he called as I turned on my heel and started for the elevator. “Frequently.”
When I touched my lips to force the expression off my face, I traced the feel of his kiss echoed there in my flesh and closed my eyes on a groan.
Maybe Dante was right about making the risk worth something. Something more than my career and its success. Something worth the cost of my soul. If I was going to damn myself anyway, I might as well do it by sleeping with the Devil of New York City.
I hadn’t lied. I was done with men. Unfortunately, Dante Salvatore was so much more than a man. He was a beast and, the truth was, he was the only one to ever make me feel like a beauty.
“Ciao lottatrice mia,” Dante’s deep rumble, so similar to the smooth purr of the car around me, settled some of the panic lingering like lactic acid in my tissues. Somewhere along the line, I’d stopped being annoyed when he spoke to me in my mother tongue. “How are you enjoying my beauty?”
“Next time I kiss that gorgeous red mouth, I’m going to make you so crazy that all you know is Italian.”
“How I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that. You’ll tell me about it when you get home.”
For the first time in a very, very long time, I felt part of a happy family. Part of a whole home.
“Elena,” he murmured in that way he had of making my name an Italian song. “If I didn’t trust you, would I let you inside my home? Would I tell my men to buy every season of that god-awful vampire show and send Bambi to get that expensive French chocolate you like? Would I train you with my inner circle every morning and laugh with you over good Italian wine?”
“Elena.” His voice whipped through the phone, startling me out of my fearful fog. “You are my fighter, a gladiator. You do not cower in the face of adversity. Do not be afraid. I’m going to talk you through this. There is a dashcam in the car. Frankie is hacking into it now, and I’ll be able to guide you, capisci? Chen just left, and Adriano’s already in Brooklyn. They’ll get there as soon as they can. Try to get over the Verrazano Bridge and they’ll meet you on Belt Parkway.”
This was just bravery. Coraggio.
I’d be fine because Dante wouldn’t let them hurt me. Even an hour away, I knew he wouldn’t let them get to me.
That unshakable faith, something like I’d felt as a girl for God...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
lanes without indicating. I’d always had a very well-honed sense of fight or flight cultivated over years of being faced with such situations over and over again, but this took it to another level.
“Stai zitta!” he barked, ordering me to shut up. “Do not say such things. Focus, Elena. Coraggio!”
“Benissimo, Elena,” Dante praised me as my hands cramped painfully around the wheel. “My fighter.”
“That’s my girl,”
“Bene, Elena, io sono con te. I am with you.”
As I clued into my body methodically, atom by atom, I realized that what I felt was not horror and weakness but exhilaration and victorious rage.
For the first time in my entire life, I felt as if I had come out on the other side of the conflict with the mafia as the winner. I felt as if the entire organization could come at me the way they had come at my family in Naples, and I could take them head-on in that fight. I could show them what it meant to battle a Lombardi, what it meant to face a woman at the end of her rope.
I could give up the idea of being a hero and rise up the villain beside a man I was beginning to understand was so much more than that.
He was the kind of man who called his seven-year-old niece the love of his life and watched episodes of some cheesy vampire show to give a lonely woman some comradery. He was the kind of man to rip someone apart with his bare hands for wronging him or his, but he was also the kind of man to take the fall for a woman’s crime because she was the sister of his heart. He was everything I’d feared and everything I’d never consciously known I longed for. And all that, six-foot-five inches, two hundred thirty pounds of British-Italian man, could be mine. All I had to do was be brave enough to reach
...more
I just hurtled myself into the marbled arms that opened instantly to catch me and haul me tight into his solid body. Instinctively, my legs locked around his waist, my arms around his neck. I burrowed my face in the junction of his strong neck and shoulder, my lips pressed to his pulse beneath his skin. Vaguely, I was aware of him squeezing me tight, of his orders to Adriano and whoever else was with us in the garage to leave.
There was only possession, the same feeling echoed in the drumbeat of my heart pounding between my ears.
The first hot swipe of his tongue parting my lips, thrusting into my mouth like it belonged there, sent everything I’d ever known about sex and desire tumbling from my head. There was no history of abuse. No nerves about how my newly recovered body might react to such passion. There was only Dante Salvatore. And me. Not Elena Moore or Elena Lombardi. Not lawyer or sister, bitch or loner. Just a man and woman tangled together in the most fervent kiss I ever could have imagined.
We panted, his breath my breath as he ate it off my tongue the way he’d once promised to.
I didn’t doubt him, but the desperation coursing through me was new and all-consuming. I couldn’t seem to get a handle on the sheer extremity of it. My thoughts lost to its magnitude the second they tried to form.
“I’ve never wanted someone so badly it felt like I would die if I couldn’t take them,”
hissed and gasped and moaned, making noises I’d always assumed only came from fake scenes in bad pornography. But I couldn’t stop myself, didn’t want to, and didn’t care. Nothing mattered but taking this beast of a man inside me, feeling him fill me up. I wanted to know how the new connections in my body would react to such a punishing invasion.
“You’ll feel every inch of my cock as I work it into this tight cunt.”
But this, Dante’s exotic voice growling over my skin as he spoke about taking me like some kind of conquering victor was almost too much to bear.
Dante pressed his forehead to mine, his eyes all black. “You can take it. I’ll make you.”
The feel of him against my most intimate place rocked through me so hard it ripped feelings out from my locked-down heart: longing so acute it burned, belonging like I’d always hoped for, acceptance so sweet it made my teeth ache.
“Figa mia,” he asserted, my pussy.
“My Elena,” he told me intractably, the way a monk spoke as if from God, with the kind of willful authority that made it seem impossible to doubt him.
The one owning my pleasure and building it beyond anything I’d ever known.
