More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 13 - January 21, 2025
“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.
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.
“Benissimo, Elena,” Dante praised me as my hands cramped painfully around the wheel. “My fighter.”
“Talk to me,” he ordered gently. “Bene,” I whispered, then cleared my throat. “Okay, I’m good.” “That’s my girl,” he told me, the warmth of relief and pride in his tone washing over me through the speakers. “Adriano will see you home. I’ll be waiting.”
“Don’t get off the phone,” I hastened to say, too shaken to be embarrassed by my need. The shaking in my hands had traveled up my arms into my shoulders and chest. I vibrated like a second engine in the driver’s seat. “Stay with me.” There was a silence that felt like a hand cupping my cheek, holding me still for one long, deep breath. “Bene, Elena, io sono con te. I am with you.”
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
...more
When Dante wrapped my hair slowly, firmly around his wide palm, I could only pant as he pulled my head back so I was forced to look at him. His dark features were carved out of stone, harsh with possession and stark desire. There was no question in that gaze, but he didn’t need one. There was only possession, the same feeling echoed in the drumbeat of my heart pounding between my ears. A mad desire to beg and plead for his touch scorched through my blood, but before I could succumb to the flames, Dante was taking control, pinning my head in place with that hand in my hair so he could plunder
...more
“I need,” I tried to tell him as he captured my lower lip and dragged it sensuously through his teeth. “Hush,” he ordered me, hands flexing hard on my ass before one ran down the crease of my buttock and thigh to dive beneath the edge of my rucked-up skirt. The rough pads of his fingers caught on the thin silk of my stocking as they trailed up to the bare skin of my cheek. “I’ll give you everything you need.”
“I’ve never wanted someone so badly it felt like I would die if I couldn’t take them,” he growled
“You’ll feel every inch of my cock as I work it into this tight cunt.”
“You can take it. I’ll make you.”
“Lottatrice mia,” he groaned, rubbing our noses together the instant before he pushed into me,
“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.
“Vieni per me,” Dante gritted out between his teeth. “Come for me, Elena. Let me feel you come apart around me.”
“I’ve never orgasmed like that before.” And it was true, though he didn’t know how much. “Now, I want to see you come for me.” “Cazzo,” he cursed, squeezing his eyes shut as he powered hard into my slightly aching, buzzing pussy. “You feel better than a dream.” “Show me how much you love it,”
“I want to watch what I do to you.”
I had never seen or imagined a man sexier than Dante Salvatore.
And that final act? Dante watching his hand massage his essence into my skin as if it would stay there like a tattoo, a brand, forever? It settled some primal need to be owned fully by someone else. To be wanted and accepted. To belong. Before I could tamp down the impulse, a sob fell wetly from between my lips. I hastened to cover my mouth, eyes wide over my hands as I stared at Dante who looked down at me in horrified shock.
“Did I hurt you, cara?” he demanded, quickly tucking himself back in his pants and righting my own clothes before reaching down to collect me gently into his arms. It only made me sob harder, my chest a cold engine stuttering to life with furious emotion. I couldn’t stop. Panicked, I clutched at him even as I tried to hide my face in his neck, the tears sliding hot and heavy down my cheeks into the open collar of his shirt. “Hush, hush,” he murmured as he stood, my body easy in his hold. “Io sono con te. I am with you.”
“Better?” he asked, eyes solemn. I nodded, biting my lips then shrugging weakly. “That was probably the first time you had sex with a woman who went to pieces in your arms afterward.” He didn’t laugh or brush it off the way I thought he would. His thumb swept over the corner of my mouth, reminding me of the fact my makeup was probably running down my cheeks, and he said, “It was the first time for a lot of things, Elena. None of them bad.”
“Sometimes there is more strength in tears than in austerity.” I laughed limply. “How do you always know what to say? Is there some kind of class for that?” His lips twitched. “It’s my natural-born charm. But it’s also this. Whatever you and I are made of, it’s the same. You don’t have to be good with me, right or true in any sense, but especially the conventional. You can be your worst self with me, because Elena, it’s the contradictory nature of your soul that intoxicates me.”
“Aren’t you going to ask about my breakdown?” I asked, my own self-hatred peeking through again. He scowled then sighed, turning me around with one hand as he reached for the shampoo with the other. “No. If you want to share, you can. But I think I have a few ideas. The adrenaline crash alone would justify it. I’m just happy to have shared it with you. Being able to be there for you is a privilege I have the feeling you don’t afford to many people.”
“There are many things I can and will make you feel,” he promised darkly. “Now that I’ve had you, I won’t let you go until I’ve had my fill, and I have a feeling that will take a very long time.”
I wondered if Bambi was in love with Dante and hoped very much, for reasons I didn’t want to delve into, that she was not.
This was why I wore black. Not because it cut a dramatic image, but because blood was impossible to get out of anything else.
Frankie had discovered who had tried to run Elena off the road in Staten Island. The motherfucking di Carlos.
It wasn’t just about the fact that Cosima had killed Giuseppe and that she was a known associate of Tore and me (though no one but the three of us knew to what extent).
Carter Andretti had been only too happy to explain in the early hours of the morning that Agostino di Carlo had paid him to shoot out Ottavio’s deli. Not to get rid of Cosima. But to get rid of his uncle.
Maybe this house arrest has made you pazzo….maybe that woman has.” “That woman?” I asked quietly, my entire body coiled.
“You call Elena a bitch ever again, Jaco, I’ll carve the word into your forehead with my blade, capisci?”
“Elena is just for me.”
“You always said women ruin a man,” he reminded me perniciously. “They make them weak.” I cocked my head, my hand squeezing his neck painfully. “Did I? I think you misunderstood. Maybe it was my accent, hmm? What I said was that a man in love has one weakness, his woman. It’s his Achilles’ heel. But that same love makes the rest of him impenetrable, strong as a god.”
“Go pick up my niece and Bambi. Give them my love.”
Oh no its him.
“Elena’s got it too,” he continued as if picking up the thread from a conversation we’d been having before. “What?” “What it takes to be donna.”
I blinked because even though Elena had been on my mind, in my fucking blood, for weeks, I hadn’t thought hard about our future. Maybe because I knew logically we couldn’t have one. She was too proper, too upstanding and moral. Too disgusted with the details of work that made up my entire existence. There was no way we could ever have a…relationship beyond the walls of my apartment, beyond the scope of this case. Yet the idea of giving her up made me mad. Crazed as a beast gone feral, foaming at the mouth. I was the only man who had ever made her come. The one to make her curse and make her
...more
How was it possible there could be a time when she didn’t seem like mine? But donna. Boss. The queen to my kingpin. A partner not just in this case against me but in crime. In my shadowed underworld. It should have seemed ridiculous, but a part of me could picture her there under the faded frescos, checking...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Triumph maybe, at the thought of corrupting her so fully. At the thought of having a woman like her stand beside me.
I knew well enough that the best-laid plans often went to shit. So I had plans A through E. And not one of those included Elena Lombardi. They couldn’t.
Wild dogs and armed Cosa Nostra soldati couldn’t have kept me from moving closer to witness Elena Lombardi like I had never seen her before.
I wanted to know if she played it for me. If the gold bright notes were about us. With Elena, it was never as straightforward as simply asking her for the answer. Like music from the keys, it had to be coaxed out with masterful hands.
“Do you play for me, lottatrice? Because this sounds like the sweetest song of surrender,”
“Bene, Elena, suona mentre io suono te,” I told her. Good, Elena, you play while I play you.
I’d never been so affected by a woman. Because Elena wasn’t just gorgeous. Every single aspect of her fascinated me.
Every sensation I eked out of her was a fucking wonder.
“You wanted me to find you like this,” I murmured against her neck, teeth plucking at her skin sharply so she hissed. “You played like the piper to beckon me here. Were you hoping I would touch you like this? Did you fantasize about this moment?”
“Because, Elena,” I continued as my hand cupped her entire wet mound. “Nemmeno immagini cosa ho intenzione di farti.” You cannot even imagine what I am going to do to you.
“I’m going to make you come like this on my hand, and you are going to play for me all the way through your climax,” I ordered. “Because I want to watch you fail. I want to see you lose control just for me.”
“I can feel how much you want to orgasm for me,”
“You’re going to come all over my fingers for me, Elena.”
