Page 157 of Valentino

I drag my eyes up. He's watching me with his jaw tight and his control fraying visibly at the edges. The sight of it, this man who walked into Enzo Basile's compound like death had invited him personally, coming apart because of my mouth, sends a pulse of heat straight between my legs. My free hand fists in the fabric of his trousers just to hold on to something.

"Two weeks," he says, rough, thrusting slow and deep enough that I feel him at the back of my throat. "Two weeks I couldn't touch you the way I wanted. Couldn't bend you over anything. Couldn't make you scream." His thumb strokes my wet cheek, tender in a way that doesn't match anything his hips are doing. "I lay on my stomach in that fucking hospital bed and thought about this exact mouth."

I hum my agreement, my approval, my entire foreign policy, and he swears in Italian, soft and vicious, and his rhythm stutters for the first time.

He pulls out of my mouth so suddenly I sway forward, gasping, lips swollen, and his fist in my hair tips my head back so he can look down at the wreck he's made of my face.

"Not yet," he says, breathing hard, and his eyes are black and his composure is hanging by a single thread that I personally want to bite through. "When I finish tonight, it'll be after I have fucked your sweet pussy."

Valentino

"Stand up," I say.

She stands slowly, dragging her palms up my thighs on the way. Her knees are pink from the floor, and I already know the next room full of men talking business will have to compete with the memory of her on her knees.

"Turn around."

"Bossy," she says, but she's already turning, already gathering her hair off her neck without being asked. The obedience underneath the sass undoes me more than the sass ever could. She knows it, too. That's the problem with Amanda. She knows everything I don't say.

I reach around her and open the button of her jeans. I drag the zipper down and peel jeans and underwear over her hips in one pull, down to her thighs. She exhales through her nose, a soft sound she'd deny making.

The lamp by the bed throws gold across her bare skin. Somewhere down the hall, a door closes. Vittoria, probably, or one of a dozen relatives who'd give a kidney to know what's happening in the east wing right now. The whole house smells of my mother's cooking, garlic and slow tomatoes drifting up through old vents, and I'm about to fuck the love of my life ten feet from where my aunt is saying the rosary. God can chastise me later. I have a long night planned.

I turn us both, walk her two steps, and put her hands flat on the wall beside the door.

"Hold on," I tell her.

She laughs, low and breathless, but the laugh cuts off clean when I push inside her.

Cristo. She's soaked, tight, hot enough to make my vision blur, and her whole body bows toward the wall like the plaster might save her. It won't.

Nothing in this house will save either of us, and that's exactly how I want it.

I seat myself fully and stay there, buried, my chest against her back. The stitches along my back pull and complain, but I couldn't give less of a damn. Pain is just a feeling. This is the only feeling that matters.

"Valentino—"

"Quiet." I take her chin in my hand and turn her face toward me, my mouth at her ear. "You wanted me to finish in your mouth like I haven't been starving for this pussy for two weeks. Greedy girl."

"You're the greedy⁠—"

I move, and her sentence dies.

I keep the pace slow at first, deep, each stroke a full statement, because rushing this would be a crime against everything I survived to get here. Her breath hits the wall in short, uneven bursts. I press my lips to the curve of her neck where her pulse is sprinting and feel her clench around me.

"You feel that?" My voice has dropped to the register I save for confessions. "That's mine. Every inch of you, mine. I lay in that fucking hospital bed planning this. The wall. The angle."

She pushes back on my cock. She can't help herself.

"There she is," I murmur, and bite her ear, and the moan that comes out of her is loud enough to reach Sicily.

My hand leaves her chin and seals over her mouth before the second one escapes. Her eyes go wide, then narrow, and against my palm I feel her grin a heartbeat before her tongue drags slow and wet across my skin. The little provocation goes straight through me like a current.

So I give her what she's asking for and slide two fingers past her lips. She closes her mouth around them and sucks, and I have to lock my knees because she tightens around me at the same time, like her whole body decided to answer.

Her teeth grazing my knuckles, the same knuckles that killed for her, and she kisses them between strokes like she's blessing the violence.

I fuck her harder, hard enough that her palms slap the wall and the framed photograph beside the door knocks against the plaster.