Holy mother of all holies.
The symphony of light and colour that had accompanied the best orgasm of my life trailed away, and I fought to pry open my eyes. When my weak efforts resisted, I allowed myself another half minute. Just to breathe.
To contain my wonder before I came across like the absolute ingenue I felt right now. But I couldn’t help but be awed by what had happened.
No one had gone down on me like that.
And I had the strongest suspicion that the set of circumstances that had brought me here to this moment meant that no other experience could match it. I almost regretted that, but the tiniest sliver of common sense finally kicked in.
I opened my eyes and saw Cesare rising to his feet. His mouth glistened with my juices, and the bulge behind his fly was even thicker. My mouth watered.
Whether regret would come in the morning or I would accept this as the culmination of what had started in that warehouse, I refused to contemplate right now.
If this was to be a one-and-done thing – and I failed to see how it couldn’t without all-out war breaking out between our families; hell, eventhisrisked everything – then I planned on being fully present, on holding back the fallout for as long as possible.
So when Cesare leaned over me, fusing his mouth with mine in a filthily melding of lips and tongue and the taste of mysurrender, I moaned like a whore in church, raised my arms and wrapped them around his neck.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing, the punishing regime required to maintain the optimal physique of a Formula One race driver on full display. Without breaking the kiss, he resettled me against my pillows.
Then he stepped back, a pained expression on his face, and… pulled the covers over my body.
I blinked in confusion as he took several more steps back, even though his gaze remained pinned feverishly on me.
He was leaving?
The question must have shown on my face. One corner of his mouth lifted, but then a ping from his pocket distracted him.
He reached for his phone, and whatever he saw on there hardened his face. He turned away, then paused to look me over once more.
Vulgar hunger mingled with cold fury before he throttled it. ‘To be continued,duci belleza. That you can count on.’
13
CESARE
‘For someone facing imminent dismemberment, you’re entirely too zen for my liking.’
I let my gaze linger wistfully for a moment on the private jet we were swapping for one of the three sleek matte black Sikorsky S-76 helicopters Orazio had commissioned last year after seeing it inSuccession, his favourite TV show.
To my eternal regret, he’d adopted several unpalatable traits from that show.
Sighing as we lifted off from the private terminal in Teterboro Airport in New York, I turned to Rafaelle.
His eyes narrowed. ‘Come to think of it, you’ve been pretty chill considering you came second in the race yesterday. What gives?’
Silently, I handed over my phone. He scrolled quickly through the neon-green message thread and glanced sharply at me.
‘Fuck. That’s why you were texting with those questions last night?’
‘Yeah.’
He read through the messages again. ‘You think there’s some teeth to this?’
I shrugged. ‘No fucking idea. But I’m going to use it to buy myself some time for you, Bibi and me to dig into it, ideally before we turn up at the next race,’ I said as I took my phone back and read through the messages.
For some reason, most likely the hacker fucking with me, they no longer disappeared immediately. Sometimes they stayed for half an hour. Sometimes two hours. This latest thread had remained on my screen all the way across the Atlantic.
It started last night just as I was rethinking the lunacy of leaving a blissed-out Maddelena to her dreams when I could have been balls-deep in her tight cunt. And in a way, the messages had set my big head straight as my little head had promised the worst case of blue balls in the history of mankind.
