But for tonight, I listen to the sea and the quiet between sobs and remind myself of the line I gave her and meant.
Stand with me. Or don’t stand near me.
21
NAOMI
Ilast five minutes in bed. Ten, if I count lying to myself.
The suite is too quiet, the Amalfi night too bright, the sea outside too relentless with its shush-and-drag, like it’s trying to soothe a child who won’t stop crying. I stare at the ceiling fan, at the soft spool of shadows, at the place on the pillow where his scent lingers—bergamot and skin and the particular salt that only ever means him—and I admit defeat.
The robe slips off my shoulders as I stand. Underneath, moss-green silk clings to me with wicked memory. I forgot how little this set covers, with its thin straps, demi cups and a slip of lace at my hips like a secret I should not be carrying into a war room. I tell myself I’m going to talk. I tell myself he’s in the next room and I am an adult who can have a conversation without losing my nerve.
My hand on the connecting door shakes once. I breathe through it and turn the handle.
He hasn’t made the sofa into a bed.
He’s sprawled across it like a man who promised himself he wouldn’t sleep and did anyway, shirt still open at the throat, one forearm thrown over his eyes, the other curled on his stomach.
The lamp by the window is on, turned low; the room is storm-light intimate, the kind of light that makes every truth look expensive.
“Can we talk, Vasso?” I ask, and my voice betrays me—soft, hoarse, a stranger in my own mouth.
He moves his arm and looks at me with heavy, brooding eyes.
Heat hits me like a thrown coat. His gaze drags once, slow, from the strap biting my shoulder to the lace that barely pretends to be a panty to the line of my legs, and then back to my face. His eyes blaze the way they do when he’s about to finalize a deal that was never not going to be his.
“No,” he says, and the word cracks open something inside me and pours fire in. “We communicate so much better in a different language.” His mouth lifts, not kind. Parts his muscled thighs and resettled his arms on them, a predator awaiting his prey. “Come here, Naomi.”
I should turn. I should leave. I should say we will do this with words or not at all.
My traitorous feet propel me across the room as my body sparks and ignites to life.
The first touch is a collision; everything after that is deconstruction.
He drags me into his lap with hot hands on the back of my thighs, hard enough to leave intent, and the breath leaves me in a sound that isn’t a yes and isn’t a no, just plea. His mouth finds mine like it’s been hunting through the dark for hours and finally caught the thing it wanted to kill or keep—teeth, tongue, anger. It’s messy, hungry, wrecked. I taste salt and sleep and the edge of the accusation we didn’t finish.
“Do you know,” he growls against my mouth, “what you do to me?”
“Yes,” I gasp, because I do, because my body knows the answer even when my mouth is a liar. “Yes.”
“Say it.” He bites my lower lip, gentle only at the last second, thumb pressing into my hip like a lesson. “Say what you do.”
“I ruin your control,” I whisper, then louder when his eyes cut warning, “I make you forget vendetta and minutes and optics and everything except me.”
His laugh is a blade licked clean. “Exactly.”
He palms my breast through the silk, rough, reverent, both. Teases and torments my nipples until I have no choice but to arch into it because my spine is a traitor. He cups my face with his other hand and holds me there as he kisses me again, slower this time, deeper, like he’s pouring something back into me he thinks I wasted. I roll my hips without meaning to; he swears into my mouth, low and obscene, and the sound strips every inch of pretense from my skin.
“Will this always be how we communicate best?” I manage, breath scraping.
“Don’t knock it,” he says, and the unfair, impossible smile punches straight through me. “Not when it’s this effective. Even when you shut up and scream for me.”
Shame and desire collide and explode into something I can’t label. I want to be furious with him; I want to be forgiven by him; I want to be unmade under his hands and rebuilt as something braver. “You’re an arrogant bastard.”
“And you’re wearing my favorite color and pretending you came to talk,” he returns, fingers slipping under silk with intent that makes my knees tremble on either side of his thighs. “One language at a time,agapita.”
We fall out of words. We use mouths for other things. He lifts me like I weigh about as much as a promise and sets me on the edge of the sofa, knees parting my thighs, and looks at me like penance and prize at once. When he slides to the floor and drags me to the edge, when his hands press my knees wider, when hismouth descends with a reverence that might break me, I hear myself make a sound I don’t ever make outside churches.
