“Vasso,” I gasp, fingers threading into his hair, tugging, holding, pleading without saying please. “Oh, God?—”
“Not God,” he says into me, smug and wrecked, voice too rough to be a joke, and then his mouth finds the exact thing that detonates the rest of my sentence. “Your husband, eating your beautiful pussy as is his right and privilege. Now say my name.”
I say his name like a rosary. And he makes me forget every other word exceptyesandmoreandpleaseandright there.
He talks to me while he wrecks me, filthy and tender both, tells me exactly what I taste like, exactly how he’s going to do this again when I stop shaking, exactly how many times I’m going to come before he puts his cock inside me and makes me remember who I belong to. The crude words land like home because they are his, because they are mine when he says them, because we are both too far gone to dress this in pretty.
“Look at me,” he orders, and I do, and the sight of his mouth on me, his eyes black with purpose, is enough to tear the top off everything I’ve been trying to contain since I mailed misguided betrayal in a velvet box.
I break, hard and helpless, a sound that will never fit inside a polite sentence. He holds me through it, hands brutalizing my thighs in a way that will leave a visible claim in the morning, mouth relentless until I try to close my legs and he drags them wider with a warning that makes me whimper and obey.
“Again,” he says, lifting his head to bite my inner thigh, gentle, then not. “You owe me another.”
“I can’t,” I sob-laugh, the edges of me molten.
“You can,” he murmurs, thumb circling where his mouth was, voice the dark thing it sometimes becomes. “You always can for me.”
He is right. I always do for him.
When he finally rises, when his body presses me into the cushions and he kisses the tears off my cheeks like he wants to own even these, I reach for him like I’m drowning. He hisses when I slide my hand over him, hot and heavy, and the curse he spills against my throat is pure blasphemy. He doesn’t make me beg to take him inside. I don’t make him beg to be allowed to. We are past begging; we are inside the part of language that only bodies speak.
Vasso fucks me torrid and furious and so stupidly tender in flashes I could crack. He brackets my face when the angle makes me see stars; I drag my nails down his back, and he tells me to do it again; we lose the shape of the sofa and remember it in bruises.
I speak, too much and too honest, and he answers, too crude, too perfect.
When I fall apart the second time, he’s right there with me, pulsing long and deep inside me, shuddering, swearing my name like he wrote it.
Silence after is a different creature. He stays inside me long enough to kiss my eyelids, my mouth, the corner where my laugh lives when it isn’t hiding. He pulls out with a curse that sounds like regret. I turn into him because there is nowhere else that makes sense and he lets me. He tucks me against his chest and strokes my spine until my breaths stop tripping over themselves.
“Don’t do that again,” he says into my hair, a command with a plea hiding inside it.
“I won’t,” I whisper, and mean it in the small, selfish way of nights.
He rises, sweeps me into his arms, and carries me back to our bed.
We drift. Wake. Drift. I don’t know when I fall fully under; I only know that when the room lightens to the pale blue of avery expensive morning, his chest under my cheek is warm and steady.
But when I wake hours later, the sofa holds only a fold in the cushion and the shape of us in the rumpled throw. The lamp is off. The door to the suite is closed. On the coffee table, beside a glass with the ghost of his mouth on it, a note leans against the lily vase.
Rest and recharge today. Headed to Florence first. Damage control. Meet me in Milan tomorrow. We’re keeping our date with haute couture and the press. —V.
I pick the card up with shaking fingers. He didn’t writeHarrison.He didn’t writetrust vote.He didn’t writewe’re fineorwe’re not.And he doesn’t answer my texts as the morning ticks forward; he doesn’t pick up when I call. By mid-afternoon, my stomach is a fist. I sit very still and listen to the sea being infinite while the rest of me is finite and frantic.
Mara answers on the first ring. “Kincaid,” she says, brisk. “He asked me to make sure your car is at eleven.”
“What happened?” My voice is paper-thin. “Is it—did something leak?—”
“I can’t discuss specifics,” she says, and I can hear the capital letters in can’t. “He left me a message to relay if you call: pack for two days, Milan by noon, you have a 3 p.m. with Valdi and an evening welcome at Palazzo Aurelia. He said—his words—‘We’re not letting her father win.’”
Nother orher father.
The distinction lands like a heavy but welcome weight as I press my thumb into the corner of his note until the card bends. Maybe it’s a completely foolish idea, but I let in the most fatal of emotions...hope. “Thank you.”
“Naomi,” Mara says, softer, and her voice shifts from COO to woman who has seen too many men weaponize silence. “He’sangry. He’s also already moving pieces to protect the things and people he cares about. Show up. That’s the only rule.”
“Right.” My laugh is a raw thing. “I’m very good at showing up in nice dresses.”
“Make this one armor,” she says, and hangs up because that, too, is mercy.
