“Scarlett,” he barely got out. “My life. My wife. Hold on to me. Tighter.” He hissed out a breath. “I could never leave you that way.” He spoke in Italian, moving us from the bed to the window, where he pressed me against it. “You bleed the blood dry from my heart. Not feeling you against my skin is a wound that can’t fucking heal.”
Time seemed to spin with my head as our worlds shrunk together, and we faded into one another. One place to another, one position to another, we couldn’t seem to get enough.
“Say it,” he commanded, taking me before the fire. “Say the words.”
“I love you,” I barely got out. “Oh God, I love you, Brando.”
“I love you more than my own life,” he said.
On the bed, his body reared over mine, and he ordered me to come to him—I did, both of us colliding and then falling.
His head came to my chest, over my pounding heart, and my arms wrapped around him, holding us together.
“I hope Rocco isn’t bleeding out,” I said when I could breathe again.
“Ah—” He made the noise sound dismissive, like a wave of the hand. “Tito was on his way.”
“You better go,” I whispered, but I held him tighter.
“I’ll go when my wife is ready for me to leave her alone.”
“I’m fine, Brando. Now. I—”
“I know,” he said, kissing my heart. “Me too.”
So, he had felt the loneliness as well as I did, and came back not only for me, but to save himself too.
“Bene.” I kissed the top of his head.
He looked up at me. “You wanted me to feel lonely too?”
“No, not exactly. I’m just glad that I wasn’t—I mean, I wasn’t as alone as I felt. You were there with me.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice gruff. “I couldn’t leave. Even when we’re not together, we’re connected. Even when you feel alone, you’re not, my baby. In the darkness, filled with all your fears, I’m there. When the sun comes up, I’m there, too. In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health…I go wherever you go,mywoman.”
“I go wherever you go,myman,” I whispered, fixing his hair. I felt so light that I could float, every bone and muscle made of air. “Ti amo.”
“Ti amo.”
He turned on his side but kept us joined. My fingertips ventured freely, of their own will, and he closed his eyes to the sensation. Venturing lower, I cupped his testicles, a warm, heavy weight, caressing.
“I need you all night,” I whispered in Italian.
“You have me for life,” he said. “And whatever is beyond it.”
Our mouths started to move again, beginning a rhythm, and my body, though languid, still craved more, more, more. The room was warm, perfumed by the wood in the fireplace, and the two of us, naked and together.
“Go,” I said, kissing his nose, between his eyebrows, his forehead. “Before it gets too late. I don’t want to miss you for long.”
He took my face in his hand, almost too roughly. “I don’t ever want to hear you cry like that from the other side of a door, understand? You cryto me.”
I nodded and closed my eyes when he started to suck around the pulse in my neck.
“I just needed a little sexual healing,” I said.
We both laughed quietly in the swaying darkness, our heads bent together, as though we were sharing secrets underwater.
He growled, but this time out of…relief. Then he started to move again, kissing me so deeply that my eyes rolled back in my head, and every noise I made belonged to him.
