“They’re yours,” I breathed. “All yours.”
“All mine,” he repeated, his hold on me becoming harder, so hard, I felt him past my flesh. He hadn’t touched me past kissing me, but I could feel it at its surface.
His claim.
He sighed. “It was not love that brought Rosaria Caffi and I together, but loyalty toward my family. We shared—an understanding of this. Until we did not remember even what that understanding was any longer. She went left. I went right. We ripped each other apart.”
“Is that why she ran? You told her…no to the marriage?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “That was part of it.” He wanted to explain, but he didn’t. There was something…so tired about his voice when he spoke of her. Like she was running him ragged even though she wasn’t there. The scar over his heart was not the only part of him that had not healed fully yet.
Turning some, I pulled the chord to the lamp, and the entire room went dark. Romantic music still played softly from the other room. Curling up next to him, I cuddled up as close as bodily possible. I inhaled the scent of his skin, and he did the same to mine. I smiled some. We were sniffing each other.
As my eyes started to close, I traced the scar again. “When she cut you open,” I whispered, flinching at even saying the words, “she set your heart free, Rocco.” She had, maybe inadvertently, sent it straight to me.
“If this is a dream,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, “and someone wakes me, I will be in hell.”
“I won’t dare let them.” I kissed his neck, right over his pulse, then fell asleep in his arms, not even nightmares daring to come close to me.
Chapter 19
Pulse of Your Heart
My body felt like it had been turned inside out, my nerves exposed, and Rocco’s hands had caressed over each one in my sleep. His hands were on me all night, like he couldn’t stop touching me. Which was why I slept, but I didn’t. Still, before sunrise, my eyes fluttered open, and I full on smiled at the way he held me. He had me cocooned in his arms and legs. His entire body protected mine, even in sleep.
The room had an otherworldly glow about it. The sun was just starting to push the darkness back, cracking open the night, a brilliant fire spreading throughout the sky. Heat was already starting to creep in, hypnotizing the cicadas to sing. The essences of our body seemed to tangle in such a peaceful point of existence.
I yawned quietly and could have stretched my arms and legs, absorbing this heaven on earth, maybe falling back asleep, maybe not. But that was the point. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but being here with him.
His breath slowly washed over my head, his heartbeat against my ear, and I breathed in the scent of his skin. I pushed my head back after a second to study his face.
In this light…his beauty—no, that wasn’t the right way to describe it, but it wasn’t wrong either. The only description that felt appropriate, or worthy, was that he had a face that could be stared at for eternity and never get old. My hand seemed to grow a mind of its own, and it followed the direction of my eager heart, tracing the lines of his face, absorbing the feel of him through touch. It was like tracing the lines of the finest art. And this art was all new, but sometime, somewhere, I’d seen it before. Knew it.
Knew him better than the lines of my hand.
“Amora,la tua mano è una farfalla che scivola sulla mia pelle,” he whispered, eyes still closed.Love, your hand is a butterfly that glides across my skin…
Sighing at the soft roughness in his voice, my butterfly continued to glide, down his throat, up and down his chest, back up to his face, where I traced the shape of his lips. He bit at my finger and I gasped, a lazy smile coming to my face.
His eyes slowly opened and met mine in the fiery haze of the oncoming day, my fingertips still on his lips. I couldn’t look away from the hypnotizing sea green color of them. They seemed to glow, the same way the water does when it’s touched by the sun. Tension started to grow between us, an ache rising from the depths of desire, pushing our bodies even closer.
Then the tension snapped, and both of us gave into it.
Our mouths came together. My hands roamed over him, and his roamed over me. His hair was wild—wilder than I’d ever seen it. It was usually perfectly styled. It made him look more like a beast. I didn’t help the case. My hands were all over him, messing up all the perfection, setting him free of all the restraints that felt like barsto meonhisbody.Around his family, he was rigid, upholding all the rules and traditions that the Fausti family seemed to thrive on. In this bed, with me, I wanted him to break all the rules. Dared him to.
Dared him to love me freely and without constraints pulling him back.
Even this amount of contact was causing us both to pant, to make wild noises, to rip and claw at each other’s clothes. Looking back, the Henley onesie wasn’t such a good idea. It had trappedme inside. A second later, he ripped it apart with his bare hands, flinging the material to the floor.
On second thought, the restraining onesie was the perfect choice.
There was something so satisfying to both of us about him freeing me and himself, assuming the noises he made were for the same reason I was making them. It was a sense of total and complete relief. We were that much closer to our bodies connecting for the first time, and a deeper place reconnecting after centuries.
I’d never been naked in front of man before. I had never allowed it to go that far. I hadn’t even kissed a man before, unless the cheek counted. Again, I had extremely high standards, and Rocco Fausti had obliterated them all and even added ones I had no clue should exist.
Because I had earned this moment, I watched as he took in my body like he was starved for it, and I was all he had ever craved.
“Amora,” he breathed, his eyes stalling on the place between my breasts were my heart reacted to the beat of our attraction, where the lion’s heart rested. “I am not worthy of you.” But he touched me anyway, traced my lips like I had done to his.
