As if Sandro can hear my thoughts, he lifts his head. “Hungry?” Then he grins. “For food I mean?”
I trace his smile with my finger. “I could eat.”
“Good because you’re definitely going to need the energy.” He presses a kiss to my lips and rolls off me.
Chapter 26
Alessandro
My cheek is pressed against her chest, the reassuring beat of her heart thumping against my ear, her legs wrapped around me. I’m still inside her after one of the most intense orgasms of my life. I don’t ever want to move. Unfortunately, I can feel her thinking. I can’t have that. I only want her feeling tonight.
“Hungry?” A spark lights up her eyes. I grin. “For food I mean?”
“I could eat.” Her finger touches my lips, tracing them, and I’m reminded of the first time she touched my mouth when I was thirteen and had a bloody lip—how gentle her touch was, how it sent a blissful, foreign sensation coursing through my body, just like it’s doing now. My cock begins to swell.
Down boy.
“Good because you’re definitely going to need the energy.” I kiss her, relishing her swollen, sweet lips just because I can, and then make myself roll off her. I ditch the condom and pull on my boxers since we are technically on a public beach. Then I drape the cashmere blanket over her shoulders.
As we talk, I feed her mango salmon ceviche and baked pomegranate brie on crackers, fresh blackberries and honeydew. Putting things on her tongue and watching her swallow is my new obsession.
We’re both trying to avoid anything serious, just catching up, sharing funny stories, and relearning things about each other.
But I begin to realize I’m in serious trouble. In the back of my mind, as I focus on every word she says, every morsel she gives me from her life that I’ve missed, I recognize something is happening. I’m trying to ignore it, but it’s powerful. More powerful than lust. More powerful than the rage that has consumed me for the last decade. It’s soft and bright, a pinprick of light in the vast darkness of my emotional landscape.
“Remember when you and Milo decided to play chicken on jet skis, and you almost died?” She bites her bottom lip in distress. I pop a berry into her mouth to give her something else to bite and then caress her raw bottom lip with my thumb.
I’ve come way closer to death since then, but I don’t tell her that. “Yeah, Gunnar saved my life that day when he pulled my unconscious ass out of the water.” I lift her hand and press a kiss to the pulse point on her wrist. “Don’t worry, I’m hard to kill, Angel.”
She gives me a lazy smile, and then it disappears just as quickly. “I secretly wished Milo was the one with lungs full of saltwater. Does that make me a bad person?” She whispers her confession.
I shift in the lounge chair. My eyes narrow. It would take a lot to make my angel wish someone harm. Putting a finger beneath her chin, I make her look at me. “What did he do to you?”
After a lot of coaxing, she finally tells me about what happened on the roof.
I’m going to kill him.
The Beast is pounding his fist on my rib cage. My heart is about to explode. “Why didn’t you tell me back then?”
She looks up at me through her lashes, her eyes bright with distress.I’m going to kill him slowly.“He threatened to throw you off the roof if I told you.”
With a groan, I pull her into my chest. “I would gladly die protecting you, Lennon Rose.” Then to lighten the mood I tug on her hair. “But you don’t really think Milo could’ve successfully thrown me from the roof, do you?”
She puffs out a laugh and it breaks the tension. When she looks at me now her eyes are sparkling with mischief. “Not today anyway. You were kind of skinny back then.”
“Is that so.” I grab her and sink my teeth into her neck as she squeals.
***
At one point she’s running a finger over the scars on my knee from where Mother made me and Rocco kneel for an hour on broken pieces of her lamp. We’d accidentally smashed it throwing a football in the house.
She sighs hard.
I reach over and take her hand, slide my fingers through hers. “We all have scars, Lennon. Some are on the outside and some are on the inside, like yours.”
Her lips curve upward slightly, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She holds it a few seconds too long, as if acknowledging and accepting what she’s lost. What we’ve lost. Then she brushes her finger over the tattoos on my hand. I have her legs in my lap again. We can’t stop touching each other.
“What does this mean?” She’s stroking the darkMemento Moriscript in front of my knuckles.
