8
LUCIA
Iwake slowly, surfacing from sleep the way you do from deep water, disoriented and heavy and strangely warm in places that should not be warm at all.
And almost immediately, I’m hit with the dense, unfamiliar awareness of another body pressed intimately along my back, solid and unmoving, radiating heat into me like a living wall.
For one hazy, treacherous heartbeat, I think I’m still dreaming, still caught in that furnace-hot fever dream filled with writhing bodies and endless panting… well… two specific bodies, one with the face and body of a falling angel, and the other one? Me.
The kind of dream that, if not interrupted, usually ended up waking me with my hand wedged firmly between my thighs, massaging myself in?—
No. I drag my mind from the sex dungeon just as memories of the night before come rushing back, an unstoppable torrent.
Attempting not to alert the pillar of masculinity behind me that I’m awake, I tentatively ease away.
I feel pressure shift on my wrist.
Memory crashes harder into me in a single, merciless wave as the silk tightens.
The jetty. The water. The chase, then the shower. And God, the tie. The memory of that last act of his conjures up erotic images I don’t want to contemplate.
Absolutely should not contemplate.
Giovanni.
My breath catches as my chest tightens.
He’s awake. I know it instantly even though he doesn’t move, hasn’t spoken. He doesn’t need to. The air around us has subtly changed, as though his awareness itself has weight, gravity and intention.
“Buongiorno,cara. I’m happy to see you slept well,” he states quietly, his voice close to my ear, low and rough with morning.
I go very still as if that will stop him speaking, breathing. Doing whatever it is he’sintendingon doing to me this morning.
Images attempt to smash through again but I shake my head, irritated by my inability to suppress them. By my inability to outthink this man, especially when he’s this close, where I can feel the blazing column of his body pressed against mine.
“I didn’t,” I lie, because pride is the last thing I have left that feels remotely intact.
His chest lifts behind me with a silent laugh, and the way the sound echoes then tunnels warmly through me makes me clamp my eyes shut and absorb every cadence of it.
“Bugia,” he murmurs. “You drooled on my arm for almost an hour.”
Heat floods my face as I groan and bury my face into the pillow. “You’re disgusting.”
“And you,” he says mildly, flexing his wristas it rubssizzlingly with that nerve-tingling abrasiveness against mine, “are still a terrible liar.”
I try to shift again, to create distance, to reclaim even an inch of autonomy, but his free arm tightens around my waist with slow, lazy possession that feels far too deliberate to be accidental.
The movement drags my arse back into him.
And I feel him then.
He’s hard.
Unapologetically hard. The imprint of him burns one arse cheek, so dangerously, erotically close to my clenching pussy. To the place I’ve craved him but somehow never had him.
The place I could have now if?—
No.
