Tongue and teeth and sucking lips drag groans of need and desire from our souls.
His fingers cup my core through my dress and mine finds the stone-hard shape of him.
The soundtrack of our lust is interspersed with gunfire and, God, I couldn’t care less.
We stop only because we have to, because the line we’re standing on is trembling under the weight of everything we’ve been holding back.
He rests his forehead against mine, breathing hard. “I hate to stop this…but,amuri, this is not how I planned it,” he says.
I laugh shakily. “You sure? I could’ve sworn you plan everything.”
“Not this,” he admits. “Not here.”
The admission guts me. Or maybe it’s the residue of danger, the intoxicating effect of Giovanni’s torrid kiss.
Whatever it is makes me lace my fingers into his jacket, holding him there.
“What if I said I don’t care? That I don’t want to be brave or managed or seduced right now?”
His thumb brushes my cheek, surprisingly gentle. “Then I’ll say you don’t have to be any of those things.”
I swallow. The next step feels as inevitable as breathing, as vital as clinging to this life we’ve tested and maybe triumphed over tonight.
“And what if I said I want more?”
The look he gives me then, dark, hungry, reverent, tells me everything I need to know.
That this time, neither of us will pull away.
15
LUCIA
The warehouse is half-dark, cavernous, smelling of salt and rust and gunpowder, and it should be the last place on earth where anything tender happens.
But tenderness isn’t what’s driving us.
Adrenaline still claws through my bloodstream, sharp as broken glass. My hands are shaking, my heart hasn’t remembered how to slow down, and Giovanni is right in front of me—blood on his shirt, fury in his eyes, his body a barricade between me and the world.
He barks something in Sicilian over his shoulder but I’m too enraptured by the shape of his lips to clock what he just said.
His men hesitate.
A rumble builds under the fingers I still have splayed on his chest. “Go,” he snarls. “A hundred feet, minimum. And cover your ears if you value your lives.”
The absurdity of it hits me, hot and hysterical.
Even now, even here, he is Giovanni Dragoni.
Commanding. Controlling. Half-feral.
He turns back to me, and the dark savage look in his eyes steals whatever breath I have left.
“My unconventional wife,” he murmurs, voice roughened by something darker than anger. “I offer you a nice, marital bed, and you decide you want to be fucked for the first time against a wall in a warehouse in Red Hook?”
I lift my chin, fight and lust still swirling through my blood stream. “I want what I want. Are you going deny me?”
A look flits through his eyes, and in another light I would’ve called it helpless surrender, even a droll acceptance of his powerlessness where I’m concerned. But in the next breath those same eyes are firing up with purpose and challenge. With heat so feral and primal, my heart flipped twice over.
