He set me down at the foot of the bed. Carefully. The way he did everything—with intention, with awareness, with the deliberate precision of a man who understood that the details mattered more than the grand gestures.
Then he stepped back.
Not far. An arm's length. Enough to look at me, to really see. His eyes moved over me slowly—not the way men usually looked, not the quick assessment of value or the hungry cataloging of parts. This was different. This was the way he looked at everything that mattered to him. With attention. With reverence.
His fingers found the zipper at my back.
He drew it down slowly. The sound was impossibly loud in the quiet room—a whisper of metal teeth separating, fabric loosening, the dress going slack around my shoulders. His fingertips traced the path the zipper had taken, warm against thebare skin of my spine, and I shivered so hard my teeth nearly clicked.
"Beautiful," he murmured. His mouth found the curve of my neck—not a kiss, exactly. A press of lips. A benediction. "Right here. Beautiful."
The dress slid from my shoulders. He guided it—hands following the fabric down my arms, over my hips, letting it pool at my feet like spilled water. I stood in my bra and underwear, the air cool against skin that felt like it was running a fever.
His fingers moved to the clasp of my bra. The hook released with a small sound, and the straps slid down my arms. He caught it before it fell. Set it aside with the same careful attention he'd give a document or a weapon—something worth handling properly.
"Perfect," he said, and his voice had dropped into that register. The Daddy voice. The one that bypassed my brain entirely and spoke directly to the part of me that had been starving for years. "Perfect here." His thumb traced the underside of my breast, the curve where soft flesh met ribcage. "And here." His palm flattened against my sternum, right over my heart. "Mine."
The word sent heat flooding through me—low and liquid, pooling between my thighs like honey warmed by the sun.
I reached for his shirt. My fingers found the top button, fumbling with the urgency that was building in my chest, the desperate need to touch him, to feel his skin against mine, to close the distance between dressed and undressed that suddenly felt like an ocean.
He caught my wrists.
Gentle. His fingers wrapped around both of them at once—God, his hands were big enough to do that, to circle both my wrists with one hand—and he held them still. Not rough. Not punishing. Just firm. Just certain.
"Let me." His eyes found mine in the lamplight. Dark and steady and burning with something that looked like it might consume him if he didn't keep a hand on the flame. "Tonight I need to take care of you. Both of us."
Take care of me.
I lowered my hands. Let them fall to my sides. Opened my fists and let my fingers go loose, surrendering the need to participate, to reciprocate, to earn what was being given.
I just received.
His mouth followed his hands. Lips pressed to my shoulder—warm, soft, lingering. Then my collarbone—a trail of heat across the ridge of bone, his breath ghosting over my skin. Then lower. The swell of my breast, and his mouth was so gentle there, so impossibly tender, that I heard the sound that escaped me before I felt it leave my throat. A whimper. Small and desperate and nothing I could have stopped.
He hooked his thumbs in my underwear. Drew them down, slow as a prayer, his palms skimming my hips, my thighs, the backs of my knees. He knelt to free them from my ankles, and the sight of him there—Dante Caruso, the don, on his knees at my feet—hit me like a physical blow.
I was bare.
Completely, entirely bare, standing in a pool of lamplight with nothing between my skin and his gaze. My hands trembled at my sides. I fisted them—not from cold, not from fear. From the effort of not grabbing him, pulling him up, climbing him like a tree and demanding everything at once.
He was still fully dressed.
White shirt. Dark trousers. The loosened tie hanging against his chest like an afterthought. The sleeves still rolled to his forearms—those forearms, the ones that had been dismantling my composure for weeks.
"On the bed." His voice was low. An instruction, not a request. "On your back. I want to see all of you."
I obeyed. Climbed onto the sheets and lay back against the pillows, my hair spreading dark across the white cotton. The air was cool against my bare skin, my nipples tightening, every nerve ending alert and waiting.
I watched him undress.
There was nothing performative about it. No tease, no show. Just efficient grace—buttons released, shirt pulled free, the undershirt stripped over his head in one clean motion. His chest emerged—broad, dark-haired, the lean muscle of a man who trained for function. The thin scar along his ribs caught the lamplight, a pale line against olive skin.
Trousers next. Belt unbuckled, fabric sliding down his legs. He stepped out of them and stood before me, and the sight of him—all of him, hard and wanting and held in check by nothing but his own iron will—made something clench low in my belly.
He came to me.
Covered me with his weight—chest to chest, hip to hip, his body a warm, heavy blanket that pressed me into the mattress and made the world shrink to the dimensions of his skin. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled, and the sound I made wasn't a moan or a gasp.
