Now she wondered about her motivations for that, too.
But the thing about Giaco was that he didn’t seem to wonder about anything.
He just did as he pleased.
His hands moved to the low waist of her shorts and then his fingers slid beneath the elastic band, and then it was happening.
It was so smooth, so inevitable, that she didn’t have time to process it. It wasn’t happening and then it was—his long, hard fingers curving into her heat, slipping beneath her panties she wore and finding her molten hot folds.
He stroked her there, he stirred her up, and she hardly knew what to do with herself. Her hands were fists in that shirt of his, and he moved—shifting her up so she was straddling one of those thick, muscled thighs of his.
And still he played with her core, his fingers working a magic she hadn’t understood as possible until this moment. All the while he kept that thigh a hard pressure between her legs, and she couldn’t seem to help herself. She rocked against him, and his fingers didn’t stop, and there was a rocking and the pressure and the friction and—
She shattered, hard and wild. It came fast and hot, like a punch. Then she shook and shook against him, her head falling forward against his chest.
Giaco muttered something she couldn’t understand and then shifted her again, this time pushing a finger deep inside her.
Then it began all over again. The rocking. The heat. The inexhaustible build—
This time, when it hit her, she cried out.
And then stood there, bewildered, because he was suddenly…gone.
It took a terrible effort to come back into herself.
He wasn’tgone, she realized. Giaco was standing a few feet away from her with a stark look on his face. She couldn’t quite read him.
But she could see that enormous cock of his, pressed hard against the loose fabric of his trousers. She was still riding through her aftershocks and she couldn’t imagine what she must look like to him, her mouth wet from his. Her whole body ravaged, and shaking. She wasn’t even sure about the state of the shorts she was wearing, much less how far up her abdomen her tank top had rolled.
Yet Giaco looked at her as if she was a ghost.
Then he turned, abruptly, and left her there.
And it took her a long time to catch her breath. Ivy stood there, still gripping that sofa, until her heart settled down. Until her body calmed…
To some degree, anyway.
It was tempting to see what had happened as some kind of cruel rejection, but she didn’t.
She thought about that kiss in the alleyway and how she’d been the one who’d had to break it. How she’d been the one who’d had to step back, and how she’d thought at the time that he’d looked a lot as if that wasn’t something he’d been about to do at all.
And here, now, thatlookon his face.
Ivy had a deep certainty inside her, then. It wasn’t something she would have wanted to defend, but she knew it was true all the same. She was pretty sure that Giaco had exposed himself tonight.
Because surely, if he was the cynical, emotionally detached fuck boy that he liked to pretend he was, he would have simply tossed her down on the couch behind her and been done with it. She had the strangest notion that what she’d seen tonight was his true face.
She had accused him of wearing a mask, and then he’d dropped it. If he hadn’t, why would he have bothered to run away?
And later, when she stood in the shower in her suite, she was even more certain of two things. First, that she was never going to sleep again, not with all of this in her head now. And second, that the more she saw of him—the more real parts of him he showed her, whether against his will or not—the more she wanted him.
Not because they were playing their parts.
But because she was starting to think that Giaco Tavian really was the narcotic everyone claimed he was, after all.
Chapter Seven
THE ORIGINAL PLAN, thanks to a timeline handed down by Umberto, had been to carry on with the romance over the summer. To tease it out to the public, particularly now that they were engaged, and continue stoking the flames of all the public’s interest until it was nothing short of an inferno.
