He stared at her, and she noticed his hands flexing at his sides.
“On the other hand,” she said quietly, “I happen to know a bit about masks myself. I don’t think that if you chose to go without yours here it would be the end of the world.”
He moved toward her then, but without all of that grace of his. He looked…jerky. Uncoordinated.
Something kicked deep in her belly, but she didn’t move. It didn’t occur to her to move. He kept coming until he was standing right there before her, staring down at her.
“There is not one true thing stitched into me,” he told her. “I am a patchwork tapestry of lies, so many that I cannot keep track. I could not untangle them all, even if I wanted to.”
She could hear a loud noise and only belatedly realized it was her own heart in her chest. Pounding out a rhythm all its own. Slamming into her ribs. The closer he came, the louder it got.
“You don’t have to untangle them all,” she whispered. And this, then, felt the way she thought their vows should have. “Tell me one true thing, Giaco. Just one.”
He moved even closer then, a look of such powerful intensity on his face that it made her heart stutter in her chest. Then he reached out and slid his hands over her cheeks, to hold her hair. To touch her.
“This,” he said, sounding gruff and unlike himself. Or possibly more like himself, at last. “The only true thing I know is this. You.”
And when he kissed her it felt like all the vows they’d made, writ large. It was as if she couldfeelthem, now.
It was as if the kiss made them real.
He kissed her over and over and then he lifted her up in his arms and carried her through the sprawling, airy villa, stopping time and again to get his mouth on her. Until finally, everything spun around and they were both on a bed.
For a moment, they only stared at each other, and she knew that this was going to be different. That this time there would be no holding back. That everything had been building to this bright afternoon with the sun streaming in the windows and all that blue in the distance, but nothing but dark jade intensity here.
She felt her whole body shudder at that, while the heat of it all washed over her.
“You’re my wife,” he said, gritting out those words as if his life depended on them. “And you’re wearing entirely too many clothes.”
Wife, she thought. It sounded different when he said it like that. It sounded real, not like a charade at all.
It felt different when he pulled back, but only so he could pull her with him and stand her on her feet next to the bed. And she was absurdly grateful for every woman he’d ever touched, because it had taken a team to put her into this dress but Giaco had her out of it in a flash.
He stripped her down and stopped, gazing at the lingerie she’d put on in what seemed like a different life, back at the castle. It had been handed to her with the rest of the things she was meant to wear today and she tried to read the expression on his face as he stared at it.
“I assume you picked this out yourself,” she managed to say, though her voice sounded insubstantial. Breathy. “A groom’s gift you already knew you would like.”
He took his time dragging his gaze back to hers. “There is not one thing I don’t like about pretty, flimsy silken things on a woman’s body, but I was not expecting…this. You.”
And then he showed her what he meant. First he shrugged out of his own clothes, and Ivy thought that having seen him naked before should have prepared her for the impact of it again, but it didn’t. He took her breath away. Again.
Then again as once more, he knelt down before her and proceeded to worship her body as if he had never seen a woman before in his life.
There was no place his mouth didn’t touch. No place his hands did not move, roaming all over her, making her glow with heat and longing.
When he slipped his fingers between her legs, he found her molten hot and wild. For him.
“Too pretty,” he murmured. And then his fingers were thrusting inside her, making her breath hitch and her hips move to meet him, and it happened so fast. Giaco’s fingers were a magic spell and her undoing at once, and she fell apart so quickly that it almost made her laugh. Maybe she was laughing. She couldn’t quite tell.
Then he was pushing her back on the bed and crawling up the mattress with her until they were rolling all around. She wanted to put her mouth on him at last. She wanted him with a ferocity she couldn’t explain.
Maybe it didn’t need explaining. It was simply who they were, wrapped up in the heat of this. They were wearing nothing at all save the rings they’d exchanged and something about that made her feel…calamitous.
But the calamity felt like joy.
Ivy explored that chest of his, at last. She traced her way over all of those ridges and flat planes of muscle. She followed the sprinkling of dark hair all the way down to that giant cock that had been imprinted in her mind since she’d seen him come out of the water like something mythical.
And he was much bigger now.
