Page 69 of Ruthless Grace

“You’re healed, cara,” I murmur, carefully tracking the high collar of her blouse, my fingers barely skimming her collarbone. “Arthur said twenty-four hours. I am not going to tear your tissue. I am not going to hurt you.”

Gia lets out a sharp, breathless sound: half laugh, half growl of pure fury. She steps forward, invading my space, her chest slapping against mine as her hand shoots up and fists into the lapel of my charcoal jacket, yanking me down with a force that shocks the breath out of my lungs.

“Look at me,” she commands, her voice ringing off the mahogany paneling like a court order. “Look at me, Luca.”

I meet her gaze. Her black eyes are ablaze with a wild, weaponized fire.

“I know what healed tissue feels like,” she spits, her breath hot and sweet against my mouth. “My incision is closed. I’m okay. I did not survive a tumor, an operation, and weeks of sitting in the dark just to come home and have my husband touch me like I’m made of porcelain.”

Her hand sweeps down between us, her fingers digging through my shirt to flatten hard against my racing chest, right over my heart.

“Stop treating me like a broken doll, Luca,” she whispers, her tone shifting from ice to liquid fire, demanding and possessive. “I am not fragile. I am your wife. Stop holding back and take what belongs to you.”

The last thread of my civilization snaps.

The fear of breaking her, the ghosts of my father’s house, the agonizing weeks of sitting in that armchair: it all detonates in my bloodstream like raw gasoline hitting an open flame.

“Vita mia,” I growl against her mouth, a guttural, primal sound tearing from my throat as I hook my hands beneath her thighs and hoist her off the herringbone floor in one violent, unbroken surge.

She slams against the dark, carved oak paneling of the foyer wall, but she doesn’t let out a cry of pain. She lets out a sharp, breathless gasp of pure triumph. Her legs instantly wrap around my waist, her thighs clamping around my hips, her heels locking behind my lower back as her fingers tangle into the hair at the base of my neck, pulling my mouth down onto hers.

The kiss is a total consumption. It isn’t gentle. It’s hard, bruising, and desperate: our teeth clashing, our tongues tangling in a fierce, starving exchange of breath and heat that tastes like salvation after a long winter.

I don’t waste time with buttons. My hand sweeps up the front of her silk blouse, my fist tightening in the fabric before I rip it straight down the center. The sound of tearing silk and popping threads echoes off the high, vaulted ceilings: a primal declaration that the sterile, medical boundaries of our marriage are officially dead.

The parted silk reveals the pale, flawless skin of her chest, and right above her heart, the clean, silver-pink line of her healed scar.

My vision swims. I drop to my knees while holding her pinned against the oak wall, my broad hands gripping the backs of her thighs to anchor her weight. I press my forehead straight against the center of her chest, right over the frantic, hammer-like thud of her pulse.

“Luca,” she gasps, her nails scraping across my scalp, her body bowing off the wood toward me.

I open my mouth, pressing my lips with fierce, devotional reverence directly over the silver-pink line of the scar. I kiss the tissue once, twice, three times: devouring the memory of the scalpel, tasting the salt and radiant heat of her flesh. She smells of clean hospital soap and warm jasmine. Alive. Radiantly alive.

I drag the scent deep into my lungs like a man surfacing from years underwater. My tongue traces the pale line, licking the skin, worshipping the exact spot where the disease was cut out of her, turning her trauma into an altar of absolute possession.

Every dark night I spent drinking bourbon in my study, every silent prayer I muttered over her medical charts, every fear I carried that I would destroy her the way my father claimed I destroyed my mother—I burn it all away against her skin.

“You are whole,” I mutter against her scar, my voice thick, ragged, and vibrating straight into her bones. “You are unbreakable, cara. Unbreakable.”

“Then stop waiting,” she pants, her fingers yanking my head up by my hair, forcing my eyes to meet hers. Her lips are swollen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes black with an absolute, demanding hunger. “Drive into me, Luca. Show me the fire.”

I surge back up her body in one fluid motion, rejoining her against the wood. I rip my belt free, the buckle clattering against the herringbone floor like a dropped blade. I part my trousers, my hand reaching down between our pressed bodies to hook beneath her thigh, shifting her higher against the carved paneling until she is completely, helplessly open to me.

My thumb drags across her wet, swollen clit, making her arch her back and let out a high, breathless sob of pleasure against my jaw. She is drenched for me, hot and tight and burning with the same starved desperation that has driven me mad for months.

I line myself up against her, the head of my cock pressing into her wet friction. I hold her gaze, watching her dark eyes widen with fierce, triumphant certainty as I drive forward, pushing all the way inside her in one deep, unbroken thrust.

A sharp, breathless shriek tears from her throat as I fill her completely, her body stretching tight around me, her internal muscles clamping down on my shaft in a violent, liquid grip that almost brings me to my knees right there against the paneling.

Actual, raw penetration: skin slapping against skin, hard, deep, and relentless. The dicker of legal terms and medical charts vanishes. There is no gentleness left, only the rhythmic, possessive slam of my hips against her thighs, driving into her again and again, claiming every inch of her body while she hangs suspended against the oak paneling.

Gia doesn’t break. She matches every hard thrust with her own violent contraction, her legs tightening around my waist, her heels digging into my back, urging me deeper, harder, demanding everything I have.

“More,” she gasps against my ear, her teeth sinking softly into the muscle of my neck as my hand finds her again, rubbing her swollen clit in rhythm with my thrusts. “Luca... more...”

“I have you,” I growl, my voice stripped down to the rough gravel of a man possessing his Queen. “You are mine, Giada. Mine.”

I drive into her with punishing, rhythmic intensity, the sound of our ragged pants filling the empty foyer. The threat of Davide Russo outside the estate gates, the internal traitor, the family debts: it all shrinks into insignificance against the blinding, white-hot reality of our bodies fused together in the dark.