Page 28

Truthfully, I needed it.

To feel my husband and I were more than mere strangers.

Even if it was just for the night.

“Fuck me,” I ordered a man who never took orders, spearing my fingers into the back of his long silken hair the way I’d secretly wanted to since I first laid eyes on it exactly one year ago. “Show me how to please a man.”

A low, vicious growl ripped up Dario’s throat, and his teeth sank into the edge of my jaw, a sharp little nip that made me shiver, but he moved back to glower at me. “I will show you how to please me, bambolina mia, because you will never know the touch of another man. Am I clear?”

“Mmm,” I hummed, rubbing my cheek against his soft-sharp stubble like a cat. “I think that depends on your performance.”

Another low rumble through his chest absolutely delighted me.

“If you push me, Fiammetta, you might not like what you’ll unleash,” he warned, ducking his head to suck hard at my neck, the skin prickling with heat until I knew he pulled a bruise to the surface.

A claim.

I shivered at the heathen act and felt wet flood between my thighs.

“I know I married a monster,” I confessed, clutching his hair tighter so he wouldn’t stop marking me. “If I wanted a gentleman between my thighs, I would have seduced Bryson a long time ago.”

“Stai zitta.” He ordered me to shut up in Italian, glaring at me. “The only names from your lips for the rest of the night will be mine and God’s.”

I cocked an eyebrow, intoxicated by more than just the alcohol in my system but by the high of having such a powerful man so obviously want me.

Finally.

“I’m surprised you are willing to share with God,” I quipped.

He shrugged one shoulder. “In Chicago, I am God. We are one and the same, so I am not sharing with anyone. Tonight, you are wholly mine. Consequences be damned.”

He kissed me then, again, so sinfully I lost my mind to the taste of bitter Sicilian liquor still lingering on his tongue and the heat of his mouth.

So it didn’t occur to me to wonder until later what he could have meant by consequences.

How could there be consequences for bedding someone who was legally yours?

Chapter Nine

Fiammetta

I forgot about my guests in the kitchen, about Dario’s night out with the lovely Aria, about how angry I was and how deeply lonely I had been up to this point in my marriage.

I forgot it all the moment Dario put his mouth to me.

Not to my mouth, which was already swollen and slick from his kisses and currently hanging open as I panted through the sensation of his tongue on me.

But between my thighs on the thin silk of my panties right over my throbbing clit.

We were still in the foyer, a room open to the stairs, to the rooms on the left and right and down the hall from us, including the kitchen where a group of my friends was no doubt listening to our interaction.

I didn’t have time to protest our public setting or experience a second of hesitation because he was suddenly dropping to his knees on the marble, roughly shoving apart my legs, and then pushing them even wider with the breadth of his huge shoulders until his face was pressed intimately to the thin skin of my inner thigh. The skirt of my silk dress was rucked up in one of his huge hands while the other was flat to my belly, splaying me against the wall for his examination.

I shivered at the scrape of his beard against me and then gasped, my head thunking against the wall when his hot, wet mouth closed over my sex.

“Dario.” His name trembled from my lips, and he roughly hummed his own delight as he sucked harder, lashing at me with his tongue through the thin, drenched fabric.

“Cazzo, you taste divine,” he growled almost angrily before slipping a finger in the placket of my underwear and pulling it aside so he could run his tongue along the length of my pussy. “Fuck, a man could get dangerously addicted to this sweet cunt.”