I closed my eyes, making peace with the answer before I gave it to him.
“That I didn’t know it could feel like this.”
His arm tightened around me by the smallest degree. “Like what?”
I swallowed. “Safe.”
The word hung there between us, soft and fragile and far more intimate than anything else we had done tonight.
Pietro went completely still beneath me. Then he tipped my chin up, just enough to look at me properly, and whatever he saw seemed to hit him somewhere deep. He brushed his thumb once across my cheek before leaning in to press a slow kiss to my forehead.
“Good,” he said quietly. “Because that’s the only way I ever want you to feel with me.”
And wrapped in his arms, with his heartbeat under my cheek and his mouth still lingering at my temple, I believed him.
CHAPTER 14
PIETRO
Ididn’t know what time it was when I opened my eyes, and for once I had absolutely no interest in finding out.
All I cared about was the woman asleep against me, warm and soft and impossibly real. Emily had shattered something open in me the night before, something I had spent years holding rigidly in place, and waking up with her in my arms felt almost unreal because of it.
When the pleasure she gave me stripped away my usual control, she had understood immediately—no pity, no hesitation, no false gentleness. Just determination, care, desire, and something more dangerous than all of it: love. Emily had made me feel no need to hide at all.
I tightened my hold on her and brushed my lips over one of her wild curls.
God, I loved her.
“What time is it?” she murmured sleepily against my chest.
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
I felt her smile against my skin and tightened my arms around her again. I had no desire to move, no interest in getting out of that bed or returning to the rest of the world. For the firsttime in my life, I understood exactly why my father had always looked faintly murderous whenever one of us interrupted his mornings with my mother, and why he used to tell me, with the solemnity usually reserved for blood oaths, that lazy mornings with the woman you loved were rare enough to be treated like treasure.
“…Olivero.”
I frowned, having missed the first part of whatever she said, but not especially enjoying hearing my friend and bodyguard’s name while she was naked in my bed and wrapped around me.
“Emily, sweetheart, I am by nature a calm man,” I said, “but I have to admit I’m not particularly fond of hearing another man’s name while I’m holding you like this.”
She kissed my chest and shook her head. “I just hope he was okay all night out there.”
I let out a low hum. “He wasn’t outside. He was almost certainly somewhere expensive, doing his best to destroy my credit card. For a night with you, it was worth every penny.”
“Trying to seduce me? It’s working.”
“I was under the impression I’d already succeeded,” I murmured. “Though if necessary, I’m happy to make further efforts.”
I let my hand trail down and squeezed her backside.
The soft moan that escaped her did absolutely nothing to help the fact that my body was already beginning to wake up again.
Not now, Pietro.
She rolled away from me with a sigh, and I couldn’t quite stop the low sound of frustration that left me at the loss of her warmth.
“I would love to stay in bed,” she said, turning back to look at me, “but I do have a seminar this afternoon, and unfortunately I’m expected to attend it.”
