“Now,” I growled. “Come for me.Good girl—now.”
She shattered.
Her body convulsed, her back arching off the bench as a broken cry tore from her throat. The tension I’d built inside her snapped, rolling through her in waves I could feel against my tongue, my fingers, my palms. She came apart with a force that left her trembling, her orgasm ripping through her like a storm, the release of a woman who’d been wound tight for a year and finally,finallylet someone else hold the reins. I worked her through every shudder, every gasp, gentling only as the waves began to ebb, until she was boneless, her hands weakly tugging at my hair.
“Too much,” she whispered, her voice raw.
I pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh, then rose, pulling her into my arms. Flour dusted her skin, her body still trembling against mine. I held her tight, my lips brushing her hair.
“I’ve got you,” I murmured. “I’ve got you. You don’t have to hold anything.”
She cried.
Not loud. Just shook, against me, her face in my neck. I held on and let her, didn’t ask, didn’t fill it, just was there, the way I’m built to be there, between her and the door, between her and the rest of her life.
Chapter 10
Katerina
Itfelt,allofa sudden, like my life had exploded.
The threats. Tonio. The wedding contract. DDlg. Everything.
For so long, life had been stable.
A struggle—sure—but stable.
But now it was still a struggle, but it felt about as stable as a card tower in an earthquake.
Two hundred and forty covers. The whole dessert table—the Italian things they wanted and the Greek alongside, my grandmother’s cannoli and the loaves and the koulourakia and the syrup things, every one of them made by these two hands, because I wasn’t going to hand these people a thing I’d farmed out. And the cake. And the loaf.
The loaf I couldn’t make.
Plus the daily shop. The bus driver and his seeds. The nurses. The old woman.
In two weeks.
With two hands. Well, there was Tonio, too, but his hands were hot and bless him, he was new to all this.
Through the thin wall I could hear him.
Low. That rumble of him, the warm engine of it, working one of the regular customers about something I couldn’t make out, and then her cackle came up through the plaster, delighted, scandalised, the laugh of a woman being told she’s a heartbreaker by a handsome man who means it. He did that. He’d been doing it for weeks. The difference was that yesterday I’d thought it was charm—the same charm I’d thrown back at him forty times and watched bounce—and today I knew what it was. Today I had the word for it.He runs toward the thing that needs feeding.The old woman with the son who never calls. He fed her too. He fed everybody.
I caught myself touching my mouth.
My own fingers, two of them, pressed to my bottom lip, where his had been, where his teeth had been, and I yanked them down into my lap like I’d touched the oven. My face went hot. Last night was still on my skin—I could feel it, the flour and the cold marble and the place on my throat where the pulse went,good girl, the shudder that went down me when he said it. I was a grown woman doing the books with the door shut and I was sitting there blushing like the boy in the thin coat counting his coins, and I made myself look back at the page.
Under the desk, Olimpo sighed.
He had jammed himself into the one place in the building he wasn’t allowed, the footwell, his enormous wire-haired head resting on my boot. The office is a closet. There is no room in it for a small bear. Yet here he was.
“Out,” I told him.
He did not listen. He breathed, slow and judgmental, and his eyebrow twitched.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.” I nudged him with the boot. He let the boot move him a quarter inch and then put all his weight back, heavier, deliberate, a verdict. I gave up. I left my foot where it was, under the warm weight of a dog who’d decided, and went back to the impossible page.
Could I do it?
