Page 79 of One Step After Another

Or bad.

It was all good for her. Especially like this. Safe in a way not many people have ever afforded her. Not as easily as Luca did.

“You drive me crazy,” he panted against her parted lips, the flex of his hips slapping against hers at a pace that already had her spiraling. His hands held tighter like if he didn’t, she might burst all apart. “There it is, yeah?”

All she could do was nod. The orgasm clutched at her throat as it ripped through her womb. There was something to be said about pleasure when it was raw; how it raked over every nerve almost violently, but it still felt perfect.

Like nothing else.

He’d not slowed under her orgasm began to wane and even then, he teased her body with long, languid strokes. She was wet enough to hear every drive of his cock into her sex, but it was the drag of his length along every tensing inner muscle that kept her live like a wire.

“You drive me crazy,” he told her.

The only thing Penny could think to say when Luca pulled her away from the window and bent her over the back of the couch was, “We’re both crazy.”

He fucked her harder like that—with fingers tangled into her hair while his palm left behind red prints on her ass until the heat spread everywhere all over again.

For a time, she forgot everything. All of it. She didn’t want reality to catch up, but it would ...

Soon.

It always did.

• • •

PENNY SHOULD BE SLEEPING, lost in dreamland while wrapped in the arms of a man she wasn’t supposed to have. She should have appreciated the fact she could do that at all but instead, she was spiraling.

Not that Luca was aware.

Over the edge of her laptop, she could see him stretched out on his stomach where he slept without worry. He used one arm to bunch around a pillow, keeping it higher for his head, while his other rested limply across her side of the bed. Like maybe he knew she had gotten up after he fell asleep, and even in his slumber, he was trying to reach for her.

To pull her back.

He was constantly pulling her back.

Did he know that?

Did he know how it confused her?

It was a horrible feeling to both want something but know it could never be hers. That’s exactly what Luca was for her. A piece of her past that she hadn’t even asked for until it was laid at her feet, but there was no way she could keep him.

The white sheets pooled just below his waist, the curve of his backside teasing the fabric low enough that she could appreciate the sight of his body even in the darkness. Strong shoulders. A back still red with lines from her fingernails. Skin that she could still feel moving against hers if she dared to let her mind wander back that way.

But she couldn’t.

Not now ...

Instead, she spiraled.

Behind the screen of a laptop, she fell even more into the rabbit hole of information in front of her. Anything she could find on her mother or the man Allegra was meant to marry, she absorbed each word like it might keep her alive. Already, she had worked her way through every article that had ever been published on the Jersey senator, his daughters, and even his wife that had died in a tragic car accident only a few years prior.

He seemed like a good man.

On paper, everyone did.

Penny knew that better than anyone.

The scars she hid beneath the sweats and hoodie she had thrown on after getting out of bed itched and burned. It started the second she dared to open her laptop and type in Allegra’s new name, determined to find the proof that she needed.