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She reached down and grasped the thick, highly aroused length of him. This time his groan split the air in a fractured moan. Quinn brushed him against her core. Teased him. When he thought he might die, she took him inside her. Slowly, torturously, her gasp filling his ears. It made him feel proud, intensely male that he could do that to her and he swelled even larger inside her. Forced himself to stay completely still as she sank down on him. More, more, until he was buried completely in her.
She trembled in his arms. Dug her nails into his shoulders. He pushed her back, held her hair away from her face so he could see her. “You are the most beautiful, responsive woman I have ever had,” he said huskily. “Never ever doubt your ability to feel, Quinn.”
Her chin quivered, her fingers curling around his shoulders in a fierce grip that telegraphed her struggle. Then she brought her mouth to his and kissed him blindly. Soulfully. Until their union was taken to another level completely.
He dug his hands into her hips and lifted her. Brought her back down on him in a rhythm so slow and deliriously good he closed his eyes and savored it. The sound of them filled the air, the raw push and pull of their bodies heart-stoppingly erotic. Quinn buried her head in his shoulder and whispered encouragement. Faster. Harder.
Her body tightened around him. Brought him torturously close to the boiling point. She begged him to make her come, needed his guidance. And he did, pulling her hips hard against him, placing a hand against her bottom and grinding them together. “Like that,” he told her. “Use me.”
She leaned forward and rubbed her flesh against him with every stroke. His body tightened, ready to explode, and he cursed and told himself to hang on. Hold on for ten more seconds so that she could get there. Be with him.
Her soft cry shattered the air. She shook wildly beneath his hands as the orgasm tore through her and caused his. He arched his hips and let loose a guttural, primal grunt of satisfaction that might have traveled to Pluto it rocked him so furiously. They stayed like that, aftershocks ricocheting through their bodies, until he picked her up and carried her to the shower. Sensuously, reverently, he washed her beautiful body all over until he couldn’t help but want her again and took her against the wall.
It occurred to him he might never stop wanting her.
CHAPTER TEN
ON THE LAST LEG of what seemed like an impossible journey to reopen Le Belle Bleu, things were finally falling into place. The night before the reopening, Quinn could almost see the light, although she wouldn’t dare say it aloud for fear some other disastrous calamity might occur. But she was smiling for the first time in a week.
Optimistic enough that she had agreed to a stir-crazy Matteo’s plan to take an hour’s break to go for roti at the shack on the beach, legendary with the locals for its version of the piquant Caribbean specialty.
They both needed a break. Needed to let off some steam. A walk on the beach might do it. She pulled on shorts and a T-shirt in the bedroom she and Matteo were sharing in the suite at Le Belle Bleu in the hectic lead up to the relaunch, his clothes left in the other bedroom for optics, and pulled her hair into a ponytail as he showered. She hummed to herself while she slicked on some lip gloss, the glimmer of Matteo’s sleek gold watch catching her eye on the dresser. She picked it up and tested the weight in her palm. It was an exquisite timepiece with diamonds marking the hours and an understatedly elegant black pearlescent background. A collector’s edition, likely.
She turned it over to examine the back. Saw there was a finely drawn inscription laced across the matte gold surface. It was in Italian. And although she knew she shouldn’t do it, that it was private to Matteo, she sat down and typed it into her computer to translate.
You meant everything to my son. Take him with you always. Affonso.
Her heart stuttered in her chest. The watch was Giancarlo’s.
She replaced it on the dresser. Stood looking at it. Matteo’s darkness had receded since that night at Paradis, but it still had him in its grip. She saw it in those unguarded moments, when his mask slipped and the haunted look returned. As if it never really went away.
She frowned. He called her a closed book. If she was a closed book, then he was a buried story. Pretending to be open to the world when he was anything but.
The sun was setting as they walked along the beach to the restaurant, if you could call the ten-foot-by-ten-foot brightly painted slatted wooden structure that. She kept the conversation light while they shared their rotis on the sand in front of the rolling waves, a cold beer beside each of them.
Matteo lifted his beer to his mouth and took a long swallow. “Have you heard from Warren yet?”
She shook her head. “I rarely hear from him while he’s in Asia with the time difference. He may not get back to me until he returns to Chicago.”
“He needs to know,” Matteo said sharply.
“And he will.” She slid him a sideways look. She didn’t understand why he seemed so anxious about her telling Warren and the board about them. It was she who should be stressed. It was she that was severely curtailing her career with this decision. Her father and the board would ultimately make the right choice. The fair choice.
“He’s back tomorrow regardless.”
He nodded. Looked out at the ocean. “Have you talked to Thea today? How’s the foot?”
Quinn grimaced. A fifteen-hundred-pound stallion had stepped on her sister’s left foot yesterday while she was conducting an examination, shattering the bones in multiple places. “She’s at home twiddling her thumbs, cursing that damn horse. You see,” she pointed out, “I was right all along.”
That won her a smile. “That was just bad luck.”
Quinn pushed her roti aside and decided the only way to get him to talk might be to start talking herself. “I’m thinking while I’m making all these radical decisions I might like to get to know my sister in Mississippi.”
“Have you had any contact with your birth family?”
“No.” The hollow feeling that invaded her every time she thought about the parents who had given her away made her chest ache. “I don’t really have anything to say to them. They chose not to keep me. They had another girl. End of story. But my sister—it wasn’t her fault. I just feel like I should know her at some point. Even if we aren’t ever close.”
He lifted a brow. “You don’t think there might be more to your parents’ decision than that?”
She brought her beer to her lips and took a deliberate sip. “They gave me away and had my sister a couple of years later, Matteo. How else can you interpret it?”
He swiveled to face her. “Like maybe they weren’t ready when they had you. Like maybe there are complexities involved you know nothing about. Life isn’t black and white, Quinn, as much as you’d like to think it is. There are a lot of gray areas.”
Gray areas. That’s what you called giving your child up, never to see them again? Marking her defective in the process? “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Why don’t you try?” he challenged. “There are no prizes for being an island, Quinn.”
She turned to face him, latching on to the opening. “I don’t know about that, Matteo, you are. You pretend to be everyone’s man, but you’re no one’s man really.”
His mouth flattened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said. You talk, but you don’t really talk.”
He sliced her an even look. “How about we finish with you before we move on to me? How is it you think I cannot understand what you’re going through?”
“Because you have a family who loves you. Who are yours. Your flesh and blood. How could you possibly understand what it’s like to not be wanted? To have Warren and Sile so desperate for a child they adopt me, then months later get everything they ever wanted in Thea? To not be good enough for my old family, and not be needed by my new one?” She blinked against the fire burning the back of her eyes. “It was heartbreaking, Matteo. Heartbreaking to grow up knowing that.”
“And finally we get somewhere...” He pushed his dinner aside, sat back and wrapped his arms around his knees. “You know what I know, Quinn? I saw how much Thea adores you that night at the cocktail party. I heard how much your father respects you when he talked about you. Do you have any idea what I would do to have that same level of acceptance from my father? My family? I have spent my life fighting for it.”
She pushed her beer into the sand, thrown again by another of Matteo’s perspectives that upended her own. Was her frame of reference really so totally off when it came to her family? Was she so colored by the past it distorted all else?
“You live in a family of gladiators,” she finally offered when the silence had stretched taut between them. “Isn’t that what you do? Fight to be the best?”
