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It would be easy enough. Now was the time, before things...progressed. All she had to do was say it.I’m a virgin.Easy and to the point.
And she couldn’t quite bring herself to open her mouth and do it.
“We are about to land,” he told her, and for some reason, he sounded deeply amused. Possibly because he was the one who couldseehow she was blushing. “And we will have a bit of a drive. If you require more time to tell me whatever it is you wish to tell me, you have it.” He ran that knuckle down her cheek again, then over her lips. “I cannot promise that I will be in a talking mood once we reach our destination. What I can promise you is that you will enjoy it, whatever happens.”
“I don’t have a lot of experience,” she told him in a rush.
And then felt as if she might break into a sweat. Or possibly start crying. Maybe she already had.
He considered her for long moments, with that steady intensity that made everything within her seem to constrict. “And it was perhaps not so great, the little experience you have had.”
She regarded him solemnly. “That is...not incorrect.”
Ranieri looked down, then took her hand in his. “Annika. Hear me on this. I want you.”
And that, too, astounded her. That he could simply...saysuch a thing. So baldly. And with such certainty.
More, he sounded as if it was normal. Run-of-the-mill. As if maybe a discussion of his needs was simply par for the course with him. She admired it. Maybe she was even the smallest bit jealous of it.
Annika felt her heart kick at her. So hard she was surprised it wasn’t catapulting straight from her chest.
“This is not what we might have chosen, you and I,” he said, in that low, stirring way he had. “But here we are. I already know that you want me, too. Handily, we are married to each other, like it or not. It seems to me that there are a great many ways that we might spend this year together. One of them is to enjoy each other as much as possible. What do you think?”
It was a variation of what he’d said to her before, but everything was so different now. She’d had much the same thought herself, hadn’t she? More, she had walked down an aisle and made vows to him, in front of people she cared about. He had put his mouth against her neck and let his fingers find their way inside her. He had made her sob and writhe in his arms.
He had touched her face gently and looked at her as if even then, given his way, he would have preferred to devour her.
And now she found herself thinking too many things at once—
But mostly, she really, truly wanted to know whatenjoying himmight entail.
She wanted to know that with such intensity that it made her shake.
“I would like that,” Annika told him quietly.
Because she loved her museum, but she wasn’t an exhibit in it. She was alive. She would never have chosen any of this, but it was happening. It had already happened. He was her husband and she wanted to experience that in every possible way she could, for as long as she could. No matter what came next. And no matter how much she’d loathed him all these years.
The look he gave her then reminded her of the same expression he’d worn as he’d said his own vows. That intensity. That gravity.
As if all of that ruthlessness he wore so easily he would bring to bear here, too.
Something in her shook and shook at that notion.
Because even now, even though he’d had his hand between her legs and he’d spoken of things likecoming apart beautifully, she still couldn’t imagine—no matter how she tried—what it would truly be like to lie naked with this man, to feel him all over her, to welcome him deep inside her body. Only not his fingers this time.
Ranieri’s eyes lit with a deep heat, and he laughed. And Annika knew then that he could read her every thought, all over her face.
“Steady on,amore,” he murmured. “We have a little way to go yet.”
But for Annika, everything shifted into a kind of overbright, sweet syrup of need and longing. And threaded through it all was a humming sort of anticipation. It seemed to take her over. She could feel it in her bones.
They landed in an airfield high in the hills. Outside, the air was crisp and the sky was a deep, moody blue, the last gasp of a fall night. Ranieri was the one who swung into the driver’s seat of one of the vehicles that waited there. It was a smaller sort of SUV, the kind they liked in Europe, and Annika was not surprised to find that he drove it the way he did everything else. With that singular focus. That intense competence.
She thought she’d be perfectly happy to sit beside him forever and let him drive her wherever he wished them to go.
Because all she could think about was that growing hunger inside her. The fire was indistinguishable now from that ache, making her feel trembly. Everywhere.
And the terrible wanting that left her too close to breathless, like that was all that was left of her.
