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And tonight was nothing like her fantasies, it was true.
Cristiano was far, far better than she ever could have imagined.
And she could see the vast gulf between the teenage crush she’d had on him all this time and the reality that was this.Him.His ruthless physicality. His rampant, commanding masculinity, his certainty in her responses and his dark demands.
God help her, but she was lost.
He thrust into her then, a slow and steady ruthlessness that had her coming apart at the feel of it. The thickness. That deep, aching stretch. The tug of it, there at her entrance, that he barely heeded.
Then the ruthless, peremptory way he seated himself deep inside her, looked down at her face and smiled.
Julienne shattered all around him. She loved him with every last inch of her woman’s body, shattering what was left of her teenage heart and loving him all the more with the far darker, far more complicated adult heart that remained.
Fantasies were nothing next to this.
She shook and she shook, and she heard his name on her lips.
A song she’d already been singing for a decade, and would likely keep singing all the days of her life.
She told herself she accepted it. Sheneededto accept it.
Cristiano gathered him to her, laughing again. It was dark music to her ears, she buckled anew, and only then did he begin to move.
And Julienne lost track of the things she sobbed, or the times she screamed. He was insatiable, and he was thorough. He taught her things she was sure she could never put into words, so she used the only one that she could remember.
His name.
It could have been hours or whole lifetimes when he finally rolled her over for the last time, pulled her knees up high and let himself go.
And it was her name she heard then, roared out into the crook of her neck as he found his own release.
One more thing that she would hoard, later.
One more piece of treasure to tuck away.
He had said one night, and he used every last scrap of it.
Julienne woke as the first hint of dawn crept across the sky, and had no idea how she was supposed to go on. Not now she knew.
She’d come here to exorcise her own, personal demons. And instead, she had lost herself all the more. Irrevocably.
But none of that mattered, because they had agreed.
One night.
“You need your own life,” Fleurette had told her, time and again. “Nothislife, his company, his world. You’re not a princess locked away in a tower, waiting for some fool to ride up on a white horse. That’s what Annette dreamed of, you know. Every time she went out. And look what happened.”
Julienne had always agreed, safe in the knowledge that it was easy enough to agree with whatever Fleurette said as long as she still had to pay him back. And could therefore agree and also carry on doing what she was doing.
But she’d paid him back in full before she’d met him in the bar last night, transferring the last of the money to the account she’d set up for that purpose. He had bought her, in a sense, but she had bought herself back.
She was sure that once she recovered from this night—once she walked away from him, reminded herself how to breathe, and found her way into the new life she planned to build for herself far away from the Cassara Corporation or anything that reminded her of Monaco and the girl she’d been when she’d come here the first time—she would treasure that.
You will have to,she told herself, a new sob building inside her.
She twisted in the bed, looking over her shoulder to where Cristiano slept.
Even in sleep, he looked stern. Unyielding.
