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She threw her arms over her head and arched into him.
Then she felt his mouth, again. She heard his dark laugh, desire and delight. He tasted the tender flesh of her inner thigh and she could not have described the sounds she made. She could onlyfeelthem, coming out of her like an echo of those same songs she’d played for him.
When she could feel the harsh beauty of them in her fingers, she realized that she was gripping his strong shoulders instead.
“Angelina,” he said, there against her thigh where she could feel her own name like a brand against her skin. In the candlelight that danced and flickered, she lifted her head and found herself lost in his gaze with only her own body between them. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Yes,” she lied.
He laughed, a rich, dark sound that crashed over her like a new symphony, louder and more tumultuous by far.
Then he shifted, pulled her panties to one side, and licked deep into the center of her need.
And then Benedetto Franceschi, the Butcher of Castello Nero, ate her alive.
He made her scream.
She bucked against him, crying out for deliverance but receiving nothing but the slide of his tongue, the faint scrape of his teeth. A benediction by any measure.
And when she died from the pleasure of it—only to find she lived somehow after all, shuddering and ruined and shot through with some kind of hectic glee—he pulled her to her feet, letting her shift dress do what it would. He sank his hands into her hair again, and then this time, he took her mouth with his.
Sensation exploded in her all over again, hotter and wilder this time.
The madness of these melodies. The glorious terror of his possession.
The dark marvel of it all.
His mouth had been between her legs, and the knowledge of that made her shake all over again. She pulsed and shook, and she was too inexperienced to know what part of the rough, intoxicating taste was him, and which part her.
So she angled her head and met him as he devoured her.
Angelina felt debauched and destroyed. As ruined as this house they stood in.
And why had she never understood that the real price of a ruin like this was the sheer joy in it?
The dark, secret joy that coursed through her veins, pooled between her legs, and made her arch against him as if all this time, all these years, her body had been asleep. Only now had it woken up to its true purpose.
Here. With him.
Like this.
He kissed her and he kissed her.
When he finally lifted his mouth from hers, his grin was a ferocious thing. Angelina felt it inside her, as if she was made fierce, too, because of him.
And she had never known, until this moment, how deeply she wanted to be fierce.
“If you marry me,” he told her, in that dark, intense voice of his, “you can never return here. You will no more be a part of your family. You will belong to me and I am a jealous, possessive creature at the best of times. I do not share what is mine.”
Angelina hardly felt like herself. There was too much sensation coursing in her and around her, she couldn’t tell if it was the music she’d played or the way he’d played her body in turn, but she couldn’t seem to worry about that the way she should.
The way a wiser woman would have, with a man like him.
“Is that a warning or promise?” she asked instead.
“It is a fact.”
And her skirt was still rucked up. She felt uncomfortably full in the bodice of her dress. She could not tell which was more ravaged and alight, the aching center of her need between her legs or her mouth.
