AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I know the name I’ve been called by all my life. But I don’t know if that name—the person who was given that name—is the person who’s here in this moment. If it’s the person I want to be any more.’
‘You can refuse to tell me your name...but you will still beyou.’
The words spilt from his lips in quick succession. He wasn’t sure who he was tonight. But he knew with an unwavering certainty that he was not the man who’d flown by private jet from a courthouse in Italy to arrive in a wet and grey London.
And he wasn’t the boy rattling around in a house in desperate need of repair with a woman who cared about nothing but seeing the man she loved again. He was a grown man now, and his house was always in perfect order.
‘My name isn’t important,’ she said, slicing through his grief, his regret. ‘It’s only a name, isn’t it? It doesn’t make meme.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t want it to,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘A name can be everything.’
Hisname was everything—because he’d made it so.
‘The woman I was before I came up here...the woman with her name—myname—is attached to people’s assumptions,’ she continued, her words coming at him fast and breathless. ‘I want to leave all those downstairs.’
‘Then who does that leave up here?’ he asked. ‘With me?’
‘Only who I am right now,’ she replied. ‘A girl who doesn’t want to go home,’ she confessed. Uncoerced. Unprompted.
The words sitting on her lips were echoed in the flush tingeing her cheeks.
She wanted him.
‘Where do you want to go,piccolina?’
‘Do you have a room here?’ she asked.
And then it roared through him.Understanding.Understanding of his temptation to smash the glass against the window.
Inhaling deeply, she added, ‘I have a room...’
He watched the tendons in her throat constrict. Elongate.
‘Would you like to go back to it?’ he asked.
She shook her head, and then nodded. He saw the heat rising from her chest to tease at her cheeks.
‘Yes. If it’s with you.’
A desire to erase all distance between them ripped through him. To press her chest against his.Without clothes.To feel the tight peaks of her nipples against him.
‘I am a stranger to you,’ he said—because he was. But he was strange to himself tonight. Exposed. Raw.
‘There’s freedom in anonymity, and tonight I want to be free.’
‘Free from what?’ he asked.
He’d never been free to act on impulse. To follow his desires. His job was to provide. Protect.
‘For once—just once—I want todoand not think,’ she explained huskily. ‘Not be told I shouldn’t...not to be warned of the consequences. Not to be told how foolish I am for wanting something.’
‘And whatdoyou want?’
‘I want you.’
