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And yet he’s here. He’s been the burr beneath my skin ever since I returned, insistent on protecting me, staying with me, helping me despite being told, and apparently, to just let things happen the way they’re supposed to.
To just let me be killed.
I just don’t know if it’s because he wants to be with me, or if it’s that he feels guilty, or if he feels responsible for me, or if…
“What don’t you get?”
I turn to look at him. He’s standing in the doorway, his face a blank mask. His eyes are anything but blank, though. His eyes burn, the fire covering over secrets I’m just beginning to unearth.
“Maybe she’s not pulling the strings, but this is because of her, isn’t it?” I ask.
There it is—the tiniest flinch in the muscle beneath his right eye. “What are you talking about?”
“Someone wants to kill me because of Evie. Because you’re supposed to marry Evie O’Hanlon, and they know about us”—I gesture between us, the motion jerky—“whatever it is we’re doing, and they don’t want me to fuck it up. So it could be any number of people. Someone from the Commission. The Valachis. The O’Hanlons or Papparados. Your own father, Luca.”
“That’s crazy, Carina.” He straightens from the doorjamb and takes a step forward, but I halt him by raising a hand.
“Is it, though? You just said that I shouldn’t trust you. That you were told tolet the pieces fall.“ The words are a hiss. “That definitely sounds like someone wants to make sure your marriage goes off without a hitch.”
He shakes his head. “But Evie knows—”
“That I’m nothing to you?” I cover the bitterness of my response up with a laugh. “I think someone missed the memo.”
Luca puts his hands on his hips; his shoulders drop as he lifts his face to the ceiling. He closes his eyes, appearing weary all of a sudden. When he opens his eyes and fixes his gaze on me, though, he looks anything but tired.
He looks enraged.
“You’re not nothing to me, Carina.” He moves toward me, and reflexively I stumble backward. “How you can think you’re nothing when you’ve been fucking everything to me since we were kids…”
My legs hit the side of the bed, halting my backward progress and knocking me off balance. “How can I think that? You’re engaged to another woman, Luca! And you let me go! It wasn’t even that you didn’t tell me to stay, or you didn’t come after me; you drove me to the fucking station—“
My tirade ends when his mouth crashes down on mine, and his body propels me onto the bed, giving me no room to argue or evade. His hands cup my jaw, holding my face still as he pulls back a scant inch to glare at me. “You’re everything to me, my wild one. And I don’t know how yet, but you will be mine. Do you hear me? Everything. Say you understand.”
I nod, frantic with feeling, and pull his face back to mine, sealing my mouth to his in a kiss that leaves me gasping.
Luca levers himself up and tosses me more fully onto the surface of the bed. He follows me, crawling over me on all fours. Sitting back, he straddles my hips, and his hands go to the buttons of the shirt he gave me this morning. He makes quick work of them, tugging the plackets briskly apart and sending buttons scattering across the bed and floor with littleplinksof sound. I help, shrugging out the arms and then shimmying free.
He stills, his fingers brushing across an abrasion on my collarbone I hadn’t realized I had. He shudders. “God, Carina…”
I glance down at the spot and curl my palm around his fingers. “It’s okay. I’m okay,” I say. “You got there in time.” Moving my hand, I tug on the hemline of his shirt. “Now, get this off.”
With one last glance at the spot on my collarbone, red and angry but nothing to cry over, he presses his lips together and tugs the shirt over his head. We divest each other of the rest of our clothing swiftly and without speaking, until he pushes me back against the comforter, hitches my legs up and over his shoulders, and with no preliminaries, slides home.
I close my eyes at the feeling of fullness as he bottoms out inside me. He’s having none of that, though.
“Open your eyes, Carina. Look at me.” He gives a little twist of his hips to punctuate his demand as my eyes flutter open. “Who’s fucking you?”
“You are—”
“Who am I, crazy?”
I don’t know what he’s asking for a moment, but then it hits me with the force of a freight train. The answer steals my breath and renders me mute. I must take a moment too long to answer, because he slams into me again, harder than before, drawing a thready gasp from me.
“You’re mine, Luca! Mine!”
It’s the right answer. With a growl, he flips us so I’m on top, his position half-inclined so he can take my breasts in his mouth. “Take what’s yours,” he mutters before his teeth clamp down on my nipple.
Taking his cock in my hand, I position him at my opening and seat myself in one sharp thrust.
