Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
S ERENA HATED THE feelings battering around in her chest. Hated that she couldn’t seem to ice them away.
His fault. Half her mother’s. Half his. Had to be, because she was better at dealing with the way her mother was when she was alone. When she was in her own space.
He added a new element and she hated it. She so desperately wanted to hate it and him and everything inside of her she couldn’t control, organize or perfect.
I have never once considered you dull .
“You do not need to stand up for me,” she insisted. It seemed imperative, even if she couldn’t understand why, to get that through to him. Though she couldn’t meet his gaze. Or even the gentle waves of the ocean as dark began to fall. She turned away from both.
She’d planned on staying, but maybe she could go and that would be okay. Maybe…
“I thought you understood, cara , I do not do what anyone else needs. I do what suits me. I say this because it is the truth.”
The truth. When the truth never mattered. And something about the way he was acting, like he was some noble person, and not the reprobate she’d always known him to be. Like the facade of his was a lie, and underneath it all was this man who was not vapid or frivolous or careless.
How in this moment she needed him to be all those things she’d once thought him. She didn’t understand why, but she absolutely needed the old Luciano to be the true Luciano. So she lashed out, pretending he hadn’t upended everything she’d thought about him.
“How I would love to be like you, Luciano. So unconcerned with what anyone needs. Flippant about legacies and responsibilities.” Because it felt like she had the weight of everything sitting on her chest, and he acted as if it was nothing.
He didn’t outwardly react to her words. He stood there, a beautiful mountain made of stern jagged edges. She wanted him to flash one of those insouciant smiles. A dagger in its own right.
But he did nothing but speak very carefully. “I am here, am I not?” His voice was deep, cutting. A warning, and she should heed it. She always heeded warnings.
But something was exploding inside of her. And it was his fault, because she could always deal with her mother. Maybe sometimes the barbs landed, but mostly it was just the same old insults and they didn’t matter. They were simply different people, and the great Angelica Valli would never understand understated, introverted Serena.
It was fine.
It had always been fine.
Then Luciano had created this experience where he insisted on being a witness to her mother’s barbs and that had felt…
Terrible. Belittling. Embarrassing and shameful.
Even that she could have withstood with her usual fortitude. But for him to kick her mother out? Insist on an apology before anything else progressed? As though… As though this thing she had spent her childhood telling herself didn’t matter, actually did.
He’d stood up for her, and she’d had to come to the startling revelation over dessert that no one ever had before.
She had clung to her grandfather because he’d understood her, given her space to be herself, but he’d never protected her from the slings and arrows of her parents. He’d told her to endure them. To create a shield through which they could not penetrate.
He had never offered to be her shield. It had never occurred to her that he should.
Until tonight. Until this man, her enemy, her rival, her soon-to-be fake husband had, in just one meeting, done what no one in her life who claimed to care ever had.
Tears stung her eyes. Unreasonable. Unfathomable. She didn’t cry in public. She always, always willed any emotion away, but she was failing in the moment and it was awful.
She couldn’t possibly stay here. She whirled away from him, blinded by those tears. Horrified by them. “I have to go.” She thought nothing of her purse or how she would get home without her keys, her wallet, her anything. She only thought of escape.
She didn’t even reach the entry. Luciano caught her by the arm and turned her around. He blocked the exit and held her there. So her only option was to look down at the floor and hope he didn’t notice the teardrops fall and land on the soft carpet at their feet.
Because, God, how could she ever let him see a weakness, an imperfection such as this?
One of his hands came under her chin. Pressed up. She could have fought it. Could have jerked her chin away, pushed him, a million things she could have done. Instead, she let the pressure move her chin up, and she looked him in the eye, even with tears streaming down her cheeks.
She did not know what she saw in his expression, only that it thundered inside of her like a storm. Only that it made her shudder from head to toe. That it seemed to reach inside her and change the very chemistry of her being.
He brushed the wetness away with the sides of his thumbs as his hands cupped her neck. It was impossibly gentle. This man who’d represented, like his father and her own, everything she hated. Waste and foolish pride and carelessness.
Except in these short days, she’d come to accept he wasn’t that man at all.
It was such a betrayal.
As was him being the only one to ever wipe away her tears.
“Come, cara mia . You must not cry. Particularly not on my shoes. That’s expensive Italian leather.”
She almost managed a bit of an amused sound at that, but there was nothing to be amused about. If dinner was embarrassing, this was a humiliation she did not know how to bear. This was why she preferred to be alone. This was why she preferred her cats. This was why her icy shields were important. She could be perfect there.
She could not be perfect when Luciano did not let her go. His hands on her neck, large and warm and like an anchor amidst all the chaos inside of her. A heated center point to the ice she could not seem to muster up.
“You must not let her get to you,” he said, very earnestly. When she wasn’t certain she’d thought him capable of earnest.
But he did not understand, and she could only blame this new earnestness of his for her wanting to explain it to him. “ She does not get to me. She is not the problem. She is who she has always been. Selfish and, perhaps it’s fair to say, mean. My father did not marry her for her warmth. I’m not entirely sure why they even bothered to have me.” She shook her head. Hated that even all these years later the thought depressed her. “But I do not…base my worth on what my mother said. I would have given up on success a long time ago if I did.”
“Then why do you cry?”
She sucked in a deep breath, but it didn’t settle the need to get it out. A need bigger than her fear of exposing herself to an enemy.
“Has it ever occurred to you how alone you really are?” she demanded, feeling the tears return in earnest, though she furiously blinked them back. “You cannot imagine what it is like to have someone…stand up for you, and realize they are the only one who has.” Her voice broke on the last few words.
“You do not mean someone ,” he said, his voice quiet and serious. “You mean someone like me .”
“Someone who hates me,” she returned, lifting her chin. Daring him to argue. She should have known better than to lay down a dare.
“I have never hated you, Serena.” He said it with such deep conviction that it felt as though her heart shivered inside of her chest.
“You needn’t lie,” she managed to rasp out. She cleared her throat, worked on getting back her armor. “I believe you once likened me to Satan. To my face.”
One side of his mouth quirked up in amusement. “Perhaps I did. But that wasn’t about you . It was what you represented. I didn’t know you were a strange little cat lady when I likened you to Satan. And while I think one of those creatures of yours might be an evil minion sent from hell, I do not think you are.”
She choked on some strange mix of a laugh and outrage. He made no sense. This actually making her feel somewhat better was baffling.
“Does it matter what I think?” he asked.
“Of course not.” She didn’t want it to. She didn’t think it should. But his hands were still on her neck. His body was still far too close. And while she usually felt hollowed out and beat down for a few hours after dealing with her mother and refusing to cry—the crying, being comforted, was cathartic.
She should hate him for that. Or thank him. She relished neither and didn’t know what to do with herself. What to say. Especially with the understanding that they were too close and didn’t need to be.
She could feel his breath, mingled with hers. So close. So unnecessarily close. His hands were still on her face, holding her just there. While his gaze, dark and intent, searched hers for something. She didn’t know what. She couldn’t fathom what.
She shouldn’t want him to find it. She shouldn’t want this, but her heart was beating overtime as a heat seeped into her bloodstream, spreading through her like alcohol. A drug-like softening. Until she found herself nearly melted against him, and a new, alarming pulse beat deep within. Wanting something…something only he could give.
And she knew it was wrong, this yearning. Letting him be this close. All the lines they were crossing instead of carefully adhering to. And she had always, always done the right thing.
But never in her life had the wrong thing been quite so tempting.
* * *
Luciano did not know what he was doing. He did not recognize himself. The violent ricochets of need rattling around inside of him. A gentleness that was either foreign or something so long lost he’d fully forgotten what it felt like inside of his body.
But there was a need wriggling through, one that was all too familiar. He tried to remember that this was all part of his plan. Seduction. Want. Need. To lull her into a false sense of security.
But it was supposed to be her wants and needs more than his. And he did not know how whatever was roaring through him could be matched. It was all-encompassing, consuming to the point he wasn’t sure he cared about what he’d meant to do, what was important, who had the upper hand. Not if he could once again get his mouth on hers.
Which is what he did. Closed that small distance and tasted her once more. It wound like relief through him. It had only been days since that fake kiss on the beach…that hadn’t been as fake as he’d like. But there was no hiding that this wasn’t for potential photographers.
It was for him . Him .
And her, he supposed, as she sighed into him. An echo of the relief he felt inside of himself. Because thank God they both wanted this thing they shouldn’t. What a disaster it would be if it were one-sided, this sizzling, warping, thrilling want.
She made a sound, some odd mix between a moan and distress, so he eased back.
She gripped his forearms as if to steady herself, and maybe he should have released her face. But he couldn’t seem to get his brain to send out any signals to the muscles that held her still. Her mouth was swollen, her eyes wide and leaning more brown than green, her cheeks flushed.
She breathed heavily, her eyes darting from his mouth to his eyes to his mouth again. But she seemed to come to her senses before he did.
Except there was no sense in what she said.
“There’s no one to pretend for, Luciano.”
Damn the way she said his name. “Who said I was pretending?” he demanded on a growl, resisting—narrowly—the desire to give her a shake until she got it through her thickest of thick skulls. He should have stopped this. Should have used that sentence against her.
But something about the vulnerability he’d seen today made him incapable of being as ruthless as he should be. Something about her tears had stripped him down, and he could only offer her the truth in return.
“I want you , Serena.”
She looked at him, those eyes wide and wet. There was such confusion in them. Mixed with lust. “Why?” she asked on a pained whisper.
But her pain had nothing on his. That she could ask that question. That he didn’t have an answer for it. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” And this time when he kissed her, he held nothing back. He let the whole war inside of him explode between them. He tasted her, deeply and selfishly. Just for him.
He half expected her to be cowed. Scared into pushing him away, into demanding he stop. Instead she met every kiss, every nip, every tightened grasp with one of her own. Dragging them both deeper into an inferno that would no doubt destroy them.
Luckily, he’d always been a fan of destruction.
He molded his hands over her shoulders, her arms, then anchored them at her waist to draw her closer. As close as she could get. A wild, desperate pressing of body against body. And her arms came around his neck, so she arched into him.
A jolt of pleasure so deep it almost mixed with pain shot through him. His body was iron hard, and she was a warm softness, begging for more.
Something incomprehensible was unfurling inside of him. None of his usual walls. There was too much emotion infiltrating that which should only be physical, light, easy.
There was nothing easy about this woman. About this kiss. He was being sucked in. Drowned. Which made no sense. She was the virgin. Not him.
There would come a moment where he would push her too far. Where she would want to stop. To pretend this wild loss of control had never happened. So he rushed forward to greet it. Or thought he did.
When he unzipped the back of her dress, she shrugged her shoulders to let the dress fall. She didn’t even hesitate. His heart seemed to stutter in his chest, and this was what had him pulling her back, away, but whatever denials had been on the tip of his tongue died.
Her underwear was a serviceable, virginal white. It made her look like a confection. One he desperately needed a taste of. She was a goddess. Soft and enticing. No doubt luring him to his doom.
What a way to go.
They both were gasping for air. Her pupils were large and dark and a flush had crept down from her face to her chest. For a moment, he thought he saw a flicker of doubt, but before he could use it…or refute it, she stepped forward and lifted her mouth to his once more. She kissed him and her hands slid up his chest, to the buttons of his shirt. She fumbled, but she didn’t give up, kissing him and unbuttoning his shirt one by one until he thought there was no sound in the world expect the sound of his own heart beating like a booming drum chorus in his ears.
His hands, without any permission from what little part of his brain he thought he still might have control over, slid down her back, over the curve of her backside. Every inch of her was soft, supple, warm.
The kiss could have gone on forever, but there was a warning bell somewhere deep down. A sense of self-preservation just barely nagging at him. Tiny, but abrasive. He wrenched his mouth from hers, alarmed at how winded he felt. This couldn’t continue. This couldn’t be .
He stared down at her, this unexpected temptress, still feeling an incomprehensible need. What would he do if she walked away?
What would he do if she did not?
Devour .
Which was wrong. It had been one thing to think of seducing her in vague terms, but the reality of wanting her was something far different. Far more alarming. Far more complex.
He was not a man who allowed for complex. He was not suited to it. He could not stand for it or dive into it like this.
“Tell me to stop,” he demanded. It was the only thing that could save him. Her good sense was all that stood between them and the ruin of giving in to this. Because it wasn’t seduction games.
It was something more. Something he wasn’t sure either of them would survive.
“Tell me you don’t want this,” he demanded of her. She didn’t say a thing and he wanted to yell it again until she reacted . Instead, he issued the order again, quietly and sternly with all the strength and control left in him. “Tell me.”
She inhaled sharply, then shook her head, chin lifted. “No,” she said firmly. Then she jerked his head down by the hair and crushed her mouth to his.