Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Siena climbed into the marital bed. Her heart was still beating erratically. Her bones felt jellified.
She could hear the shower running in the marital bathroom and wished she had the power to will herself to sleep before Elio came out of it. She’d never known a stomach could knot itself so tightly.
She’d never felt so powerless, not even in that nightmare moment when she’d been pinned to the wall.
This was the rest of her life. She’d known it when she’d stepped up and agreed to it, but now she felt it. Really felt it.
Turning her back to the bathroom door, she rested her cheek on the pillow and swallowed back the panic rising in her.
She could leave. He wouldn’t try to stop her.
But if she left, he would take it as a declaration of war.
If she failed to consummate their marriage within twenty-four hours, he would take that, too, as a declaration of war.
Her whole family, everything she held dear, would be in danger.
The army Elio had built under their noses matched theirs for size and power.
And that was just the army they knew of.
There was no knowing how many of their own men had been recruited by him and were waiting for the signal to act.
She had to have sex with him. There was no getting around it.
It wasn’t even as simple as closing her eyes and just letting him take her.
Not now. No, Elio was showing her who held the power in their marriage and in the most degrading way possible.
He’d turned the tables on her. As punishment for her refusal to be seduced, he was blackmailing her into seducing him.
God, how could she do that?
Men were pigs. Every single one of them. Even Rico had been a pig before he’d fallen for his angel. This pig was the worst of them all.
To have to seduce him…
How could her father not have warned them of the threat Elio had grown into? He must have known. Must have. So why the hell hadn’t he stopped him?
The bathroom door opened. She snapped her eyes shut and clung tighter to the sheets around her.
“If you’re pretending to be asleep, you need more practice,” he said in that mocking tone she’d already come to loathe.
“Fuck off,” she muttered.
He laughed. “That’s not very wifely, is it, wife?”
“Stop calling me that.”
The sheets rustled as he climbed in beside her.
There was no time for her to even freeze when a large, warm hand clasped her hip and a hard, warm body pressed into her back.
The breath that danced into her ear was hot.
“But you are my wife, Siena.” He’d twisted her onto her back and climbed between her legs before she had time to catch a breath let alone protest.
“What are you doing?” she demanded tightly. Hoarsely.
Palms either side of her head, he lifted his chest and smiled down at her.
He was naked, a hard length jabbing into the top of her thigh clearly definable through the silk of her pyjama bottoms. “Getting a goodnight kiss from my beautiful wife…” The dangerous silver eyes glittered.
“Unless, of course, my wife is planning to seduce me now?”
Fisting her hands, she clamped her lips together mutinously and reflexively clamped the inner muscles between her legs shut too.
He lowered himself so his face was hovering only inches over hers, and threaded his fingers through her hair. “Oblige me with a goodnight kiss, and then I will let you sleep.”
She tried to cut her senses off again, but it was as impossible as swimming through treacle.
The warmth of his hard body was permeating through the silk of her pyjamas, the scent of his minty breath and freshly showered skin already inhaled into her bloodstream.
She hated that she found his scent appealing.
She didn’t want to like anything about him, not even his smell.
His face lowered another inch. He was so close to her that she could see all the individual hairs of his beard. “One kiss, wife.”
She swallowed to clear her constricted throat. “One kiss and you’ll get off me and let me sleep?”
“You have my word.”
Not giving herself time to back out, she raised her head enough for her mouth to fleetingly connect to the corner of his lips. “There. You can get off me now.”
He shook his head. The face he pulled was almost sympathetic. “I meant a real kiss, not the kind of kiss you would give to one of your brothers.” He brought his face even lower, his mouth almost a whisper against hers. “Now, let’s try that again.”
His breath merged with hers a beat before his mouth pressed against hers.
Siena, her heart beating painfully hard, closed her eyes and clenched her fists even tighter, as determined to block him from her senses as she’d been earlier. More so.
When Elio had attempted to kiss her earlier, they’d both been fully dressed.
Now, he was fully naked, and she had only thin pyjamas on.
Earlier, she’d been on her feet, in his power, but with a slim chance of fighting him off if she’d needed to.
She hadn’t been pinned beneath him. Hadn’t felt the most essentially male part of him stabbing so close to her sex.
Just lie like a mannequin as he’d so cruelly teased, she told herself, trying harder than ever to block him out. Let him take his kiss. Block it all out.
And maybe she would have succeeded if he’d kissed her with the firm determination of earlier, but this kiss was gentle.
Insidiously gentle. Elio’s lips moved in a slow, featherlight caress over hers, so insidious and so gentle that she was barely aware he’d coaxed her lips apart and that her mouth had moulded to his, barely aware that the new taste in her mouth was his breath until she felt the probe of his silken tongue against hers and sensation like nothing she’d ever felt before lanced through her.
Her eyes shot open, and she would have wrenched her mouth away if he hadn’t deepened the kiss.
His tongue was no longer probing but exploring, their faces meshed so tight together that the soft stubble of his beard was scratching her skin, his bare chest compressed tight against her breasts, and suddenly she was fisting her hands to stop them from touching him.
The tingling warmth in the pit of her stomach had flickered back to life, and now sensation was everywhere, seeping into every little crevice of her body, the inner muscles between her thighs no longer clenched, but pulsing...
He pulled his mouth away from hers and lifted his head to gaze back down at her.
With her heart a burr and heat licking her skin, it took all the courage Siena possessed to meet his silver stare. The corners of his mouth twitched. “Much better,” he said evenly. “You can go to sleep now.”
And then he rolled off her, and the heat and weight of his body were gone.
For the longest time, Siena lay there paralysed. While Elio made himself comfortable beneath the sheets, the sensations still flickering through her were too strong for her to dare move even an inch.
What the hell had just happened, she wondered dazedly.
When she was finally able to get her body to turn over, she could still taste him in her mouth.
* * *
Elio could still see the pulsing shock of desire in Siena’s beautiful eyes from when he’d broken the kiss as vividly as he could taste her sweetness on his tongue.
Through the large gap she’d created between them – he was quite sure she’d moved so close to the edge of the bed that she was in danger of falling out of it – he could feel the heat of her unmoving body. If he had to guess, he’d say her eyes were open and fixed unseeing on the wall.
How long had he spent wondering what she tasted like, he mused darkly.
Elio’s first concrete recollection of realising how spectacularly beautiful she’d become was on her eighteenth birthday, an event he’d observed from afar since her first.
In the early days of his watching the Espositos from afar, he would look at her, at the ringlets of her hair, which in those days had been so pale it was almost white, and feel a tightness in the pit of his stomach to see the innocent child that was Siena.
Even with all the dark thoughts of vengeance that had consumed him from the age of nine, a strong part of him had wanted to save Siena from the fate her birth had laid for her.
Not just save her from the fate he had planned for all of them, but save her from the monsters that were her family.
As she’d grown older and her curls dropped and her white hair darkened to blonde, he’d watched the innocent child slowly melt away, but it wasn’t until he’d watched her and Gabriella, the woman who was now Tommaso’s wife, leave the Esposito home, all dressed up for a night out celebrating, bodyguards in tow, that he’d seen just how beautiful she’d become.
She’d radiated with youth and vitality, and with a knowing sassiness he’d never witnessed before.
The angelic toddler had grown into a ravishing young woman right before his eyes.
The fantasies of making her his had come a few years later when he’d learned she’d demanded her father let her be in the inner circle of her family’s shadowed world.
The strength of his fury had been shocking in its intensity.
Somehow, over the many years he’d spent watching the Espositos and learning every last detail about them, Elio had been rooting for the child born the day his mother died.
He’d been hoping for a miracle to excuse her from his vengeance.
Learning she was every bit as abhorrent as the rest of them had ripped away any sentimentality he’d been holding for her and ripped away the emotional wall he’d unwittingly built to protect her from him, and let his imagination run free.