Chapter 11 #3
Maybe her mood was down to a lack of sleep.
Other than the two days of her period, they’d barely slept the last few weeks.
The sexuality switch Elio had turned on in her seemed to have exploded.
She could not get enough of him. Making love to him had become a form of drug to the point where it felt she was living through the days just to get to the night and the pleasure that would come with it.
Dear heaven, he’d broken down the last of her barriers by bringing her to orgasm with his tongue, and it had been so glorious that every time he snaked his tongue over her breasts and belly, she would find herself writhing with anticipation of him doing it again.
After they’d sated each other, she would lie in his arms, but before she could fall into sleep, desire would swell back up, not just in her but in Elio too. It was like he could read her mind and sense she was aching for him to make love to her again.
Kissing him goodbye after the meeting with the distributors had been a fleeting moment of madness. She hadn’t even known she was going to do it until she’d done it.
God, she was in so much trouble. The tightrope she’d spent their marriage walking on had been pulled so high and so tight that she was in serious, serious danger of losing her balance and plummeting.
Even thinking of what they did in bed as lovemaking was dangerous, but she could no longer force her mind into calling it sex, and she could no longer pretend that she wasn’t sitting at this table with him longing for him to show her some of the affection he showed so readily when they were in bed.
And here she was, feeling sad and melancholy partly because it felt like she’d said her final goodbye to her father when Elio had said goodbye to his parents so many years ago.
Their bowls of carbonara were brought out. Just to sniff it was enough to trigger her appetite into life. Her stomach had been too tight to manage breakfast or lunch.
“That’s better,” Elio said approvingly after she’d eaten a couple of giant forkfuls of the delicious, comforting pasta.
She gazed into the vampiric, silver eyes, and her heart ballooned so swiftly it stuck in her throat.
If she fell off the tightrope, she suddenly wondered, would Elio catch her or let her fall? If he let her fall, could she even blame him?
Taking another, bigger drink of her wine, she quietly asked the question that had been playing on her mind with increasing frequency. “What were your parents like?”
His features tightened before she could even blink, his silver eyes hardening.
“I know only what my parents have said about them,” she said, “and I doubt it bears any resemblance to the truth.”
“What did they tell you about them?” he asked in a silky voice that spelt danger.
She refused to be intimidated or turn her stare away.
“Nothing good. But then, they wouldn’t, would they?
You don’t claim victory in a bloody war and then say your opponents were actually good people with hearts of gold, do you?
You need to keep the legend of their inherent evilness alive and to hell with the truth. ”
The world they lived in was littered with monsters jostling for position, but what Siena’s father had done went beyond even what an average gangster would consider acceptable.
There were unwritten codes, and her father had broken them.
With her mother’s knowledge and blessing, he’d murdered his best friend and framed Elio’s father for it, and for the first time Siena felt, really felt, the true horror of what he’d done.
He hadn’t been protecting his family or his own interests.
He’d deliberately set out to take the Ranieris territory from them and show Italy who the new boss in town was.
Knowing her mother, it had probably been her idea.
She swallowed into the oppressive silence that had grown between them. “Were your parents good people?”
His lips formed a tight line, and then he closed his eyes. When he opened them, his features loosened. “Can anyone who inhabits this world of ours be a good person?”
“Some are better than others.”
“Yes,” he agreed softly. A small smile played on his lips.
“If they weren’t good people, they were good parents.
” The smile dropped, and suddenly his eyes were boring into her with that intensity she felt deep in her bones.
“I know this much for certain – if Stefano had done to my sister what he did to you, my mother would never have protected him and she would never have made Elvira feel like it was her fault. He’d have been lucky to walk away with his balls, let alone his life. ”
Her heart swelled back into her throat, and with it swelled tears.
God, why did she keep wanting to cry? The tears that had threatened at the beginning of their marriage had been driven more by fury than anything else, but now it felt different, like a different kind of force was driving them. Driving her.
She fought hard to stop them from falling.
Of everything that had changed between them since they’d made their vows, that was the one thing that hadn’t.
She’d laid so much of herself bare for Elio that to cry in front of him, she was certain deep in her swollen heart, would have her plummeting off that tightrope.
There would be no safety net to catch her or break her fall.