Chapter 10 #2
He twists his thickly muscled body over the side of the sofa and retrieves a blanket, then tosses it to me. Self-consciously, I wrap it around my shoulders. It just about covers my satin pajama top and the hem of my shorts. My legs are still exposed but my feet are fast-becoming toasty.
I lift my lashes only to see him watching me through a sidelong gaze. Then, in a move that whips my breath away, he rolls his eyes and lifts my feet onto his lap.
“Fucking freezing,” he mutters, covering my two feet, my ankles and a good portion of my lower legs easily with his large scorching hands.
My lungs empty and my cheeks burn as I try to acclimate as quickly as I can to the situation.
I try to behave as if nothing is strange, nothing is out of turn. That my inordinately beautiful stepbrother doesn’t have my feet on his lap.
But my heart is racing, my pulse is thundering and I cannot hear a word the characters are saying on the screen.
Unlike me, who is trying so hard not to move, and sweating, Nicolò is entirely unaffected. He could sit on couches with young women’s feet on his lap every day of the week. It’s quite possible he does.
That thought sends a strange flare into my chest. If I was finding it hard to breathe before, now I’m positively suffocating. What is wrong with me?
Halfway through the movie, Nicolò checks his phone. He’s so nonchalant and not at all bothered by the contact of our skin. I force myself to relax against the arm of the couch, scooching down a little, and I briefly check my own phone. I don’t know why.
Perhaps I want Nicolò to think that I have a busy life too. That I have friends.
Thankfully, I have Clara and Annalise. And the former has sent me a text.
I swipe across and my mouth falls open. The subject line reads, simply, “Taylor” and the message contains a list of links, concluding with the words, “He’s so fucked.”
I click on the links, one by one, my eyes widening as each revelation unfolds.
There are screenshots of stolen work, quotes where he’s passed off others’ successes as his own, incriminating DMs. There’s evidence he’s cheated on girls, that he screwed with Jenny Arbor behind her boyfriend (and Taylor’s best mate’s) back.
It’s ugly and it’s returning to bite him in the ass.
“Everything okay?”
Nicolò’s voice draws my gaze from my phone and I realize I have a hand clamped over my mouth. I still can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen.
“The guy at school I was telling you about?”
Nicolò brings a thumb up to his jaw and rubs a forefinger slowly over the perfect dimple in his chin. He nods a fraction but his expression doesn’t appear to register the memory.
“The one who ripped off my work,” I remind him. “He’s being annihilated on social media. I thought I was the only one he’d been an asshole to, but he’s done a lot of bad stuff. Someone has dug it all up and the rumors are going… crazy.”
I stare down at my phone in disbelief. “I almost feel sorry for him.”
I feel Nicolò’s frown heating my face from the other end of the sofa.
“I mean, this is going to ruin him.” I can’t help the gleeful smile from spreading across my face.
He shrugs. “Glad to hear it,” he says, with a lazy lilt. “Sounds like he was a dick.”
His dark eyes fall to my free hand. “How’s your cut?”
I uncurl my wrist, showing him my palm. The cut was really deep but it’s healed a lot. Nicolò’s eyes turn to slate as he turns my hand this way and that. He’s gentle but interrogative, not missing a hair.
He looks at my hand for a few long moments, then releases it. “Keep applying the salve.”
My voice almost breaks. “I do. Every night.”
“What were you doing out there with the vines anyway?”
The smallest of smiles falls from my face and he notices.
I glance at the TV. Alongside the thudding of blood through my temple, the volume seems too loud, too overwhelming. As if he can sense my need for quiet, Nicolò leans forward to reach for the remote. The movement shifts his pelvis forward until I feel a warm firmness beneath the ball of my foot.
And it isn’t his thigh.
I freeze.
I once read that one foot has around two hundred thousand nerve endings, and I’m pretty sure every single one of mine is fired up at the thought of what’s pressed against them.
I’ve never touched a man’s dick. I’ve never even seen a real one.
Well, only when Taylor stripped off his boxers in the school hall to embarrass me, but that doesn’t count.
There was barely anything there to speak of.
But unless Nicolò has a third leg he hasn’t told anyone about, his dick is not barely anything.
He doesn’t sit back once he’s grabbed the remote. He remains angled forward, elbows on his knees and my foot in his freaking groin. I feel like I should pull my foot away, but then it would be obvious I’ve felt something, wouldn’t it?
Instead, I swallow and stare at my phone, trying not to betray the fact I am so incomprehensibly embarrassed right now that the back of my neck is sticky with sweat.
He turns the volume right down which only makes the panic in my head even louder. Finally, thankfully, he sits back again, completely oblivious to the fact I’m having a mild stroke.
He glides his icy gaze to my imploding one. “Well?”
Please voice, work. “Um, well what?”
“The vines,” he answers in a measured tone. “What were you doing out there?”
Oh, right, yes. That.
“They went wild over summer,” I say quietly. “The gardener kept saying he had other jobs he needed to do first, and he never got around to clearing the vines.”
I feel Nicolò’s attention warming my face. Even with the sensitive subject matter, knowing I have his full focus sends an electric charge through my veins.
“Eventually, the vines completely buried my mama’s rose bush. I was trying to cut them. I—”
My voice cracks and I cough to try and clear my throat.
“You what?” His voice has quietened too.
“I don’t want it to die,” I whisper beneath lowered lashes. “It’s all I have left of her.”
Nicolò doesn’t say anything.
After a long silence, he turns the volume back up, but not before he acknowledges my pain some other way. With both palms once again resting on my feet, he brushes the thumb of his right hand over the inside of my ankle, softly, like a warm breeze.
Normally that part of my anatomy is unbearably ticklish but the stroke is chased by an indescribable heat. A yearning for just one more brush of his thumb. I hold my breath, aching for his touch, his acknowledgment.
And I get it.
He turns, lifts his gaze and locks it on mine, then brushes his thumb slowly over the curve of my ankle, one more time. He doesn’t say a word, he doesn’t blink, he doesn’t swallow. But I know, for a brief but triumphant second, Nicolò Di Santo feels something too.