Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
H ER HEART WAS thundering in her ears. Had she really just told her boss that she wanted him?
Had she really just assumed that he wanted her?
But the way that he had touched her...
Luca was a great many things, but subtle was not one of them. And the last week had felt like an assault. Like suddenly all that was sensual in him had been turned on to her, with the full force of a tractor beam.
It had been the most exciting, delicious, terrifying week of her life.
She had done her best to ignore it. But every moment of every day had only ramped up her arousal. Had only made her desire more insistent.
She was leaving him.
He was the only man that she had ever wanted like this.
She was sure every therapist in the world would say that that was not how you dealt with your daddy issues. She didn’t care. She didn’t want healthy. She wanted something that felt good. She wanted something for herself.
Because her feelings for Luca were a complicated tangle and she was never going to be able to work through them.
She was taking another job. She was moving across the country. She wanted him in a way that blotted out any potential need for other men.
She wanted him.
It was a terrible thing. A great and terrible thing.
“Be explicitly clear in what you mean,” he said, closing the distance between them. They were surrounded by people.
Everyone would know.
But then, the fire that had burned in Luca’s dark eyes these past few days had been bright enough, hot enough for anyone to see it.
In fact, one of the female scientists had said something to her just last night.
“I thought he was your boss. I didn’t realize the two of you...”
“We aren’t.”
“He certainly wants to.”
“It would be inappropriate,” she had replied.
“Sometimes inappropriate is the most fun.”
She didn’t think she wanted Luca because it was inappropriate . Rather she wanted him because...
Because she had never known anyone else like him. Because she had never seen a man so beautiful and remote. He was like a lost gem, and he would hate to be compared to a gem but it was true. He was hard, all angles and brilliant light.
He was painful to look at. Painful to care about.
She did care about him. That was the worst part.
How could you not care about a man this brilliant? This singular?
And it had never been easy. It had never been anything half so simple as having a crush on her boss.
She knew every inch of Luca’s life. Every brick that comprised who he was. And she knew that there was not a single space for another person. Not as a partner. Not as anything other than a useful tool.
But she knew also that this was the only way that she could ever purge that need for him.
Now that she actually would be leaving him.
The very idea of trying to love Luca made her want to die. A woman could dash herself upon those rocks over and over again, and she would never find any satisfaction.
She had seen women leave his home.
Looking high on the experience of having been with him. He never called them again.
She knew because eventually she had to block or reroute their calls. Luca wasn’t a playboy, but he wasn’t celibate either.
He had told her once, very bluntly, that for him sexual release was a necessary function. But that he felt nothing emotional about it. Any more than he would eating a meal.
That lived inside of her.
And the same likely couldn’t be said for her. It was very possible that if she slept with him she would experience emotional ramifications. And he wouldn’t.
But she was strong. She could withstand it.
And tonight, she was finally going to get something that she wanted out of this relationship. Maybe for a few minutes, he would even see her as a human being, and not simply a more complex than average paperweight.
What would happen if she was honest with him? If she told him this thing was destroying her from the inside? That it was growing so unbearable it was part of why she was finally leaving, this sensation that she cared for him while she was nothing at all but furniture to him? That it felt too big to be contained anymore?
That she didn’t understand it. Because how could she when she’d never even touched another man?
She wasn’t going to admit that.
“Luca,” she said slowly. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid of how powerful this feeling is between us. I want you.”
The sound he made was like a growl. It made her feel electrified. “I want you,” he whispered, so close to her now that she was dizzy with the scent of him. “Naked.”
“Yes,” she said.
“What is the protocol? Do we have to stay? Will we be seen as rude?”
He was genuinely asking. This was part of her job. Guiding him when the social situation didn’t make sense to him. Though he didn’t often ask so bluntly.
The truth was they would be seen as two people sneaking off to have sex. Which was exactly what they were.
“Everyone will know,” she said. “They won’t find it rude. Though we might end up being the subject of gossip.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
She was leaving. She wouldn’t be part of this world anymore. She didn’t care.
They had never even kissed. But she didn’t need to test her need for him that way. She already knew.
He took her hand, and she was stunned by how rough it was. How strong. Hot. “Then if they already know, there is no reason to be subtle about it.”
He sounded relieved by that. He would be. He wasn’t subtle. Thank God. Because another man might not have answered her so honestly regarding their shared desire. There were no games here, and for a woman without experience, that was ideal.
He pulled her away from the dance floor, straight through the ballroom. Her heart was racing, her whole body on high alert.
She wasn’t going to regret this.
This felt like her compensation. Her severance. Her parting gift.
To finally have something from him.
To finally have some of his control.
Oh, she’d dreamed of it. As much as she’d tried to pretend she didn’t. As much as she’d told herself she wasn’t unendingly curious about how he was in bed, she had wondered.
Did he ever let himself off leash entirely?
And what was that like?
All that focus, force and obsession, zeroed in on another person.
The idea was dizzying.
They were silent in the elevator, and then, his hand over hers, he led her back down the hall toward his suite.
He opened the door, and closed it. And as soon as it closed behind them, he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her heart up against him. Her breath exited her body in a gust.
Right then she wanted to cry. Right then it was too much, and so was he.
She was leaving him. He was infuriating. Why wasn’t it simpler?
“Do you know how much I wish I could hate you?” she whispered, their mouths a mere whisper from each other.
“Why is that, cara ?”
“Because you’re the worst boss. Because you don’t see me as a human being. Because you have treated me like an incidental these past five years.”
“I treat you the same way I do everybody else.”
The words were a knife’s blade, turning inside her.
“Exactly,” she said. “And you shouldn’t. You should treat me like I’m special. Because I do things for you that nobody else does. And now I know for sure, you feel things for me that you don’t feel for anyone else who works for you.”
“It is attraction, Polly.”
He said it so blandly. As if it could never be that simple.
“Nonetheless, Luca, the way you treat me leaves me feeling so hungry for something more. You make me so angry, you make me feel small sometimes. And yet I can’t hate you. Because you are the most complex, interesting man I have ever known, and do you have any idea how much it pains me to say that? A man shouldn’t be interesting and complex simply because he displays baffling behaviors.”
“I am baffling even to you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you understood.”
He almost sounded hurt. If he had been anyone else she would’ve imagined that he was. Perhaps that should make her feel bad. But it didn’t. “I baffle you and yet you want me anyway?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And I feel like I deserve this.”
“You are so confident you will enjoy it?”
“Aren’t you?”
He moved closer, and she felt like she might faint. Being this close to all that beauty had left her feeling nearly drunk.
“No more talking.” The words were hard. Blunt. Arousing.
That was when she found herself crushed roughly against him. His mouth crashed down upon hers, and there was nothing left to say. There were no more words left in her entire being. She was made entirely of need.
His mouth was hot and hard, his tongue insistent as a requested entry. She granted it. She wanted him to devour her. She wanted...
This was such an explosive fantasy. Seeing him like this. When he pulled away from her, he was breathing hard, his eyes wild.
She had done that to him.
It was different than his frustration over his exacting standards not being met.
This was him at the edge of control. This was him pushed to his limit, by her.
She had power.
And she felt electric with it.
She had never been kissed before. And yet she was confident that no kiss could ever match what his did.
Because he was the man who had changed her life with a glance. She had been so certain she had seen him, and evaluated him as she did everyone. That she had seen everything. But nothing could have really prepared her for him. It was why he was dangerous and wonderful all at the same time.
And now that she was leaving, now that this was it...
She could finally have him. Just for tonight.
This explosive, wonderful, terrible, dangerous, sharp thing.
She was confident that no one could ever fully understand what this was. It wouldn’t be like anything else that had ever existed before or since.
Luca Salvatore was a singular man.
She knew sex with him would be singular as well.
As if determined to prove her point he wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her up off the ground as if she weighed nothing. He carried her through the sitting room, propelled her back into his bedroom.
“I want to see you naked,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much?”
There was something burning in his eyes that was completely unfamiliar to her. She had thought that she had known Luca and all of his moods. But here it was. The hidden depths. The thing that she had never seen. She had imagined that he might be during sex as he was with everything else. There was an intensity to him, yes. But it was always entirely within his control.
He seemed to be pushing at the bonds of it now.
There was...desperation in his eyes. She had never imagined that. It took her breath away.
“No,” she said. “Tell me how much.”
She needed it. After all these years of feeling like nothing more than a particularly useful paperweight to him, she needed to hear that it was different. Now, at the end of this. At the end of them, she needed to hear it.
“I know everything about you,” he said. “About the way that you move, about the way that you complete tasks. There is a very particular way that you hold your wrist when you are annoyed with me. A way that you move your head when something interests you. You smile a particular way when you are pleased, and a different way when you’re upset. I don’t normally notice those sorts of things about people, but you have been an object of my fascination from the moment I first hired you. You are a study in contradictions. I think most people don’t notice them, but I do.”
She wanted to hide. She had never imagined that Luca looked at her that way. She had never imagined that he looked at her like much of anything.
She’d never thought, for one moment, that he had seen her quite so clearly.
“But...”
“You don’t think I notice details like that. But I only know details that matter.”
There was nothing he could’ve said that could’ve possibly aroused her more than making it clear that she mattered.
But this was somehow more than sex.
He kissed her again, hard and insistent. “I do not know how your body looks without clothes on,” he said. “I’m studying your face now. Your eyes are filled with... I don’t have a word for it. But you like this.”
“I do,” she said, not feeling embarrassed, not at all, because this was just so honest. He was honest. That she had always appreciated about him, whatever else was going on.
“I’ve never seen you aroused.”
“You have. It’s only I do a good job of hiding it, I think.”
“Not always. Though I would consider you interested, not aroused in those moments. I noticed the way that you looked at my body when we were at my house.”
“ Anyone would want to look at your body.”
She found it easy to return his honesty with honesty.
“Anyone would want to see yours.”
“I can assure you that is not the case,” she said. “But I’m glad that you do. For my purposes at the moment.”
He reached behind her and grabbed the zipper of her dress, releasing it, letting the dress fall around her waist.
Need arced through her, and she found herself more aroused as her breasts were exposed to him, as the dress slipped down over her hips, revealing that she was wearing nothing more than a pair of very brief underwear.
She wasn’t embarrassed. Because of his honesty. Because he made his appreciation for her form so apparent as he gazed at her.
“Beautiful,” he said.
He kissed her neck, and then he bit her. She gasped. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he consumed her. She began to tear his clothes away from him. She didn’t have the patience to go slow in deference to her inexperience.
She didn’t have patience at all. She needed him. Like air.
This was five years in the making. Whatever she had told herself about how she felt working for him, this was undeniable.
She wanted him.
Every night she had spent in his bedroom watching him dress, every time she had been pinned beneath his stern gaze. Every time she had watched his intense anticipation when he had been working on a project, it had all coalesced into this moment. It had been foreplay.
Even if she hadn’t quite appreciated the extent of it. She did now. She was slick with need for him.
She was also innocent. She didn’t know what was happening to her body.
She knew all about sex.
She knew about climax.
She had brought herself to it more than once.
She was human, after all.
She was just a very guarded, protected human, which meant that always, these things had been better for her to experience on her own. Without anyone else.
She let out a shuddering breath as he kissed her again. As he moved them both to the bed, as he removed all the layers of clothing between them.
“Please,” she said. “I have to see you.”
He moved away from her, and she looked at his masculine form in awe. She had seen his bare chest many times. But never so that she could openly stare at it. So that she could touch him. She reached her hand out and placed it flat on his chest. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered.
He made a rough sound of male satisfaction. Then she let her eyes move down lower. To that thick, aggressively male part of him.
She had never seen a naked man. She was not one for sexual images, even though she didn’t have an issue with people who did enjoy them.
She had just never been interested.
She had on occasion brought herself to climax at night when she couldn’t control her riotous thoughts. Her fantasies about her boss.
But she didn’t go out of her way to seek out sexual arousal. There had never been a point to it.
He was the first. And he was... He was beautiful.
Just as she had known he would have to be. Because he had called to her, always, in a way that no one else and nothing ever had.
If there was one thing she trusted about herself, it was her instincts. When it came to people and what they were concealing. And she had sensed that what he was concealing was something that she wanted. She had been correct.
“Have you looked your fill?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Because she knew, somehow without a doubt, that this would never be enough.
“Touch me,” he said, his voice hard.
She reached out and pressed her fingertips against his chest, dragged them down his stomach, all the way down to that hard, masculine place between his thighs. She wrapped her hand around his shaft, biting her lip as she did so. Experimentally, she stroked him. She thought about telling him that she was inexperienced, but ultimately changed her mind. She didn’t want anything to alter the experience between them. She wanted to have him. All of him, as he would have any other woman.
He closed his eyes, his breath hissing through his teeth. And then, it was like he couldn’t bear it any longer. Then, he was kissing her. Then he had her pinned to the mattress. She wrapped her arms around his neck, parted her legs for him, and he pressed that hot, hard length against her slick flesh. She groaned, arching against him. He kissed her neck, down to her breast, sucking her nipple in deep. She couldn’t breathe for how glorious it was. He moved down, so that his face was between her legs. He cupped her rear and lifted her up off the mattress, devouring her most intimate heat as if it were a delicacy he couldn’t get enough of.
She didn’t even think to be ashamed. She didn’t think to hold back. She moved her hips in time with every stroke of his tongue, every scrape of his teeth. She was lost in it. She felt like she might die. He called yet more and more desperate sounds from her body, and met them with sounds of masculine hunger.
He pushed two fingers inside her slick channel, filling her. She cried out in pain and pleasure, her internal muscles pulsing around him as an orgasm was extracted from her with the most intense precision.
It was Luca Salvatore to his core.
Even in this he was unmatched.
Even in this he was everything.
When he looked up at her, his eyes were nearly black, his pupils expanded so much he was pure predator. And she could see that he had lost all control. He moved his body up the bed, gripped her thigh and hooked it over his hip as he kissed her, as he thrust himself inside of her with one brutal stroke.
It hurt. She cried out into his mouth, but he swallowed her pain. And turned it into pleasure. He began to move, hard and unyielding, taking no quarter, taking no prisoners.
He was so deep inside of her she could scarcely breathe. She could feel him, each dominating inch as he claimed her over and over again.
Whatever she had been before this, she couldn’t remember. For now, she was simply Luca. And he was hers.
He was not her boss, and she was not his assistant.
She was not leaving.
And he was not cold.
They were together. They were a conflagration. An expression of need burning so hot, so bright, that nothing would ever be able to dampen it.
With each stroke, her pleasure built. Until she was at the end of herself. At the end of everything. She came again, a hoarse cry of need escaping her. And his own release came on a roar as he poured himself within her.
She was left storm-tossed, sweat-slicked and exhausted.
He did something entirely unexpected. He pulled her into his arms and held her fast as their breathing calmed. And then she found herself drifting off to sleep. When she woke, it was with a start. She was still lying next to Luca. They were both naked.
And she knew she had to leave. She had no other option. Because if she stayed, she would never be able to go.
She felt like she had been slashed with broken glass.
She felt like she was destroyed. And she couldn’t be destroyed. She had to remake herself. That was the whole point of taking this other job. It was the whole point of leaving him in the first place. It was the whole point of taking this chance and having one passionate night with him.
She had to leave. She sneaked out of the hotel room, and he never once stirred. She went back to her room and gathered her things.
Then she went straight to the airport, and got the first flight back to Italy.
And as she sat in her economy seat and stared out the window, she tried to come to a place of acceptance with the fact that she was never going to see Luca Salvatore ever again.