19. Pulse of Your Heart
Chapter 19
Pulse of Your Heart
M y body felt like it had been turned inside out, my nerves exposed, and Rocco’s hands had caressed over each one in my sleep. His hands were on me all night, like he couldn’t stop touching me. Which was why I slept, but I didn’t. Still, before sunrise, my eyes fluttered open, and I full on smiled at the way he held me. He had me cocooned in his arms and legs. His entire body protected mine, even in sleep.
The room had an otherworldly glow about it. The sun was just starting to push the darkness back, cracking open the night, a brilliant fire spreading throughout the sky. Heat was already starting to creep in, hypnotizing the cicadas to sing. The essences of our body seemed to tangle in such a peaceful point of existence.
I yawned quietly and could have stretched my arms and legs, absorbing this heaven on earth, maybe falling back asleep, maybe not. But that was the point. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but being here with him.
His breath slowly washed over my head, his heartbeat against my ear, and I breathed in the scent of his skin. I pushed my head back after a second to study his face.
In this light…his beauty—no, that wasn’t the right way to describe it, but it wasn’t wrong either. The only description that fe lt appropriate, or worthy, was that he had a face that could be stared at for eternity and never get old. My hand seemed to grow a mind of its own, and it followed the direction of my eager heart, tracing the lines of his face, absorbing the feel of him through touch. It was like tracing the lines of the finest art. And this art was all new, but sometime, somewhere, I’d seen it before. Knew it.
Knew him better than the lines of my hand.
“Amora, la tua mano è una farfalla che scivola sulla mia pelle ,” he whispered, eyes still closed. Love, your hand is a butterfly that glides across my skin…
Sighing at the soft roughness in his voice, my butterfly continued to glide, down his throat, up and down his chest, back up to his face, where I traced the shape of his lips. He bit at my finger and I gasped, a lazy smile coming to my face.
His eyes slowly opened and met mine in the fiery haze of the oncoming day, my fingertips still on his lips. I couldn’t look away from the hypnotizing sea green color of them. They seemed to glow, the same way the water does when it’s touched by the sun. Tension started to grow between us, an ache rising from the depths of desire, pushing our bodies even closer.
Then the tension snapped, and both of us gave into it.
Our mouths came together. My hands roamed over him, and his roamed over me. His hair was wild—wilder than I’d ever seen it. It was usually perfectly styled. It made him look more like a beast. I didn’t help the case. My hands were all over him, messing up all the perfection, setting him free of all the restraints that felt like bars to me on his body . Around his family, he was rigid, upholding all the rules and traditions that the Fausti family seemed to thrive on. In this bed, with me, I wanted him to break all the rules. Dared him to.
Dared him to love me freely and without constraints pulling him back.
Even this amount of contact was causing us both to pant, to make wild noises, to rip and claw at each other’s clothes. Looking back, the Henley onesie wasn’t such a good idea. It had trapped me inside. A second later, he ripped it apart with his bare hands, flinging the material to the floor.
On second thought, the restraining onesie was the perfect choice.
There was something so satisfying to both of us about him freeing me and himself, assuming the noises he made were for the same reason I was making them. It was a sense of total and complete relief. We were that much closer to our bodies connecting for the first time, and a deeper place reconnecting after centuries.
I’d never been naked in front of man before. I had never allowed it to go that far. I hadn’t even kissed a man before, unless the cheek counted. Again, I had extremely high standards, and Rocco Fausti had obliterated them all and even added ones I had no clue should exist.
Because I had earned this moment, I watched as he took in my body like he was starved for it, and I was all he had ever craved.
“Amora,” he breathed, his eyes stalling on the place between my breasts were my heart reacted to the beat of our attraction, where the lion’s heart rested. “I am not worthy of you.” But he touched me anyway, traced my lips like I had done to his.
My body reacted instantly.
My mouth parted. My back arched, pushing my breasts up, as if he was caressing my hard and aching nipples. My thighs craved to open, my legs to wrap around his powerful hips. My body raced, but my hands moved slowly, as if I were unwrapping a present, removing the shirt from his shoulders, flinging the expensive fabric to the floor, right over mine. With trembling hands, I unbuttoned his slacks and pushed them down, hooking my fingers in his briefs, undressing him all at once. He kicked his socks off.
Getting to his feet, he stood before me naked.
It should have been criminal to cover such a physique with a worthless custom-made suit, but I appreciated that it existed, because if he walked around naked, I would commit a crime if another woman tried to step close to my territory.
Yeah, I had made a claim on Rocco Fausti, just as he had made a claim on me.
Getting to my feet, I circled him, my finger tracing all of his lines greedily, just as his eyes had inhaled mine in the same way. His eyes followed my trajectory, until I ran a finger up and down his back.
This proved something to me.
He already trusted me. That was why he had entrusted me with what was left of his heart. The pendant dangled between my breasts.
I reached up and stroked one end of his shoulder to the next, making a zigzag pattern as I followed all his lines. And when I stood in front of him, the slash across his chest red and angry in the light, I hid the heavy sigh that came from the depths of my chest. But I’d decided to see it differently. Just as I had said to him the night before, she had opened his chest and freed his heart. I had been going straight for it while his was coming straight for me.
Our hearts had collided on this island.
His hands were balled into fists, like that was where his power resided—the only thing keeping him from touching me. But he was allowing me this. A chance to see him naked and vulnerable. He was allowing me to become his judge and jury.
“ Mio, ” I whispered, and he made a strangled noise in his chest. “You belong to me, Rocco Fausti. All mine .”
I said the words, just in case he didn’t feel my claim down in the marrow of his bones, like I felt his inside of me. But I knew he needed this. I knew he needed me to claim him this way.
“There’s not a damn thing lacking about you, Rocco Fausti. You’re the entire world. My entire world.” I hit my chest like he had when he repeated his family’s motto, then I repeated it. “La mia parola è buona come il mio sangue. My word is as good as my blood. ”
My words, the warm conviction behind them, were stirring something deep inside of him, drawing him closer and closer to me, even though he hadn’t moved. A feral smell, like an animal marking his territory, cut through our combined scents as if it was made of cotton, and the wildness of the scent he was throwing off was made of sharpened steel. His cock, straining against taut skin, was leaking his seed, my words like a fist around it.
His cock was as bold and beautiful as he was, but only a part of him, a part that made him him , that completed his picture, that made him whole.
Like I’d said.
He lacked nothing .
Forcing myself away from him, I slipped back in bed, moving the cover over.
An invite—dated for the rest of our lives.
“Rocco,” I whispered.
His eyes slowly opened to mine, and a strike of fear lanced through me at the look I found. It was as if all his desire had been trapped in the black circles around his irises, and it was bleeding out, forcing the green to surrender to an all-consuming passion. I started to tremble, but it didn’t stop him from stalking toward me, his eyes not missing the way I’d moved back the cover to invite him in my bed.
He stopped at the mattress, though, and moving my body like it was nothing but a rag doll in a monster’s grip, he situated me like he wanted me. He leaned over me, taking my mouth in a breath-stealing kiss, until he sensed I was having trouble breathing and moved down my face to my neck, to lick between my breasts, before he took my nipple in his mouth and sucked.
It felt like a zap went straight from my nipple to my uterus. It tightened. And I knew the snap of it would send me spiraling. It happened again when he lavished the other one with the same attention.
I had grown a throbbing pulse between my legs.
He dropped to his knees, and after licking my thighs, the equivalent of flinging me inside of a whirlwind made of dopamine, he ordered me to look at him.
“I will go slow,” he said, caressing between my legs, and I closed my eyes again, moaning. “Look at me, Amora ,” he ordered once more.
My eyes fluttered open, like a newly developed butterfly would open its wings. When our eyes connected, he groaned and said in a rough voice, “You are my heart’s long-lost craving—a craving that starved me down to the marrow. You are here now, and a king’s table could not compare. And I will not allow a second with you to go unappreciated.” He set his face between my thighs and started to devour me.
My hips pulsed to meet his tongue as a soft gasp seemed to echo throughout the room. I had no idea pleasure this consuming existed. Climbing the stairs to his heavenly castello over the sea had nothing on how high he was bringing my body. Every cell was flooded with a mind-numbing drug that tore through my system and pushed me outside of myself. I was a being made of only feelings—and he was touching every one of them with his mouth, eliciting a version of me who had only existed in this moment. My hands reached out, fisting the sheets, as his tongue forced my hips to pulse up, causing my breasts to jiggle.
It felt so good, I almost wanted to cry.
My hips matched the intense tempo of his tongue, and I had no idea what language I was speaking in, but he seemed to understand. He bit my overly sensitive nub, sucked on it, then bit it again, and I made an, “ Ah! Ah! Ah! ,” noise as my body snapped and all of that concentrated pleasure rushed through my veins.
My head spun after. Worse than it had ever spun when I had the concussion. Stars danced behind my eyes, my lungs burned, and sweat coated my body.
And when I was finally able to open my eyes, there was that stunning sea view that almost seemed unreal: Rocco Fausti’s eyes staring into mine. I hadn’t even heard him move or felt the dip in the bed when he slipped in next to me. He pulled me close, so close, I could hear the frantic beat of his heart, and I felt his seed slide against my leg when his hot cock touched it. Running my fingertips up and down his chest, my touch moved lower and lower. When I took him in my hand, hardly able to close my fist around him, he jerked, like I had shocked him, and his hips pulsed into my grip. He made a strangled noise as I started to move my fist up and down, using his own wetness to glide over it.
The noises he made were causing me to make my own.
Why did this make me feel so powerful?
My hand stilled on the tip of him, my thumb exploring the shape of him. He was swollen, so swollen, veins snaked around his hardness.
“ Amora ,” he groaned out. I thought he was about to spill himself, free himself, but he took my wrists in his hands and pinned them on each side of my face. His eyes concentrated on mine, and mine were consumed by his. Our chests were heaving so hard, it almost seemed like they were pounding against each other’s—a drum and its beat.
“Rocco,” I whispered.
“I have never experienced anything like this,” he said, his accent even heavier. “It is wild. There are no laws for me to follow.”
“None,” I breathed. “Except for one.”
His eyes studied mine as if they were studying for the test of a lifetime, and he refused to fail.
“You are mine. Only mine.”
This man had more options than the average male. The entire world at his feet. Not only was he so gorgeous that it was almost impossible to take my eyes away from him, but he was also rich and powerful—dangerous to an unnatural degree. It radiated around him like rays from the sun. He might kill me if he denied me this, but I refused to settle for anything less than all of him. Nonna had imparted on me a sense of self-worth, and how, in a world that will attempt to change me at every turn, I wouldn’t settle for anything less than my heart desired .
Rocco Fausti was who my heart desired.
He released me in a whoosh of air, like that was the only way he could let me go, and sat up, his long powerful legs on the side of the bed, his head in his hands.
“There could never be another you,” he whispered. “I did not think you even existed. You were—are—a fantasy, and fantasizing about you does not compare to holding you in my arms. There is no comparison. I could not live without you now.” He turned to look at me, then, closing his eyes, leaning in close, breathing me in, he kissed me on my forehead. “I will never touch another out of want. Out of desperation. The sum of me has come together, at last, and made the ruling.”
I closed my eyes to the feel of him moving away from me after. He was heading toward the bathroom before going for his clothes.
“I must leave for a while.” He stood in the doorway.
“Will you be long?”
“No. I would not be able to survive it otherwise.”
I nodded, looking down at my nails, as if one of them suddenly had a new growth on it.
“Amora,” he called.
My eyes lifted to meet his.
“Tell me.” Two words, and I sang like a canary.
“What about me?” I whispered. “Only you for me?”
A slow grin lifted his lips, giving me a glimpse of his perfect teeth, but there wasn’t anything jovial about it. It was the exact opposite. Terrifying. “Let another male try,” he said.
With that protective threat lingering around me, sending a shiver through me, he left.