King of Italy (Fausti Family Royal)

32. Nothing But An Illusion.or Is It?

The world around me was a blur as my husband seemed to fly over the narrow streets and toward Castello Sul Mare , my head on his shoulder. I’d heard him snapping orders at his men. He only usually had to look at them to get his order across, and the ending was always implied without the words… or else . I got it. They were soldiers. And these soldiers had pledged fealty to the Fausti family, so it was their jobs to follow orders and protect them. Rocco was going to be king, but he was made of a knight’s tough armor. Still. I felt bed for all of them at times.

It seemed like they all rotated shifts, but on this island…it shouldn’t have been mandatory to have protection. The island was big enough for the soldiers and their families to enjoy, just like we were doing—or were.

I was too tired to sit up and ask what was going on, but I had a clue it had something to do with the new ghost of the island. She was causing havoc on these men.

No other man as much as my husband.

Maybe he didn’t have to be admitted to the hospital for psychiatric care, but he was on the verge of burning this island down, demanding to catch the vision of the ghost in smoke, dispelling her. If she hadn’t showed up in the thermal springs—the entire cave full of wisps of it—I doubted she was going to show up during a fire.

Or maybe all of that was just a diatribe of symbolic proportions coming from the green monster inside of me—fire was usually associated with hell and brimstone. And, again, no disrespect to the dead but, it seemed like Rosaria Caffi would be at home in that type of situation. I was not sin free, but she seemed to take her role very seriously as the ruthless queen-to-be of the Fausti family. She loved the role so much, she seemed to forget she had a husband at her side.

I sat up, groggy, but a lucid thought had sparked inside of the fog in my mind. This thought had nothing to do with the other thoughts, but the state of my…entire being.

What had come over me at the hot springs?

It was like the warmth of the water was love—then suddenly, I felt the opposite side of that. Hate. I’d never felt either of these emotions so deeply until Rocco appeared in my life. I could be impervious to people unless I was watching them, studying them. But…Rocco seemed to pop the top to something inside of me that overflowed with feelings—good, bad, all in between.

To be honest, the sex was physically draining, but the emotional connection we had in that cave was on another level. I felt everything he was sharing with me, like he couldn’t hold the starved memories of his heart back any longer, and they tore out of that scar across his chest and fused with mine. It was like he was…sharing with me all he felt. A loneliness so cold, it burned down to the bone. A heat so hot, it burned down to the marrow. Then…warmth. It was the most intense moments of my life to date.

My poor coochee-cooch, though. If it wasn’t for that last round in the thermal springs, when I’d fallen asleep so hard, I wouldn’t have been able to sit without crying. I glanced down at my thighs. He’d ruined the bathing suit Scarlett had given me. Then a slow smile came to my face. She’d done that on purpose! Scarlett was a slick chickee.

“Coochee-cooch,” my husband repeated.

Oh. I must have said that out loud, or my husband had taken up residence inside of my mind while I was sleeping. I honestly wouldn’t doubt it. He was powerful in so many ways.

“Coochee-cooche. It’s, um. Well, it was an erotic dance done in the eighteen hundreds.”

He repeated the words, rolling them around in his mouth, and I grinned and squeezed his rock-hard bicep.

“I have a question for you.” I yawned.

He gave me a side-eye glance, like he was suddenly wary of those.

“Where was Rosaria going that night?”

He tensed, then relaxed. “Away from me.”

“I know.” I sat up taller, but it didn’t help the tiredness still flooding my system. But I was determined to get this out. “But do you know where—specifically? She was in an awful rush.”

“She drove fast,” he said, but I could tell the gears were turning in his head.

Where was she going that night?

If I was looking at this from a purely metaphorical view—if I was running to Rocco, who was she running to? Maybe she thought she could detour me by killing me, then keep going?

That would have finished him off.

She damaged his body.

She would have stolen his heart too.

This was never truly about me, but about him.

I love a good metaphor, symbolism too, but…this family took both to another level. If I didn’t have it in me to figure it all out, I would have been so effing lost—like those soldiers suffering from ghost afflictions in the hospital lost.

“Vincenzo,” I said. “He was there that night. I saw him.”

He glanced at me again.

I refused to tell him what Vincenzo had told me that night, about Rosaria being the witch I had killed, because…I didn’t want him to die, not for the comment, but for maybe talking to me out of turn—talking to me first. Before Rocco had. I didn’t think Rocco would punish him for it, since I wasn’t known to him at the time. On the other hand, I saw the look on his face when I was about to admit to him that the police hadn’t noticed me because of the case, but because most of them were flirting with me. It wasn’t the kind of attention I was looking for—what I had going on went much deeper than the physical, because my physical body was in jeopardy of being murdered. That tends to send anyone’s heart into panic mode and make them jump at every noise.

It had been so bad at one point that, even if I wanted a pet, I never would have gotten one. If, say, my cat would have jumped down from his carpet tower, I would have had a heart attack.

“Vincenzo would have been searching for Rosaria,” he said, but the words seemed automatic.

Something I sensed about Vincenzo the night we met—not much put him off. Something I’d confirmed about him since our first meeting. This family had dark themes, and that was where Vincenzo existed—in its darkest parts. Maybe he was going to…finish Rosaria off because of what she’d done to Rocco? That would have made sense, but his car was parked in the opposite direction—the direction behind the bus, not behind her. He hadn’t been chasing her, and she wasn’t running from him.

And, yeah, maybe she had been running from Rocco and the entire situation, but it seemed like she was determined to get somewhere. Like she was going to be late—just like I was, and we both couldn’t stand the thought.

Alarm bells were going off in my gut, arrows pointing in all different directions, but I was so sure of this—someone had been waiting for her.

Maybe this “ghost” on the island?

That still didn’t explain the night I’d seen her underneath my balcony, though. The slicing motion she’d made across her throat. Maybe that was why I was so empathic to the men who claimed they saw her too. It was unnerving to an umpteenth degree to see a woman who was supposed to be dead walking (floating, some of the men swore) around. Come to think of it, it almost seemed like she floated away from me too. Or maybe because she was such a shock, my mind hadn’t registered the entire picture.

Her face came back to me at times, like I was in the middle of a night storm, no light, but when shocks of lightning would brighten the world around me, she was coming at me—each shock a step closer.

“Maybe it’s not one person,” I threw out there, “but two?”

“The men claim to have seen Rosaria Caffi.”

Yeah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? The seed from which this entire mysterious tree sprouted. We were all seeing her, and she was supposed to be dead.

“Rocco,” I whispered. “Did you, ah, did you see her body? After the crash, I mean?”

“No.”

The one word was whispered, but my mind heard the rest of the sentence loud and clear.

No, there was nothing of her left to see.

“Once I was told of the details, I turned the funeral over to her parents.”

Yes, the funeral/production. (I added the production part.)

“If you would have been able to see Rosaria after, what would you have said to her? In the stillness—in truth?”

He was quiet for so long that I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. I looked in the opposite direction, hoping it would make it easier on him. I just thought…maybe he had never properly said goodbye to her. Maybe that was why she was stuck here. Unfinished business.

We arrived at Castello Sul Mare, and he pulled straight into the garage that housed all the vehicles. Rocco put the car in park and turned it off, and we sat in silence, save for the occasional voice of a solider, a bird twittering and flittering, and the constant rush of the sea.

He lifted his hands from the steering wheel and allowed them to drop back without a sound. “‘I understand.’ This is what I would have said to her.”

Oh, their understanding. His way of saying… I understood why you ran. I understood you . And in their own way, forgiveness of all the misunderstandings at the end of their arrangement. I would have titled their relationship a marriage, but in my heart, or in Rocco’s, the title didn’t seem to fit. Because it was never what he considered a marriage, even though he’d called her wife—an honor, in my opinion.

He told me it was the greatest honor of his life to be married to me—to have the right to call me his (he had emphasized my ) wife. I felt the same. It was the greatest honor of my heart to be married to him. To call him my husband.

We sat for a minute before he stepped out of the car and opened my door for me. We walked hand in hand toward the castello , lost to our own thoughts. A few steps away from the door, it seemed like a huge hand had covered the sun and shadowed the earth around us. The water turned dark, and lightning streaked across the sky, thunder rumbling not far behind it.

I closed my eyes for a second, the sight of it pulling the image of Rosaria from my thoughts, like she had imparted herself on my retinas.

“Rocco?” I whispered.

His eyes snapped to mine.

“Remember our first time together?”

“If I ever forget, it is time for me to leave this earth.”

That was a bit dramatic, but…Rocco Piero Fausti. I wasn’t mad at it.

“ Grazie ,” I whispered. “But it was more of a rhetorical question. I wanted you to know what night I was talking about when I say this.”

His eyes searched mine.

The truth was already to my mouth. “I should have told you this. I didn’t want her to have a part of our night. Anyway. I saw her. Rosaria. Below the balcony when you went inside the apartment for what we thought was the burning foccacia . She and I…we locked eyes. The night on the cliffside, she made this motion at me when she told me to stay away from her husband.” I made a slicing motion around my throat.

“Your husband,” he said.

“Now my husband. You.” I smiled at him, even if it was kind of weak. “But that night. When I saw her. She did the same thing.” I made the same motion around my throat.

He took my hand, stopping me, his eyes almost possessed by whatever thoughts streaked across his mind. It seemed like his eyes were reflecting the charged atmosphere—his greenish gold irises were almost glowing, the black ring around them severe in contrast. He set me behind him, his back to my front, like he was looking for her, and when she didn’t appear, he made a frustrated sound in his throat. It was mostly a warning growl.

I ran my hands along his back. “Let’s go inside,” I whispered, the first heavy drop of rain landing on my forehead and streaming down my nose.

He turned to me, and I set my hands around his neck, protecting it for some reason. I wished I had ten hands to set on him. A suit of armor. His reaction was freaking me out some. He set his hands on my shoulders, though, and I dropped my arms. I could feel the tremble of his bones. He was keeping all this uncertainty locked there. The outside world could have never known by just looking at him.

He stared into my eyes. “No more secrets.”

“That’s all I had,” I whispered. “Now I only have the ones between us.”

We stared at each other, and I thought it was because he wanted to make sure I had nothing else to share, er, hide.

He cleared his throat. “Tell me, what do your feelings say about the vision below your window.”

Oh, he was asking me, in his own way, if I believed she was the ghost of Rosaria Caffi or the “real” Rosaria Caffi.

My gut reaction?

“I can’t be certain. I’m not Scarlett or Eva. I’m not that far into life with this… gift yet to be at peace with it. I don’t trust myself that much to put my head on a chopping block for anything I feel, except for what I feel for you. But she didn’t feel real to me, even though she looked it.”

What I didn’t add was that in my book, the woman haunting him was a ghost. I found this was how I worked out the confusion of my feelings—on paper. I wasn’t completely sure if this was what was happening, though. In the story, the ghost of the main character’s past couldn’t throw vintage candelabras at people’s heads.

In the next second, it seemed like a screeching slash of lightning forked in the sky, followed by a rumble of thunder that made the ground beneath our feet tremble. Then the sky opened, probably from the violence of the shock, and rain seemed like it pulled from the sea below—that was how fast and how much.

The rain smelled fresh, but the sulphur smell seemed enhanced in this weather. It was drifting off our clothes and especially my hair. I wasn’t sure if I could deal with it. It almost reminded me of fire and brimstone.

I glanced at the castello , suddenly not sure about it being perched on the rock how it was.

What if this storm ravaged it?

I had never felt uncertainty like this before. I wasn’t sure why I was feeling it then.

It made my heart overreact, but in a totally different way than it did when Rocco was close. It was panicked.

The intensity of my husband’s eyes on me sent a shock through me, like I was the sky, and he was the most dangerous thing that belonged to me. Sweeping me off my feet, me dangling in his arms, he took a few steps toward the door, then stopped. He closed his eyes, turning his face to the sky, and his mouth whispered a silent prayer. It was almost like he was offering me up, asking it to protect me. I knew it went much deeper than that, though.

He was reaching out to heaven.

His inky hair was plastered to his forehead, rain rushing over his face like tears from a statue, and in the storm…he was almost a creature I had never seen before.

That endangered animal he had mentioned on the ride to the thermal springs.

Wrapping my arms around his neck, I kept my ear pressed to his chest, his heart speaking to me in a language only I could understand, and closed my eyes. The words of his heart echoed the same ones of mine, except I replaced “her” with “him.”

For me, for what I have finally found, keep him safe and sound in my arms, or there will be no life left for either of us.

It was another one of those island storms that seemed to come out of nowhere— boo, I’m here, m’fers . It was bad enough that we couldn’t leave if we had to. Conditions were not safe to take the helicopter out, and staring out of one of the glass windows, I wouldn’t step foot on a boat if I had a hundred life preservers tied to me. High, rolling waves seemed to be crashing into each other, like they were either battling or high-fiving, and it was causing the entire sea to be violent. The boat at the dock was like a toy in a bathtub full of splashing kids. It might as well be a buoy.

Sighing, I turned toward my husband, who stared out the same window, a stone look to his face. It had been decided that we would stay on the island, keeping the threat with us. We had men with us wherever we went, even if I didn’t always see them on the outskirts of our private space. I had the king of beasts matching every one of my steps, so I didn’t care if I ever saw the soldiers or not. I knew I was safe with him. I’d put my head on a chopping board for that feeling.

It was my husband who I was worried about .

What I had realized—about Rosaria not caring about me but him—set my heart on edge.

Whoever was after us was getting closer.

The rage I’d felt from Rosaria was creeping underneath our door like seeping blood from whichever animal had been sacrificed to write the warning letters on the wall. If it wasn’t coming from her directly, it was coming from someone directly connected to her.

Where had she been going? Who was she running to?

Maybe she hadn’t made it, but it was still important. I didn’t want to keep bringing it up, but…I wanted to know. One look at my husband’s face and I decided to bring it up later. He had a lot of pent-up energy—it seemed like the storm was getting to him, and so was the entire situation. It had gotten to me too, but I wasn’t pulling extra tension from the intense pressure system like he was either. It was like it was feeding him.

“I need a bath, Rocco,” I said. “The sulfur smell is getting to me for some reason. It’s more intense now.”

He came close, sniffing me, and I almost backed up a pace. I didn’t want him to smell it on me. Because I couldn’t smell it coming from him. All I got was his natural scent, which was like a potent drug. More powerful than dopamine. And I smelled like…rotten eggs. His nostrils flared as he got closer, and this time, I wanted to take a huge step back, like, to the other side of the castello away from him, but after his sniff test, he only shrugged, taking my hand and leading me toward our room. He waited in the doorway of the closet while I got clothes for him and me. He seemed to like it when I did that. I was glad. It felt natural to me, like each of us having a preferred seat at the dining table.

When I went in the direction of the bathroom, he took our things and my hand, leading me out of the room and down the hall. He opened the door to a suite I’d never been in before. It was like our room, but different colors and furniture. Rocco locked it. The bathroom was much bigger, like it was built for a king—a king of the Mediterranean Sea. It had tiles like the ones in the other bathrooms, but it also had elements of rock to it as well. Living plants seemed to grow from the cracks.

I took our things from him, going for the counter, and he went to the shower. He turned on the spray, and what seemed like immediately, the room filled up with the scent of eucalyptus. The lights in the bathrooms were never bright at night. All the Fausti places seemed ready for midnight seduction and all-night pleasure. Though, I was here to make the claim, it honestly didn’t matter what time—day or night, nothing could detract from how sensual the men of this family were.

A breath escaped my lips when my eyes found the most sensual of all to me.

My husband.

He was naked, enveloped by steam, and when a cool breeze pushed the billowing clouds from around him, his muscular body glistened. From his black hair to the sharpness of his face and nose to his firm but soft lips, down his wide shoulders to his broad chest, his perfect arms, swollen veins leading straight to his (my) heart, to his rippling stomach, a sharp V giving his hips definition, and legs that seemed to belong to a rock-hard statue…

He dripped water.

I looked down.

I thought maybe I had turned into desire and clung to his body, dripping onto the floor at his feet, turning into a puddle.

“ Oh. My. God .”

I whispered that. Or…not.

I didn’t have a clue.

Sometimes just how gorgeous he was hit me like a wave of fire.

He held his hand out to me, but his rock-hard cock, just another gorgeous piece to the art, seemed to be pointing the way.

Maybe that wasn’t my desire pooling on the floor, but drool. My mouth watered, imagining the taste of him.

He took my hand and brought me to the shower, shutting us inside.

The scent in here was different .

Bergamot with a smoky oak finish.

He led me over to a seat and sat me down.

Where was I again?

Oh, sitting down.

And my daze was the reason I hadn’t noticed right away that there were two seats.

The one I was on was meant for a woman’s body. It spread out behind me almost like a human-sized seashell, and my legs fit perfectly into the stone. Except…the spaces were set further apart, even though the way he positioned me, my legs were together. My arms were inside of two arm-shaped molds, except…at the end, two bars.

I blinked away the steam from my eyes and glanced over at the seat in the opposite corner. It was similar, but the floor in front of the throne had indentions— where knees would go.

Oh.

Man.

“Amora.”

I blinked through the steam and turned my face to my husband.

“It does not matter if the world is ending, we will be together.” His eyes were lowered, his thick black lashes impossibly long and catching droplets of crystal water. But he looked…high. Like the thought of the world ending, the two of us together however we wanted to be, was a powerful aphrodisiac to him.

I could smell something else coming off him through the bergamot—something wild and untamed, a little bitter and salty.

“Your body is my temple to honor,” he said in Italian. “Your heart my religion to find safety and rules in. And I will forever return to you—in good times and in bad. In all times. We will never part.”

There was so much I could say to him, but I didn’t. I stilled myself, even if my heart pounded in a wild rhythm, allowing him to do whatever he needed to do with me. This was as much for him as it was for me .

He reached for a bottle in the crevice of the tile, and after squeezing some in his palm, he started to massage my body. His hands were big, and he was applying just enough pressure for me to feel him, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was the exact opposite. He was putting his fingertips in it, too, and all I could do was rest my head back and absorb it. I moaned, my entire body going slack, as the oil he used perfumed the air—a scent like mine.

A bouquet of subtle, fragrant flowers, with the zest of a lemon, and pulling it all together, a sensual warmth that came from woodsy scents. The warmth complimented the almost spicy bergamot, and it seemed to marry our two scents together in a union that clung to the body as well as the soul.

I could never smell these scents again and not be taken back to this moment.

He had only done my shoulders, and when his masculine hands worked down to my breasts, a soft gasp escaped my lips as my entire body trembled. Like he was molding a statue, he seemed to shape my breasts, until his thumbs barely touched the tips of my nipples.

A sound came from my chest that seemed to fill my head like smoke.

I was lost in it.

Lost at his touch. Lost inside of him.

He pinched my nipple, and I hissed, the pleasure flooding straight between my legs. My eyes barely opened to meet his lowered ones.

“We will never part,” he repeated, and he wasn’t a man to repeat himself. I’d noticed that about him right away. He said what he meant and meant what he said. “Even if we find our bodies at war. We will battle it out until one of us surrenders to the moment. In the next, we will be lovers once again.” His hands slid down my ribs, taking care of the place he felt he sheltered my heart. “ My rib.”

“Yours,” I breathed.

He took the curves of my waist, his hands big enough to wrap around me and make me feel insignificant, but in doing what he was doing, he was showing me how powerful I was to him. He was almost on his knees in front of me. And that was when I got it. The difference between the front of this chair and the other one. This one didn’t have a comfortable place to bow down. The other one did.

The king would sacrifice for his queen’s pleasure.

His hands slipped over my hips, and my eyes closed, moaning into his touch. I was tempted to move at this point—he was touching all the right places. All the places my body desired in that moment. Because my desire was following his touch.

He spent extra time on my thighs, but always only a breath from my vagina.

I was so starved for his touch, my legs moved on their own and slipped into the two leg-sized indentions, and I opened to him. A rush of air caressed my folds. And I understood then why flowers open to the sun, tilting in whichever direction it moved.

“Ah,” he breathed out. “Mine.”

My hips bucked up as his mouth came over me, his tongue licking, his hands coming up to my breasts, caressing just the tips of my nipples. My ass was sliding easily on the seat, my hips bucking.

“ Ah! Ah! Ah! ”

“Tell me, my wife,” he breathed against me. “Tell me, does my body please yours.”

“Yes,” I moaned out. “Yes.”

His tongue moved inside of me, before he started to lick, then nibble.

It took me a minute to realize my hands were wrapped around the bars, strangling them, but when I did, I moved them to his head, my fingers in his hair. My hips started to move with the rhythm of his tongue. I was easily sliding but not slipping. Everything about my position was prime for this.