Chapter Six #4
“Everybody lies,” Giaco said in that same quietly dark way.
“If you don’t think that someone is putting on a performance for you, you’re not looking closely enough.
Let’s talk about your performances, shall we?
Lady Bountiful. Saint Ivy of the Orphans, casting her goodness all about her like palm fronds.
Who are you when you’re at home, I wonder? ”
“I suppose we’ll never know,” she retorted, “as I was chased out of my home by the demon horde you have on speed dial.”
“What I cannot understand is this act,” he replied, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “You were raised in celebrity. It has touched every aspect of your life. Yet you act as if no one ever told you that it was a game, and I cannot account for that. You’re damn right that I play it, and well.”
“Do you play it?” she asked, leaning closer to him. “Or at this point, is it just playing you?”
Giaco leaned in, his hands gripping the back of the sofa on either side of her body, caging her there. “I don’t care,” he murmured.
And then his mouth was on hers again.
It was as if sheer exultation was a tap that he could turn on and off, because it flooded her. And it occurred to her only now, only with his mouth on hers, only when she could arch forward and wrap her arms around his neck and press her body to his, that this was exactly what she wanted.
That maybe all those feelings she couldn’t quite name were this.
A deep yearning for this. For him.
For the way his hands seemed to know her body so well, so easily. They moved over her, stirring up a restless hunger everywhere he touched her. One moved over her hair, caught back in a loose, messy braid. Another moved down her back, then tested the curve of her butt.
It had been a warm day in Rome and she was wearing a loose pair of shorts that she sometimes slept in, too. And a tiny little tank top because she’d been sitting out in the courtyard, encouraging the sun to dust her skin something more than its usual pale white.
Now she wondered about her motivations for that, too.
But the thing about Giaco was that he didn’t seem to wonder about anything.
He just did as he pleased.
His hands moved to the low waist of her shorts and then his fingers slid beneath the elastic band, and then it was happening.
It was so smooth, so inevitable, that she didn’t have time to process it. It wasn’t happening and then it was—his long, hard fingers curving into her heat, slipping beneath her panties she wore and finding her molten hot folds.
He stroked her there, he stirred her up, and she hardly knew what to do with herself. Her hands were fists in that shirt of his, and he moved—shifting her up so she was straddling one of those thick, muscled thighs of his.
And still he played with her core, his fingers working a magic she hadn’t understood as possible until this moment.
All the while he kept that thigh a hard pressure between her legs, and she couldn’t seem to help herself.
She rocked against him, and his fingers didn’t stop, and there was a rocking and the pressure and the friction and—
She shattered, hard and wild. It came fast and hot, like a punch. Then she shook and shook against him, her head falling forward against his chest.
Giaco muttered something she couldn’t understand and then shifted her again, this time pushing a finger deep inside her.
Then it began all over again. The rocking. The heat. The inexhaustible build—
This time, when it hit her, she cried out.
And then stood there, bewildered, because he was suddenly…gone.
It took a terrible effort to come back into herself.
He wasn’t gone, she realized. Giaco was standing a few feet away from her with a stark look on his face. She couldn’t quite read him.
But she could see that enormous cock of his, pressed hard against the loose fabric of his trousers.
She was still riding through her aftershocks and she couldn’t imagine what she must look like to him, her mouth wet from his.
Her whole body ravaged, and shaking. She wasn’t even sure about the state of the shorts she was wearing, much less how far up her abdomen her tank top had rolled.
Yet Giaco looked at her as if she was a ghost.
Then he turned, abruptly, and left her there.
And it took her a long time to catch her breath. Ivy stood there, still gripping that sofa, until her heart settled down. Until her body calmed…
To some degree, anyway.
It was tempting to see what had happened as some kind of cruel rejection, but she didn’t.
She thought about that kiss in the alleyway and how she’d been the one who’d had to break it. How she’d been the one who’d had to step back, and how she’d thought at the time that he’d looked a lot as if that wasn’t something he’d been about to do at all.
And here, now, that look on his face.
Ivy had a deep certainty inside her, then. It wasn’t something she would have wanted to defend, but she knew it was true all the same. She was pretty sure that Giaco had exposed himself tonight.
Because surely, if he was the cynical, emotionally detached fuck boy that he liked to pretend he was, he would have simply tossed her down on the couch behind her and been done with it. She had the strangest notion that what she’d seen tonight was his true face.
She had accused him of wearing a mask, and then he’d dropped it. If he hadn’t, why would he have bothered to run away?
And later, when she stood in the shower in her suite, she was even more certain of two things.
First, that she was never going to sleep again, not with all of this in her head now.
And second, that the more she saw of him—the more real parts of him he showed her, whether against his will or not—the more she wanted him.
Not because they were playing their parts.
But because she was starting to think that Giaco Tavian really was the narcotic everyone claimed he was, after all.