CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Juliette
I BARELY REGISTER the opulence of the two-story suite Gavriil carries me into. Not when I’m focused on the man holding me in his arms like I’m the most precious thing he’s ever held. Not after he listened to every single doubt, every insecurity I’ve ever had, and accepted me for it.
He sets me on my feet. I reach out, grab the string on his pants, and pull. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move as the pants fall, leaving him naked. I trace my fingers over him. Pure feminine satisfaction rolls through me as he hardens under my touch. His sharp inhale makes me look up. His face is calm, smooth.
Except for his eyes. His eyes burn.
“You’re a tease, Juliette.”
I prove him right by kissing the pulse throbbing at the base of his throat. My lips drift down over the ridges of his chest as my fingers trace teasing circles on his thighs. Every tensing of muscle, every sharp inhale, fills me. Seduces me.
I know, as I move lower still, that I’ve completely surrendered to him. My husband. One year from now I have no doubt my heart will be shattered. But I can no more stop my desire, my feelings for him, than I could stop the moon from crossing the sky. Not when he has given me so much in just a few short days. A man who has known hell and yet encouraged me. Believed the best in me when I couldn’t see anything but bad.
I swallow past the lump in my throat as I wrap my fingers around him. My hand moves down, up, then down again. I lean forward and take him in my mouth. His groan fills me. His hands sink into my hair. I feel like a goddess as I move my lips over him, feeling the effect my touch has on him.
Suddenly, he steps back and kicks his pants away.
“My turn.”
He scoops his hands under my arms and moves me back to the middle of the bed before I can utter a protest. He has me on my back in seconds. He covers my mouth with his, another possessive kiss, but one with a touch of sweetness that makes tears burn beneath closed eyes. For a moment, I wish. Wish for more than this night, for more than a year.
One hand settles on my breast, gentle yet firm. I arch up beneath his touch. Whether we have just the remaining nights of our honeymoon or the rest of our contracted time together, I will take everything he has to give and never regret surrendering to him.
He moves farther down my body, worshipping my breasts with tender kisses and teasing strokes of his tongue that send me hurtling to the edge of reason. I shift, moving my thighs, my body seeking him out.
When he finally lifts his head, I sigh in relief, ready for him to finally end the agony he’s created. But instead, he smiles at me before he grabs my hips and slides down my body. I clench, waiting. His lips graze my inner thigh, the tender flesh, the spot just above.
But only grazes, kisses, light nips, until I feel like I’m about to burst.
“Gavriil.”
“What?”
I can hear the smile in his voice.
“Please!”
“Please what?”
“You—”
He moves then, a deep kiss to the most intimate part of my body. I arch up and cry out, my hands grasping, sliding through his hair, over his shoulders. He makes love to me with his mouth, keeping me in a frenzied state as he alternates between short, teasing kisses and long, slow dances of his tongue across my skin.
One minute pleasure is spiraling through me. In a second, it shatters, leaving me trembling. He moves up my body and slides inside before I can catch my breath. Still shaking, I wrap my arms around him and hold on as he moves inside me. Slow strokes at first, deep ones that I feel all the way to my soul. His eyes hold mine, the emotion reflected in those pale blue depths enough to obliterate any lingering doubts.
I whisper his name as I lift my hips to meet his thrusts. His gaze darkens as he groans, his hips quickening as I hold on to his shoulders, the peak inside me building until I know I’m going to explode, break apart into a million pieces unless he—
He covers my mouth with his. It sends me over the edge. I cry out as I crest. He follows a moment later, my name on his lips as we shatter together.
Gavriil
I wake to sun filling the suite. Juliette and I lie together, pressed against each other as if we can’t get enough. I wait for the uneasiness to settle in. But it doesn’t. Lying here with Juliette in my arms feels right.
She stirs and smiles up at me with sleepy eyes.
“I could get used to this.” Her eyes widen and her cheeks pale. “I just meant...good sex.”
She wrinkles her nose and tries to roll away. Laughing, I grab her arm and pull her back.
“You’ve never had good sex before?”
“I’ve had good sex,” she mumbles against my chest.
I frown into her hair. I’ve never been the jealous type before. But the thought of any other man touching her incites an anger I’ve never experienced before. One that includes vivid images of me planting my fist in their face. Completely unfair, especially given the numerous women I’ve entertained over the years.
But I don’t care. I don’t like it.
“I just haven’t had mind-blowing, spine-tingling, sleep-inducing sex.”
The jealousy dissipates. I arch a brow down at her. “Are you trying to stroke my ego?”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Your ego doesn’t need any stroking.” Her hand drifts teasingly down my stomach. “Now other parts of your anatomy...”
“After breakfast. I need my strength if we’re going to spend all morning in bed together.”
Her eyes brighten. “All morning?”
My arms tighten about her. Last night, she opened up again. Except instead of confiding secrets from the past, she shared something even greater: her fear. The one thing holding her back, something so personal she hadn’t even shared it with the people in her life who loved her and she them. The gift of her trust, the deeper understanding of everything she had been through and what had spurred her to investigate Rafe and me in the first place, had wiped away the last lingering bit of resentment I hadn’t even realized I’d still harbored.
It also left me wanting to do the same. To share with her. Not just my bed, not just my body, but myself. I had resisted it before in Paris. But now, for the first time in my adult life, I wanted to share a piece of myself.
I don’t prepare her. I just speak. If I try to explain, to give any context, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through this.
“My mother and I lived in squalor in Santorini.”
Her hand stills for a moment, then resumes tracing slow, reassuring circles over my chest. I stare up at the ceiling, eyes wide-open but not seeing anything except a dirty apartment with a single mattress on the floor and broken windows that didn’t stand a chance against the sweltering heat of summer.
“My first real memory was when I was about four. We didn’t have anything to eat. My mother sat on the mattress, holding me, crying and telling me how sorry she was.”
“She cared about you.”
I hear the question in her voice, the confusion.
“She cared for me as much as she could.” I swallow past the resentment I can feel building even now as I tell my story. “Dessie knew you needed a mother’s touch, a steady influence in your life. So she drove hours to see you at least twice a month. When things got bad, she made a home for you. Provided for you.
“My mother turned to alcohol. She just drank more until there was nothing left. I have my suspicions about how she earned the little bit of money she brought in, but I never asked.”
I had come home to the occasional scent of too much cologne or the faint whiff of a cigar. Nothing concrete. But I grew up too fast to not know how some people earned their meager income.
“The one good thing she did was never let me see that side of her life.”
Juliette’s palm flattens on my chest and rests over my heart. The weight is comforting, steadying.
“When she was sober, she would make plans on how to finally get Lucifer’s attention. She tried reaching out multiple times, but he had instructed his staff to rebuff her. He didn’t want his wife, Rafe’s mother, knowing he had another child.”
“I always knew I hated him.” Juliette’s voice is a vicious whisper. “But I had no idea how truly hideous he was.”
“He seduced an eighteen-year-old hotel maid, kept her in his penthouse for a week and gave her a taste of the kind of life she had never imagined. When he left, someone reported her for fraternizing with a guest. She was fired. When her family found out she was pregnant and unmarried, they kicked her out.”
I feel Juliette’s breath catch, but she stays silent.
“It’s possible, I’ve come to realize, to have pity and compassion for her, and still be angry with how things turned out.”
“I wonder if things would have been different if her family would have taken you both in.”
I shrug. I used to ponder the same thing as a child. Now, it doesn’t matter.
“I came home one day from running around the neighborhood, picking tourists’ pockets, and discovered her dead on the mattress we shared.”
There’s no gasp, no strong reaction. There’s just Juliette, her hand over my chest, her head warm against my shoulder. She knows exactly what I need and, for the first time as I revisit the past, there’s no anger for my mother. Just a bittersweet pain of knowing what could have been but wasn’t.
“How did Lucifer find out about you?”
“The police. I found a neighbor, who called them. My mother had written a letter she had entrusted to a friend in the event of her death. The friend gave it to the police when they came to our flat.”
I can still remember the look of incredulity on one of the officer’s faces when he had opened the letter and read my mother’s claims.
“They took me away kicking and screaming. I had overheard my mother trying to talk to Lucifer’s staff on and off over the years. I didn’t expect a limo to pull up outside the police station and take me to a nearby dock. One of his security guards took me on the boat over to his private island.”
I still remember walking into that palace of an office, shelves two stories high and arranged perfectly to feature awards, rare books, works of art. Even to an uneducated eight-year-old, Lucifer’s private study had screamed wealth.
“He looked up, saw my eyes, and leaned back. He said, ‘So she was telling the truth.’”
“That’s it?”
“No.” This part I still cannot remember without anger, without fury against a man so cold and so selfish that he couldn’t even have a moment of compassion for a grieving child. His grieving child. “He approached me and looked me up and down. Then he smiled and said I might be related to him by blood, but he would bet that I would prove to be more like my mother than him.”
“What?”
“Weak. Unmotivated. A failure. He told me those words himself.”
The little sliver of heart I had left, the secret longing to finally meet and perhaps be loved by the father I’d always heard about but never met, had shriveled up and died that day. In its place, though, anger had been planted. Anger that just a month later, once Rafe had walked by me and dismissed me with such casual indifference, had twisted and morphed into determination. Determination and a vow to never let anyone close enough to break me again.
“He told me he would support me until I was eighteen. After that, I was on my own. I could either take advantage of the opportunities he offered me or live the good life until he turned me out on my ass.”
Juliette gives a huffing little laugh. “And look what you became.”
There’s pride in her voice. It moves me in a way I can’t put into words. I wait a moment before I speak again.
“I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.”
“As you should be.”
I can’t help but laugh as I gather her close, slide a finger under her chin, and kiss her firmly.
“Just a little over a month ago, you thought I made at least part of my fortune through illegal means.”
She winces. “I don’t even know if I fully believed it at that point. I didn’t want to miss something.”
“I still don’t like it. But,” I add as her look of guilt deepens, “I understand it better now.”
“As I do your drive to be the best.” She tilts her head to the side. “Although, I’m curious. Why this deal in New York? Normally your projects seem bigger, splashier.”
Pride fills my chest. The deal with Paul Properties has evolved in the last couple of days to include more investments in the community. A targeted recruitment plan for locally owned businesses. Grants to fund said businesses. Future meetings with some of the neighborhood organizations to have them be an active part of the development process.
“One of the things I’ve been trying to incorporate into the deal is development not only for the sake of the deal, but for the neighborhood and the people that it impacts.”
She freezes. “What?”
“The slum I grew up in in Santorini made an impression. There were good people there, some of them through no fault of their own except circumstance. Fate. I watched so many of them struggle. Once I realized I was actually going to make a success out of Drakos North America, I started taking on the occasional personal project.”
“The project in Los Angeles,” she murmurs. “I remember reading about the high crime rate in the area, the lack of housing and restaurants that might attract workers. It surprised me that you would push for that property.”
“Which is why that project included guarantees from several local business and franchise owners to put in said restaurants and shops. It also included funding for a year for a private security firm and donations to renovate some of the houses in the area.”
“You did all that.”
“Yes. It’s good business.”
And not enough.
Not nearly enough when I have so much at my fingertips. I want to tell her more about the spark she’s created in me to use my wealth in a way I never thought about. But before I can, she sits up, eyes flashing, color filling her face. She doesn’t even seem to notice that she’s bare from the waist up with a sheet tangled about her hips. She’s magnificent as she leans forward and pokes me in the chest.
“Don’t you tell me that line if it’s just business. You care. You’re doing good things.”
“Yes, but don’t tell anyone. I could lose my reputation.”
She buries her face in her hands and groans. “How did I miss all of this?”
I grab her hands and pull them down from her face. “Because you weren’t looking for it. Juliette, I’m going to say the same thing to you that you said to me. Don’t turn me into a saint. I only started making this a priority in the last year. I still make a lot of money off these deals. Money that, as you can see, I use in very selfish ways.”
“But you’re doing things for others,” she insists. She cups her hands on either side of my face. “You don’t have to be perfect. But you’re so much more than I ever realized. I have to wonder that, if not for your father and this ridiculous will, if I would have ever seen that.”
I’m lying to myself every time I think her words don’t matter. They matter a great deal, more than anything that matters to me in recent memory, including Drakos North America. I’m not quite ready to fully accept that yet. Just a little more time. A little more time to process these newfound emotions, figure out exactly what I feel for Juliette and how far I want it to go.
She leans down and kisses me. Her naked breasts brush my chest. Blood pumps through me. I’m hard and grow harder still when I brush against her thigh. She laughs against my lips and makes me want her even more.
“What about your breakfast?”
I pull her to me and roll, pinning her body beneath me.
“It can wait.”
Whatever else she is about to say is lost as I grasp her hips and slide back into her wet heat. As we start to move together, as I surrender even more of my control and let down my walls, emotion surges with the lust already pounding inside me. I realize, as our breaths merge and her cries grow louder, that I feel like I’m home for the first time in my life.