CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
S EDUCTION WAS NOT exactly in Dioni’s wheelhouse.
If anything, she found the fact she was even trying such a thing funny. She had grown up mostly unconcerned with her body, since no one paid much attention to the clumsy, scruffy, mostly overlooked daughter of legends, and so she could run and swim and wander about as she liked. At school she’d discovered that she was not only supposed to care deeply about her looks, but feel shame about it all, and she’d tried. But it was much nicer to curl up with biscuits and books.
She had never tried to employ feminine wiles in her life.
Dioni hadn’t actually known she possessed any. Not until the night of her brother’s wedding.
And yes, she supposed that her behavior could have been seen as seductive that night , but she hadn’t thought about it that way at the time. She had wanted him, but that hadn’t been anything new. It hadn’t been an action item . And wanting him wasn’t anything new, either. She had simply wanted to dance in the rain. The way she often did, on her own. There had been something about the rain and the storm that had called to her. It had felt to her the way that he did.
It had been unconscious, was the thing.
But the same could not be said about tonight.
Because Dioni had spent a long time thinking about the things he had told her on their wedding night. She had spent the week since then going over and over how he’d left her standing there, in the middle of an empty dance floor.
She hadn’t felt much like singing, really. Not since that night.
But she had also completely disagreed with his conclusions. About everything.
Allowing the terrible things that had been done to him and those he cared for to wreck him was understandable. Yet if he never moved on from those things, he was allowing himself to remain wrecked forever.
Staying still was only an option if a person was in their grave.
Or maybe, she had thought earlier tonight, lying in bed and rubbing lotion into the parts of her body that were still expanding and growing, it was simply the space that she was in. Everything inside of her was shifting, changing, shaping itself into something else entirely.
That was what she wanted. The shift, the push. Creating room where there was none.
Her body knew how to do it. Why shouldn’t she let it take her where she wanted to go?
And the more she thought about actually doing such a thing, actually getting up and going to him and being seductive because he wouldn’t, the more she found herself something like incensed. What was the point of them being married at all if she was simply sent off to some far reach of his massive house? What was the point of any of it if she was simply expected to accept what everyone else said about him, this place, and her future here?
Not to mention the implications for their son.
Dioni had never thought that she would get a chance to touch Alceu, and yet she had. She had certainly never expected to fall pregnant, or to marry him. Those things had happened, and she wasn’t precisely upset about either of them.
How could she be when even now—while his mother slunk about muttering her dark incantations all over the place and everyone here seemed entirely too preoccupied with their expectations of woe and lamentation—she still felt that same clear stillness inside.
Nothing had changed that.
If anything, it was stronger than it had been in New York.
And Dioni had grown up in the shadow of a man who thought entirely too much of himself and what he believed others thought about him. She had learned quickly that if she wished to claim any space for herself, she would have to go ahead and do it.
She was the one who had prevailed upon her father to send her away to school in the first place. If she hadn’t, she was fairly sure that Spyros would have forgotten to bother, and who knows if she would have ended up with any kind of education at all? And she was the one to insist that she should stay at home after school. Partly because she loved the hotel and her family’s legacy, but also because she wanted the opportunity to continue to live with Jolie. To maintain their friendship despite the unusual circumstances.
After all , she had told her friend on the night before her wedding, not everyone gets to call their best friend stepmother .
So tonight she’d gotten out of her bed and put on that nightgown she’d been wearing in the ballroom. And then, even though it was a long walk, she’d wound her way through the hallways, moving quietly so that she attracted no notice from anyone. Not even the staff.
It was like she was one of the ghosts of this place. And she liked the feeling of it, almost as if she was light on her feet, when she knew better.
She had passed his office, there at the start of the hallway that she’d been told led to the signore ’s private rooms , and had seen him working there, though it was late. He’d been frowning down at his laptop while making notes on a pad in front of him and she could have stood there, looking at him, forever. But she’d moved on before he could look up and see her, slipping down the hall and beginning her search for the man’s bed.
Because even the unknowable Alceu must be in possession of a bed.
Dioni had never been this deep into his private area of the house before, but she would have known these were his rooms even if she was blind. It all smelled faintly like him, that hint of citrus and spice. She’d felt her breath go shaky and her whole body shiver into awareness as she padded her way through the suite until she eventually found his bedroom, set there at the corner of the house.
Inside, she’d paused to look out the windows that, like hers, opened up onto the walls. She could see little but darkness, and the lights of the villages clustered down at the foot of the mountains.
By day, she was certain that he could see almost all the way to her island.
And somehow, thinking of home made her feel at home. She’d pulled the nightgown up and over her head and then she’d made her way to the bed, a large, imposing affair set against the far wall, while carefully aesthetic antiques stood about like sentries.
First she’d gotten under his sheets, but then she’d thought that she would make far more of an impact if they were tossed aside, so that the point of this gambit was immediately clear.
That being her nudity, which, now, she could see was doing exactly what she’d wanted it to do.
“Is it working?” she asked him.
But she could see that it was. That arrested look was all over him. He could not seem to keep his eyes on her face, too busy with drinking in her curves. And she was certain she saw his hands twitch as if they wished to reach out on their own.
“Is what working?” he managed to get out, though he hardly sounded like himself.
“My seduction.” She moved to prop herself up on one elbow, a perilous affair given that her center of gravity had shifted. Then she lifted a hand to her hair, shaking out the knot she’d put in it, so that the black mass of it tumbled down all around her. She could smell the scent of her shampoo filling the room and she could see that he did, too, because she watched it work its way through him—from the flare of his nostrils to how he shifted the way he stood.
And that dark, furious, glorious look he aimed at her, as if he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming, Dioni knew that she would remember forever.
It wouldn’t be possible, no matter what he said, to feel more beautiful than she did now.
And that was a good thing, because he did not exactly start singing hosannas.
“I thought we agreed,” he gritted out instead.
“We did not agree,” she corrected him. Gently, she thought, for a naked woman who clearly deserved a different response. “You made a great many decisions and then left the room before I could respond.”
“Surely you heard me, all the same.”
She sighed a little and as she did could feel her body move. Just slightly, but it was enough. His eyes tracked the movement and if she wasn’t mistaken, he swallowed. Hard.
“You made your case,” she told him. “But I reject it.”
“It was less an argument than a statement of intent, camurria .”
“I know what it was.” But she decided that she would not categorize it. Because she doubted he would like the things she would call it. It would involve a discussion of ghosts. Of the sins of the father and her belief that anyone could change their life if they wanted to, no matter what lurked in the past. “But Alceu. It isn’t practical.”
“Because you believe anything about what happened between us is practical ?” He sounded incredulous. “I think perhaps your current state is affecting your mind, Dioni.”
“My current state?” She nodded, sagely. “You mean the fact that we are married. I agree. It is affecting my mind. Because, according to you, the worst has already happened. God have mercy on both our souls , and so on. So I don’t see why we have to continue to punish ourselves. I’m already pregnant, Alceu. The damage has already been done, according to you. Why must I be banished off to a guest room?”
He was shaking his head, but she could see the way that pulse of his pounded in his throat. “What are you suggesting?”
She sat up, and it wasn’t elegant, but he looked mesmerized all the same. “Well, for a start, I thought it might be fun to see what it was like to both kiss and have sex at the same time, instead of separating those events by six months and a baby.”
This time there was no doubt that he had to swallow, more than once, as if to clear his throat. And that gaze of his was nothing but fire.
“That would be a mistake.” His voice was low.
It wasn’t easy for her to move her body so that she could get to the edge of the bed, and then stand, but she did it. Then she walked toward him and she felt like a fertility goddess, because that was how he looked at her. As if he had never seen anything so beautiful approaching him before. As if he couldn’t conceive of it.
That was what she held on to. Because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do when he was saying one thing to her, but everything else about him was telling her the opposite.
“Surely the mistake has already been made.” She watched him watch her, and it made that curious, wonderful heat inside her turn into something more like a naked flame. “What would happen if instead of damning ourselves forever, we danced in it, instead?”
Dioni drifted closer to him, though he looked something like tortured.
“Dancing is what got us in trouble in the first place,” he said, in a voice that almost sounded bitter, but she could see the flash of fire and heat in his gaze.
“You can’t get me pregnant,” she pointed out. “We’re already married. It’s currently a secret, but it won’t always be. Whether or not you take me to bed tonight will make no difference at all in the grand scheme of things.”
“If it would make no difference—” he began.
“Except,” she clarified, “to me. It would make a tremendous difference to me , Alceu.”
She was far too close to him now. Dioni reached out and helped herself to one of the buttons on his shirt, loosening it and then letting her fingers trail across the swath of golden skin that she found there.
And he made a tortured sort of sound, but he didn’t push her away. He reached out to brush his hand over her jaw, her cheek. Then he moved his thumb restlessly over the arch of her cheekbone and the seam of her lips.
It was like the fire between them went molten.
“What is it you want?” he demanded, his voice little more than a whisper.
She loosened another button, and this time, leaned forward to press her mouth there. She felt the heat of his skin blaze against her lips. She felt the small jerking motion he made, an electric shock to him the way that he had always been for her.
Only then did she ease back and look up at him, her hands braced on his chest, and her big belly a round weight between them.
“You,” she told him, though she knew it was dangerous to declare such things. It strayed too close to the heart of her. “Alceu, you must know that I have always wanted you.”
Dioni watched him as he fought himself. As he struggled.
And then as he fell.
As whatever resolve he had built up against her simply shattered.
Until there was nothing remaining but that fire.
It was what she’d wanted. But seeing it, she had the stray thought that she’d had no idea how potent it was, this thing she’d come looking for.
That it could burn her into ash if she wasn’t careful.
“You are the undoing of man,” he rasped out.
But before she could respond to that, or simply revel in it, his mouth crashed down upon hers.
And it was even better than before.
It was a wild, impossible glory and everything in her spun out, greedily.
He kissed her and he kissed her, his hands rising to frame her face. He detangled her hair as he raked his fingers through it, kissing her more. His hands moved down her back, finding the span of her bottom and then drifting to her hips, as if noting the way they’d widened.
He shifted her around so that her back was to him and took himself on a tour down her neck, holding the great, round weight of their baby with one big hand.
Over and over again, he kissed her.
Alceu set her away from him and she looked at him quickly, expecting that he would stop this—but he didn’t. He shrugged out of his shirt. He kicked off his trousers. Then he came to her, the look on his face so intense that she backed up of her own accord, until she brushed up against the bed. He kept coming. She sat down.
And this time, he did not offer her a ring. This time, he urged her to lie back.
When she did he spread her legs apart, draped them over his shoulders, then bent to lick his way into her heat.
Dioni shattered immediately.
It was an immediate implosion that had her throwing out her arms, arching her back, and then—worse still, or better —she could feel the way he laughed against her flesh.
And he was still laughing as he shifted to grip her bottom as he held her before him like a feast.
Then he took his time, slow and deliberate, and tore her apart.
One extraordinary lick at a time.
And after she had shattered into so many pieces that she wasn’t certain how she was meant to carry on, he began to move his way up the length of her body, lavishing attention on every centimeter he found.
Any stray thought she might have had about the comparisons he could make between her body six months ago and now were swept away in the obvious enjoyment he took in her as he went. She had no doubt at all that he found her enchanting. Engrossing.
And in case she thought to wonder, he kept murmuring it as he went.
“I have never seen a woman more beautiful,” he muttered at one breast, tasting it and holding it. “ Chi si duci. You are too sweet,” he told her when he found his way to the other, and made her moan.
He shifted his weight to one side so he could hold her there, laid out on the bed with him. Then he kissed her, his naked skin against hers.
Dioni had never felt anything so divine.
She wanted to revel in every part of it. The hair on his chest that made his skin rougher than hers, so that all she wanted to do was bury her face in it. And maybe rub herself all over him, everywhere. The blazing heat of him. The way his skin looked next to hers, the muscles in his forearm next to the smoothness of hers.
But he was kissing her, turning her face to his and plunging his tongue deep enough that she could taste herself in his mouth.
It made her shiver all over again.
And then he rolled them over, pulling her on top of him so she could settle there astride him the way she had once before in the pouring rain.
But everything was different now.
She straddled his hips and for a moment, all thoughts of fertility goddesses fled. Because she felt so exposed, as he was staring up at all the parts of her that had gotten so rounded, so heavy—
But he sighed. “Zuccareddu,” he murmured. “Bellissima.”
Then he reached between them and at last —at last— she felt the thick, wide head of the hardest part of him deep in her sensitive folds.
He rubbed himself there, laughing in that dark way that thrilled her, everywhere, and she began to shake. Then she shattered again as he pressed himself against the center of her need.
As if it was the first time, she flew apart—
And she was still shaking with the force of it as he shifted her, holding her as he slid his way deep inside of her.
Dioni didn’t have time to come back down from the stars before he started to move.
She stayed there, bright like a comet.
And for a long while, possibly forever, there was only this.
The way he thrust, claiming every part of her. The way he gazed up at her, something fierce and possessive, greedy and dark all over his handsome face.
There was the way he gripped her like he would never let her go, so hard that she hoped he left fingerprints behind.
She rocked herself against him, moving with his grip, and meeting his thrusts so that both of them were moaning out their pleasure—
Because it went on and on.
And every time she shattered, it got better. Deeper. Wilder.
Until, at last, Alceu took her up to another peak, hurled her off of it, and followed, blazing like a comet all his own beside her.
And when they both found their way back to earth, back to flesh instead of fire, he rolled with her. He took her down to the bed beside him so he could kiss her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth.
She was still quivering, and making little noises in the back of her throat involuntarily. He lay there beside her, that huge, hard length of his body pressed to her side and one arm holding her pregnant belly.
Dioni could feel her breath match his. She could feel the heat of him, deep inside her body, all over her, and beside her. As if they really had become one.
She wanted to stay awake as long as possible, though her eyelids were heavy and her body wanted nothing more than to slip off into oblivion.
But she fought it, because she wanted to enjoy this. Before he said anything. Before he made more declarations.
Before he tried to take back what had happened, or minimize it.
Right here, right now, Dioni wanted to do nothing at all but bask in Alceu and the shockingly effective seduction she’d executed here.
And love him, whether he knew it or not, for as long as she was able.
Before he discovered her secret and made her stop.