Chapter Eight #2
“I will almost certainly kill you tomorrow,” he said, almost offhandedly. The way he had once already. “But in the meantime, baggiana, I have a lot of extremely physical demands I intend to make of you. You will need to keep up your strength.”
I froze, my fork halfway to my mouth. “What do you mean by extremely physical demands?”
I cautioned myself that he could mean something unpleasant. But my entire body was certain he meant something deeply pleasant indeed.
He jutted his chin toward my plate. “Eat, Rux. Now.”
So I did the only thing I could in a situation like this.
I ate.
When I was done, I went to wash my plate but he took it from me. He waved me away, and even though I suspected that he would have preferred it if I stood there quietly and waited for his next command, I couldn’t do it.
“Why do you know how to cook?” I asked.
He wasn’t looking at me, and still I could see affront all over his body. Along with scars and smooth muscle on his sculpted back. “What kind of question is this? I am Sicilian.”
“I was under the impression that most Italian men—”
“I am Sicilian,” he corrected me, with an edge in his voice. But when he turned to face me, I could see that his eyes were gleaming in that way that I was pretty sure was his version of laughter. “I am only Italian second, and under duress, you understand.”
“I thought most men from your region had a collection of grandmothers to do all the cooking for them. Or mothers, in a pinch.”
“There are always women to cook meals,” he said, but there was something about the way he said it that made me frown at him.
He shrugged. “My mother died a long time ago and my grandmother only cooks sometimes, these days. There are many other women in my family, and it is true that they can also do these things, and they do. But I am not always in Sicily. And when I am not, I prefer to cook for myself.”
I considered that. “Well. You’re very good at it.”
“Do you know how to cook?” he asked me.
I laughed. “Boris Ardelean’s only child, no better than a kitchen drudge?
Certainly not. My father believes that common domestic tasks are below him, and therefore, below me.
Though, confusingly, he also believes that a woman’s role is to be silent and decorative and obedient.
Just as long as her hands are soft and she remains appropriately slender and docile at all times, he thinks this is the epitome of all that is classy. ”
Jovi studied me in the remains of my Christmas tree pajamas. “You do not?”
“I think,” I said carefully, diplomatically, even though my father was not in the room and I wouldn’t have been speaking like this if he was, “that anyone who is concerned with whether or not something is classy doesn’t have much class to begin with.
But we are talking about a man who would never cook for his own wife.
He would see that as a direct assault upon his masculinity. ”
Though now, as I said a thing like that, I had a better grasp of the implications.
“Then he is not much of a man,” Jovi said after a moment, and I could tell that we were both picturing the things he’d done with his wicked mouth between my legs, making me cry out so loud I was shocked the Policie ?eské Republiky had not broken down the doors. “But this is not a surprise.”
I could feel his tongue again as if he was still crouched there between my legs with his hands holding me high and open. I wanted more of that, even though I thought it might actually be the thing that killed me.
But I couldn’t really believe he was talking to me. I wanted to keep it going. “But the men you work for are better?”
I could tell it was a mistake immediately. He went hard and cold in a blink. I’m not sure he moved. He simply…changed.
“Who is it that you think I work for?” he demanded, in that softly intimidating way of his.
I could feel my eyes go wide. “I have no idea.” I pointed at the tattoo on his chest. “Somebody, though. I’m betting.”
He put a hand on his heart as if he’d forgotten the tattoo was there. Then he looked down, as if he’d forgotten his heart was there, too.
When he looked up again, he looked almost…shaken. Alarmed. Something like that.
He did not have to tell me that this was not a normal reaction for him. That he did not usually feel these things.
Or anything.
“This is not a conversation we need to have,” he said with that quiet command. That I had responded to before he touched me, but now…
I could feel it. Licks of sweet, wild fire, everywhere.
“You said you were a man of vows,” I reminded him. “What does that mean? Is that what your tattoo says?”
We were still standing in the flat’s sprawling galley kitchen that was outfitted with sleek, impressive appliances, none of them offering the slightest personal hint about the man who seemed so comfortable here that he had fresh groceries in the refrigerator.
Nothing in the flat was personal, I realized then. This was a way station, not a home.
I was glad the kitchen opened up to the living area, because Jovi didn’t need any help taking up all the air there was.
And I needed to pay more attention to my breath.
Meaning, I needed to stop holding it.
“You should be very careful asking questions, baggiana,” he warned me. “I am not certain you want the answers.”
“I thought I made this clear,” I said at once. “I want everything.”
“This I doubt.”
“You’re the only one who knows how much life I have left to live,” I reminded him, and the funniest thing was that I felt almost…
comfortable that I was so fully in his hands.
Life, death, and all the pleasure in between.
It didn’t feel like a risk, it felt right.
“What I want is every last thing I can find in that period of time. That’s all.
” I blew out a breath. “And only you can give it to me, Jovi. Only you.”
He moved toward me then, and I had the sensation it wasn’t of his own volition. There was that wondering sort of look on his face once more as he fit his hand to my jaw.
I watched his eyes flare when I nestled my cheek more deeply into his grip.
“My family operates on loyalty,” he told me after a moment, his voice a dark, thrilling scrape of sound. “My father chose disloyalty and paid for it. So it has never been enough for me to express my own loyalty or honor. I’ve had to prove it. Live it.” His dark eyes scanned mine. “Become it.”
“What did your father do?” I dared to ask.
He looked almost shocked. And I had a little bolt of intuition then. I would have sworn on anything and everything I was that he had never talked about these things before with any other woman.
Or anyone else, for that matter.
“My family runs a very particular kind of family business,” he said. Eventually.
Neither one of us named that business. Neither one of us chose any one of the many words and phrases we could have used to describe the kind of business I was certain he was part of. It was unnecessary. I had always referred to my own father as an entrepreneur for the same reasons.
“My father did not wish to be part of this business,” Jovi continued, with a faint note of surprise in his voice, as if he could not believe he was talking about such things.
“He became embittered by it. He wanted out, not only for himself, but for the whole of his family. That might have been allowed, since he was the brother of the family’s head, but he wanted to take the business apart as well. ”
I wanted to hold him. I settled for putting my hand over his, there where it rested against my face.
Jovi frowned as if this story caused him pain, or maybe my touch did, but he kept going. Stiffly. “He began talking to the people who could do the dismantling. It was discovered. Consequences followed swiftly.”
I thought about consequences. About the kind of consequences that were typically rendered in a world like ours. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened to his family in any detail. I could guess.
And I thought, too, about the ways loyalty was demanded but even more so, how it was cultivated.
If the only person in your life who could help you or harm you was a tyrant, well.
I supposed that some people might have standards.
They might hold themselves to some higher level of morality, because they could.
But it was my experience that when the kinds of people Jovi and I knew took charge of a child and set themselves up as a cruel god who had the power of life and death over them…
There were all kinds of consequences when you lived the kinds of lives we had.
Something in me shuddered, near enough to another sob, when I thought about all the ways that Jovi and I were the same.
I didn’t say this out loud. I wasn’t that far gone.
So I did what I could. I went up on my toes and while he looked at me with something like wariness, I slid my hands onto his hard jaw, and cupped his face.
But that wasn’t enough, so I leaned in. And I kissed him.
Not the devouring, life-altering kissing that we’d been doing. Not that wild burn that consumed everything, leaving nothing in its wake but ash and longing.
I could feel that fire inside me, and I could taste it on his lips, but this kiss wasn’t about that.
This kiss was comfort, understanding. This kiss was compassion and empathy.
This kiss was all these strange and overwhelming things I felt for him that didn’t feel any less real for being so fast, so sudden.
Truth be told, I had never felt anything more real in my life.
I kissed him like he was a wish granted, like I was sealing the deal on something magic, some marvel that was only ours.
The kiss shook through me. I could feel it in him, too.
When he pulled away, I gazed up at him and found the world was gone. Everything had narrowed down to this. The two of us, eye to eye. The sound of our breath and the way we seemed fused together, into one.
My hands on his face while his hands had come to grip my upper arms.