Chapter Ten Guinevere #3
“For better or worse?” I quipped to lighten the heavy expression crinkling Raffa’s handsome face.
His laugh was a short, bitter bark. “Nel bene e nel male,” he agreed. “Speaking of family, andiamo. Let us enjoy the fine weather and allow me to teach you a little something about wine.”
“I certainly enjoyed the first lesson you gave to me on the subject,” I said, smiling at him as I stood to join him at the front door.
Raffa’s pale eyes burned with intensity at my words, the air between us crackling palpably. I swallowed thickly, wondering why I’d flirted so boldly when I was still so unsure about where we stood.
He’d given me an orgasm with his mouth the night before, and there I was flirting with him like there was nothing wrong between us.
And maybe that was the problem.
There was nothing wrong between Raffaele and Guinevere. It was everything around us, wedged between us, that seemed so insurmountably problematic.
“Those shoes are pretty, Vera, but they will not work today.” Raffa interrupted my reverie to grin down at my sandals before he opened a heavy wood bureau and emerged with a pair of dark-green gum boots.
“There will be debris on the ground that you could hurt your feet on, and these offer protection from vipere.” When I made a horrified face, he grinned.
“La vendemmia is not for the faint of heart. You will sweat and toil like the rest of us, and at un lauto pranzone, when you are so tired your hands will not make a fist and your back aches, we will all come together to eat the feast Mamma and her friends will spend most of the day creating for us.”
“Who is looking after the kids if everyone is out working?” I asked as I undid my sandals and took the socks and boots Raffa handed to me.
“They are with some teenage cousins, playing their own games in the areas we have already harvested,” he explained.
“Sometimes they want to help, but really they only like to play in the vines and feel like they are taking part with the rest of their family. Delfina always sets aside a few of the grapes she will use for the family’s table wine so that the young ones can stomp them with their feet.
It was a tradition we did as children, too, with our uncle Tonio’s wife. ”
“That sounds like fun, if a little unsanitary,” I admitted, and watched Raffa’s ruddy mouth bloom into a bright smile.
“In order to have fun, we must get a little dirty,” he teased me before offering his hand. “Come, Guinevere, let me watch you fall even more in love with my country. It reminds me there is more to love than hate here, especially with you to share it all with.”
“Raffa,” I breathed, staring at his hand as if it was a vipera peeking its triangular head through the vines. “Don’t say things like that to me.”
“No,” he said, voice strong and even, the cold flat of a blade at my throat.
“I will tell you every day exactly what you bring to life in the previously barren fields of my heart, so you know how excruciating it was to be without you for two months. How excruciating it will be for me if you choose to run away scared from the truth of me and this life. I will survive, of course, because only in Dante’s works do the heroes have the luxury of wallowing in their tragedies, but I will not thrive.
I did not a single day before you came, and I will not a single day after you leave. ”
“Are you trying to guilt-trip me?” I demanded, clinging to the negative by the ends of my fingertips so I did not plummet headlong into the blinding brightness of unconditional love I had occupied before I knew better. “Because that’s not fair.”
“L’amore domina senza regole,” he said, stepping closer so that suddenly he was looming over me, so much taller and wider, a mountain of a man who would not be moved.
“Love rules without rules, and so do I. There is no room for fair when I am trying to convince you to stay here with me forever and be la cacciatrice mia.”
“Not your little fawn?” I asked before I could stop myself, transfixed by the way he was staring at me as if nothing existed for him but me.
This time, his small smile was wry with self-deprecation. He reached up to pinch my chin gently, a quick caress I hadn’t realized was one of his idiosyncrasies with me, one I missed.
“No, Guinevere,” he said. “If you stay here with me, you will have to be more than a cerbiatta caught alone and innocent in the middle of the road. You will have to be a huntress. So that the next time some man comes for you, you will not hesitate to put him in the ground where he belongs. So that, after, you will not lock yourself in the bathroom unless it is to drag me in there with you to fuck you hard and long in celebration of your own sexy-as-hell gumption.”
My mouth was dry, but heat pooled between my thighs at the thought.
Raffa pinning me against the travertine tiles, pressing my face to the cool stone with one hand while a foot kicked apart my feet roughly to make room for his narrow hips and hard cock.
His teeth at my neck almost painful, biting a claim into my flesh that would linger for days.
“I can see what it does to you.” His whisper curled like smoke around me, insidious, inside my lungs before I could think to stop breathing.
“The thought of being powerful, of taking charge. You came to Italy to find yourself and your independence. I know you were not looking for the darkness you found, but I think, perhaps, it found you for a reason, and I am starting to believe you could be glorious, my Vera, as Regina Inferna at my side.”
His mouth was so close to mine, and I wasn’t sure when that had happened. The scent of him, like the forest floor shrouded in fresh dew, consumed me, and his mouth, framed in inky black stubble, the color of the inside of a seashell, was all I could see.
There was nothing in me but the urge to kiss him. I rolled to my tiptoes in the rain boots so that I hovered closer, swaying into that beckoning mouth. His smile was a slow, long curl, like a ribbon under scissor blades.
“Next time you kiss me,” he murmured, “you will be sure of what you want. So sure, you will be the one to fuck me, to push me against the nearest surface and take your pleasure from me however you want. You will use me to get off and cry my name to the sky because you know there is no God for us but each other and no heaven but the kingdom down under we could reign over together.”
He dipped just slightly to tongue at the center of my bottom lip.
My tongue chased after him, but he pulled away from me between one blink and the next, cold air suddenly rushing in against my chest. When I blinked again, he was gone through the open door, whistling with his hands in his pockets as he started to walk down the hill into the vines.