Chapter Twenty-Four Raffa #2
“Sei la parte migliore di mei,” I told her. “You are the best part of me.”
“Agree to disagree on that.” She leaned over to kiss my suited shoulder. “But I appreciate the sentiment. So will you tell me where we are going?”
“No.”
“Raffa!”
“Vera.”
“Don’t be a tease,” she insisted.
“I know for a fact that you enjoy it when I tease you,” I countered, sliding her a dark look. “If last night in bed was any indication . . .”
She pouted, but her eyes sparkled in the low light inside the car.
“Besides, you do not have to wait long,” I said as I pulled up to the front of the Uffizi, where a valet was waiting for us.
If Guinevere was disappointed we were going to the famous gallery when she had already visited, she did not say a word as I helped her from the car and handed the keys to the valet, the same young man I had met outside Guinevere’s apartment in the summer.
He grinned at me as he took the keys, but a single cool glare reeled in his enthusiasm for driving my car.
“I recognize him,” Guinevere murmured as we made our way inside the museum.
“He was one of the thugs outside your shoddy apartment beside Fortezza da Basso.”
“That’s a weird coincidence,” she said, peering up at me because she knew it was not just that.
“He had the decency to look out for you while you lived there and keep the general riffraff from disturbing you, so I hired him for a few odd jobs.” I shrugged.
“Sweet,” she reminded me, as she had done so many times since we had met. “You are unbearably sweet, Raffa Romano, and there is no hiding it from me.”
“I think your definition needs recalibrating if you think hiring a young thug to work for my criminal outfit is worthy of an altruism award.”
She laughed, the sound echoing off the marble floors and pillared walkway as we made our way down the silent corridor toward the gallery I had selected for the night.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“It is past closing time,” I told her as we stopped at the entrance to the temporary exhibition space. “And this special exhibition is only for you.”
“What?” she gasped as I pushed the doors open to the hall.
The interior was decorated sublimely, given the short amount of time the curator, Amir Saleh, had had to bring everything together for me.
In the center of the room sat a small table draped in white linen and laid with fine silver and china, a bottle of prosecco and a bottle of sparkling juice sitting in a gold bucket beside the chairs.
The floor was festooned with red petals, not from roses but from poppies, the same flowers I had imagined Guinevere twirling in the first time she’d tried on a red dress for me.
But it was the art in the room that stole the show.
Amir had brought in part of the Dante exhibit they had shown at the Ashmolean in Oxford a few years ago thanks to my connections there.
Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss dominated one corner, on loan from Paris, and art from Salvador Dalí, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti flanked the walls.
Immediately before the table sat the most famous piece of art in the entire museum, though. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, his goddess bearing a remarkable resemblance to his great love, Simonetta.
Next to that, Alessandro Allori’s The Abduction of Proserpine.
Pavarotti’s music played softly in the background as Guinevere clapped her hand to her chest as if to contain her wildly beating heart and swept around the room, staring at each piece.
I waited inside the doors, hands clasped behind my back, as I watched her look of unadulterated shock and wonder.
Finally, she stopped before the painting of Venus and turned to me with her mouth open in a soft O.
“This,” she started, and then swallowed hard before trying again with an ineloquent wave of her hand. “This is a love letter written in art. You . . . you found all the stories we’ve likened our love to.”
“I did,” I agreed. “Though there is a mosaic in Ravenna of Theodora and Justinian that is adhered to the wall of a church, so I will just have to plan a trip there for you to see it.”
“They’re . . . God, Raffa. They’re so beautiful,” she whispered through the thickness of emotion in her throat.
Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears.
I stepped toward her and gathered her beautiful heart-shaped face in my hands so she could see the sincerity in my eyes when I said, “None of them come close to the beauty you bring to my life. Not one of these stories is as perfect to me as ours.”
Her hands came up to clasp my wrists, holding me to her. “Even though I left you?”
I rubbed my thumb against the end of her pouting mouth to erase the frown.
“I am glad you left,” I said. “It taught us both lessons we needed to learn.”
Her laugh was wet. “That I am too stubborn for my own good?”
“That we cannot be fulfilled unless we are together.”
“You know I won’t leave you ever again, right?” she asked, her eyes wide with desperation as they searched my face. “When I promised you, I meant it. Nothing can take me from your side again.”
“Let’s not tempt fate,” I encouraged, leaning to kiss the tip of her nose because she was adorable and I did not have to try to resist her temptation any longer. “You are not that proficient with a gun yet to ward off any enemy.”
“Soon,” she swore. “Just like with Empress Theodora, people will come to fear and respect me too.”
“La mia temibile cacciatrice,” I teased as I bit into her lower lip. “La mia stella cadente.”
My fearsome huntress. My shooting star.
“Meus Rex Infernus,” she said, rolling to the toes of her high heels to better kiss my mouth, sliding her tongue between my lips with a proprietary assertiveness that made my cock ache. “I want you.”
“Dinner will get cold,” I told her, but I was already lifting her into my arms, her legs wrapping around my hips as I walked over to the bench before The Birth of Venus and sat down on it.
“Cold is good,” she murmured nonsensically. “I have this fire beneath my skin, and I need you to put it out.”
“Is that right?” I asked roughly as her mouth trailed from mine to the corner of my jaw and then my neck. “I brought you here to admire the art, Guinevere.”
“After,” she suggested, biting into my earlobe as she moved sinuously over my lap, rubbing herself against the crest of my hardened cock beneath my trousers.
“Now,” I insisted, clamping my hands over her hips to lift her off me and settle her between my legs, on her feet.
She pouted.
I ignored it, pushing her firmly away from me until she took a few steps back.
Only then did I brace my hands behind me on the bench and lean back to devour her greedily, lazily, with my eyes.
“Well?” I asked coolly. “I am here to admire the art, Guinevere. Undress and let me admire the most beautiful piece in the room.”
Her nostrils flared as she took a startled breath, but I watched the way desire transformed her too, deepening the pink in her cheeks and lips, turning her eyes to hot, dark coals.
My sweet cerbiatta might have struggled to strip for me in a public place like the Uffizi, no matter that it was closed, the cameras off, but my fierce cacciatrice loved the challenge.
Her chin tipped high as she slowly moved her hands up those narrow panels of fabric covering her breasts, molding the shape of them, pausing to pluck at her nipples until they were hard beads beneath the gauze.
I could almost see the dusky rose of them through the slightly sheer chiffon.
“Sei così bella,” I encouraged her as she slipped her fingers beneath the panel and edged it in tiny increments until it fell off one shoulder, exposing her right breast to my gaze.
Puckered pink nipple, high, pert swell.
My mouth watered.
A coy, feminine smile played at her mouth as she did the same little dance with the other strap until it fell, limp petals at her waist revealing that lean, slightly curved torso, bare but for the cornicello necklace I had given her at her neck.
“Il tuo seno mi fa venire l’acquolina in bocca,” I growled.
Your breasts make my mouth water.
“Take out your cock for me,” she asked, touching her tongue to her lower lip while she waited for me to obey her.
I pulled myself out through the zipper carefully so that I remained fully clothed, just the hard, weeping shaft of my dick exposed for her gaze.
“Do you want me to stroke myself while I watch you get naked?” I asked, my voice as deep and dark as the desire curling like my hand around my length.
“Yes,” she hissed.
“Then continue,” I demanded, wrapping my fingers around the base of my cock but not stroking.
I waited until she started to roll her hips, shimmying the tight fabric down them and then turning to show me the way it caught under her ass, plumping the cheeks beautifully above the fabric.
“Sei la creatura più sensuale che abbia mai visto,” I praised. You are the most sensual creature I have ever seen. “Bend over and show me your sweet pussy.”
She let the collected fabric drop to the marble floor in a pool of white like fallen moonbeams. Left only in her gold high heels and a tiny strip of white lace bisecting her cheeks and covering her mound, she looked like an angel fallen into the dark underworld, a morsel for me to devour.
“Take them off,” I grunted, my civility sloughing off under the heat of the fire building between us.
She toyed with me, looking over her shoulder with her lower lip trapped between her teeth as she played a finger along the edge of the underwear. When she removed it, I could see how it glistened with her juices, and I groaned as she lifted it to her mouth to suck hard at the taste of herself.
“Sei deliziosa, vero?” I asked.
Delicious, isn’t it?
She hummed her agreement.
But I was done with the anticipation.
“Come here,” I said. I waited as she straightened and walked, slow as could be, between my legs.