Chapter Nine Guinevere #2
I panted as he moved our fingers through my wetness, wondering if he would make me orgasm right there in the car. We were hidden behind some kind of shed and surrounded by linden trees on two sides, so there was privacy, but the threat of exposure made me so hot I burned.
Instead, he pulled our hands away, two fingers glistening with my juices as he raised them to hover between us.
He brought his hand to his mouth, painting the wetness along his bottom lip.
His eyes seemed to stare straight through me, glowing like banked coals as, slowly, I followed his silent order to echo him and traced my mouth with my essence.
My tongue peeked out to touch the gloss, and I shivered delicately as the flavor bloomed on my taste buds.
“Mmm,” I hummed, but before I could say any more, Raffa’s clean hand was sliding through the back of my hair and tugging hard. My torso twisted toward him, head canting back to alleviate the strain, and my mouth parted on a gasp.
A moment later, he ate that sound and the taste of my figa out of my mouth with his tongue.
I groaned shamelessly at the invasion, hands flying up to curl over his shoulders so I could cling to him as he rocked everything I’d known off its axis. He tasted like me but also like him, dark and male, his scent heady in my nose and the heat of his mouth the epicenter of my universe.
I thought, So this is what it’s like to be kissed.
This is what it’s like to feel lust like a lightning bolt, electricity fizzing through every vein.
Without thinking, I pulled him closer, trying to kiss him even deeper.
His moan was my reward, vibrating from his mouth to mine. In that moment, I thought I would have done anything to earn that sound from him again and again.
In that moment, I had never felt so alive.
When Raffa finally pulled away, forehead pressed to mine, breath wafting across my wet, swollen lips, soothing the stubble burn he’d left on my skin, I found my eyes mortifyingly damp.
“ Cerbiatta ,” he murmured, releasing my hair to cup the entire back of my skull in one big hand.
It was a question and consolation without making me feel foolish or too young.
I laughed as a single tear dislodged and rolled down my cheek.
“I’ve never done that before. I always wanted to.
Always dreamed of kissing and ... more.
But I was sick or too sheltered, and the opportunity never came.
This, well, it was better than I ever imagined. I’m sorry for crying. It’s silly.”
“ Non sciocco ,” he corrected firmly as his other thumb caught the tear and brought that to his mouth too. He paused to lick the salt from his skin in a way that was startlingly hot. “I understand wanting something for so long and believing you will never have it.”
“What do you want?” I asked, stripped of my usual shyness by our proximity and the simple but devastating act of sharing the taste of me between our lips.
His eyes shuttered, but when I cupped his cheek in one hand, he answered, “To be the man who deserves that look on your face.”
“What look?” I asked, afraid of the question—and the answer—but not enough to take it back.
“Like I could pull the stars from the sky for you if only you asked me to.”
“And would you?”
His sigh sounded almost resigned as it feathered over my mouth. “ Troverei un modo. ”
I would find a way.
Fattoria Casa Luna was a stunning sprawl of golden stone buildings arranged around a pretty garden and patio that were elevated over a vista of hills lined with wine grapes.
I squinted against the sunlight, raising a hand to cover my eyes as I tried to see where the vines ended three hills and valleys deep from where I stood.
“Incredible,” I breathed, tipping my head back and dropping my hand to soak up the sunlight on my face.
Raffa had shown me the bathroom at the entrance to the main building and then gone off to find Imelda with a promise to meet me on the patio. Washing my hands and staring at myself in the antique mirror without his presence to muffle my senses had been its own kind of enlightenment.
My cheeks were flushed, my hair tousled from his tight grip, and the skin around my swollen mouth was pinked from the roughness of his cheeks as he’d kissed me.
I looked slightly debauched and ridiculously proud of it.
My smile was close lipped and smug, a coy expression I’d seen before on Gemma’s face when she’d returned home from a date with her boyfriend, but never on my own.
God, she would have loved this for me.
Thinking about how she would have crowed in delight and teased me about the mysterious Italian stranger who had swept me off my feet stole my breath for a moment. I rested my hands against the counter and blinked the tears from my eyes.
Who would have known kissing could be so emotional?
But then, I could acknowledge it wasn’t just the kiss.
It was the entire adventure laid before me, not the one I’d so meticulously planned from the comfort of my home in Ann Arbor, but a new future entirely. One elevated by the presence of Raffaele Romano.
He would have appealed to any woman with a pulse, I was sure, with his beauty and wealth, but there was something intangible about him that had appealed to me almost from the start.
A mirror image of the tension I felt inside myself, maybe, between who we were and who we wanted to be.
I didn’t know why Raffa struggled with it or how it manifested itself, but the divide was subtly clear.
He was kind with me, thoughtful and tender, which seemed uncharacteristic given his gruff, exacting manner. Martina had said how he related to me was unusual, and Raffa himself had said I was the exception to every one of his rules.
Maybe that should have been a red flag, but I couldn’t deny it made me feel special. Secure, even. If he had never experienced the kind of chemistry we had together, I could rely on it to feel just as real to him as it did to me.
Still, the idea of embarking on a true holiday romance was so surreal, I giggled to myself in the bathroom. Guinevere Stone, American virgin, licking the taste of herself out of someone else’s mouth.
No one back home would believe it.
Then again, Gemma and my parents had always been my best friends, the ones who knew me best, and it wasn’t like I could have ever told them the secret, kinky fantasies I touched myself to at night. Talk about awkward.
And now I had the perfect opportunity to explore them without embarrassment. Because I didn’t know Raffa that well, not really, but I knew in my bones I could trust him to teach me about pleasure without any judgment or shame.
It wasn’t easy to realize that my parents and I had been so afraid of my death throughout most of my life that I’d let fear wrap me in chains and keep me anchored to the safe banks of banal mundanity.
Didn’t survivors deserve more than just what they could eke out moment to moment? Didn’t they deserve to thrive and rejoice in every single second? Suck the marrow from the bone, juices dripping down the chin, gluttony not a sin but a privilege after the barren, hungry times of survival?
I would always have to mind my health. It was as much a fact of life as taking my next breath, but it did not mean I couldn’t take chances and indulge when opportunities were worthy.
I’d first started to feel this when Gemma died.
Healthy, robust Gemma who was beautiful and young and at the beginning of her whole life.
How could she be gone between one minute and the next when there was no indication she had ever been ill?
The randomness of it had not just shaken my reality, it had cracked it, and from that crack had grown an abyss I was finally able to crawl out of.
And here I was free to live my life for myself as I hadn’t been able to do the last twenty-three years.
What was I going to do?
Before I could think about it too long, I ducked into a stall and pulled off my damp silk thong, one of many that the Marias had picked out for me at the boutique and that I never would have bought for myself.
I rolled the material into a ball and put it in my purse, feeling the heat in my cheeks as I thought about slipping it into Raffa’s pocket at some point, the look on his face when he realized I was naked beneath the shift.
I’d seen how he looked at me when I came out in the dress that morning, and I knew he wouldn’t try very hard to resist.
I smiled as I thought about it, opening my palms to get the sun on as much of my skin as I could. The scent of gardenia, freesia, and honeysuckle from the garden was undercut by the woody notes of herbs.
Minutes later, Raffa was still nowhere to be found, so I decided to walk the grounds myself.
The patio edged a fragrant garden filled with the faint hum of fat bumblebees hovering between stalks of lavender and white-faced gardenias.
I followed the flagstone path through the maze of plants toward the sound of trickling water and found a fountain with a small cupid spitting water from its pursed mouth.
I trailed my fingertips in the cool water for a brief reprieve from the July heat, feeling so at peace it was hard to believe my surroundings were real.
The sound of harsh yelling reminded me they were.
I straightened, hesitating, before following the sound of the angry voice toward some kind of industrial warehouse to the left of the main wine-tasting building. The voice grew clear, shouting in a way that conveyed anger but also a contrary desire to be quiet.
I hovered behind a line of cypress trees separating most of the garden from the behind-the-scenes setting of the vineyard, peeking between the gap.
“ Calmati! ” Raffa’s voice found me before my eyes found him; he was facing away from me and toward the man who had been yelling. “ Che cazzo fai? Do you want the entire staff to hear you, Wyatt?”
The man in question switched to British-accented English, but his posture remained on guard, a finger raised like a weapon at Raffa.