Chapter Eleven Guinevere
Chapter Eleven
Guinevere
I was worried the intimacy of our day would falter after we discovered someone was effectively stealing from the winery and had an awkward run-in with his sister and best friend, but Raffa proved me wonderfully wrong.
If anything, he seemed filled with intent, his attention keen eyed as he showed me the fattoria ’s well-organized cellar suffused with the sweet musk of aging wine and barrel wood.
Imelda had made herself scarce after setting up the wine-tasting table for us, and Raffa himself seemed determined to be my sommelier.
“I am beginning to think you have a kink for teaching me,” I teased him as he poured a splash of Chianti Classico into my glass after explaining the specifics of its bouquet to me.
“Maybe,” he admitted, watching with dark eyes as I placed my nose at the top of the glass to breathe in the scents and then breathed in again through my mouth before taking a sip that I aerated with my teeth. “It seems in this I do not have to.”
I laughed and admitted, “My father is Italian, remember? He taught my sister and me about wine well before we could drink it.”
Gemma had loved the science of viticulture and was studying to be a sommelier herself.
One of the reasons she had decided to live abroad in Albania for a year was to study in one of the oldest wine-making regions in the world.
It made me feel close to her, tasting wine in an Italian cellar, knowing she would have loved it like I did.
“More evidence that we do not know each other very well,” he chided with a cluck of his tongue as he leaned against the table across from me. “You have not spoken much of your own sister.”
“She died,” I confessed softly, staring into the garnet liquid so he wouldn’t see the agony in my face.
“Last year. It was a really rare form of heart attack. She was living abroad when it happened, and we just ... weren’t expecting it.
Of the two of us, it always seemed more likely I would be the one to die young because of my illness. ”
“ Mi dispiace ,” he said softly, reaching across the table to draw two fingers down the back of my hand. “I lost my father four years ago, and it still feels fresh.”
“You were close?” My curiosity sprang like water from a tapped well.
Raffa had shared so little about himself in contrast to how comfortable I felt in his company.
I was eager to know more, especially after his best friend had been rude to me and Martina had seemed shocked he would’ve played the white knight for anyone.
“In some ways,” he mused. “In others, we were at odds. It is often the way with parents, I think.”
I winced a little, hiding my reaction behind the glass as I raised it to take another sip. After swirling the wine around my palate, I spat the liquid into the silver spittoon.
When I looked up, Raffa had a brow raised. “I will not think less of you if you want to actually drink the wine.”
A blush fired my cheeks. “I didn’t think so. I just have to be careful with alcohol.”
His other brow joined the first. “Because of your condition.”
“Yes. I would have to watch my intake anyway, but I had a kidney transplant when I was sixteen, so I have to be doubly cautious.” I hesitated. “My sister was the donor.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat that was somehow sympathetic without being coddling. “It is not such a bad thing. As much as most Italians are loath to admit it, alcohol is not exactly a health food.”
I laughed, shocked that he continually found ways to put me at ease. “That’s true.”
“But you enjoy it?” He nodded at my glass.
“I know Chianti is made specifically to pair with food, but it’s lovely.”
“Lovely,” he murmured, coming around the table to my side, where he seemed to reach for me before crossing my body to grab another bottle of wine to pour into two clean glasses for us both. “That is not a word I would use for wine, but for a woman.”
“I think it works for both,” I breathed, my nipples pebbling from the brush of his forearm across them as he replaced the wine.
“Both,” he mused, wickedness slowly pulling his mouth into a crooked grin. “I cannot say I have tasted both to know if you are right.”
“No, not together,” I started to correct him, but my words were lost to a gasp when Raffa picked me up by the hips and placed me on the table. “What are you doing?”
“This is a wine tasting,” he said drolly. “I am tasting my wine.”
I opened my mouth to say something but forgot entirely when he lifted my glass to my nose so I could smell the red before he tipped it against my mouth.
“Open,” he coaxed, a light flush on his pronounced cheekbones. “Taste.”
I shivered as cabernet sauvignon pooled on my tongue, all red fruits and a shadow of oak.
“Do not swallow,” he ordered in that domineering, faintly cold way that made my skin flush.
I waited obediently, instinctually, and had the gratification of his wide smile, white teeth and pointed canines almost lupine and entirely too gorgeous.
“ Molto bene ,” he praised before stepping in close between my thighs so my dress rode up almost all the way to my hips. One hand rose to grip my chin, tilting it slightly so that when his mouth descended on mine, we fit perfectly.
At first it was closed lips, just the trace of his tongue against my lower lip and then pushing beyond to touch my teeth. Then he was slipping inside, drinking the wine from my mouth. When it was gone, he languidly sucked the taste from my tongue until I moaned around a full body shiver.
“Mmm,” he hummed, pulling back an inch to stare at my wine-stained lips. “Perhaps lovely is not the word for either. è ambrosia. Divino. Come una droga. ”
It is ambrosia. Divine. Like a drug.
Unwittingly, I squeezed Raffa’s lean hips between my thighs, trying to relieve the ache he’d placed at their center. His answering expression was low lidded, one corner of his full bottom lip depressed by a sharp tooth.
“Do you agree, cerbiatta ?” he asked me in a husky drawl.
“Well,” I said, my voice choked off with desire. “I can’t say for sure after only one taste.”
“Ah, fair,” he declared softly, and I realized we had both been speaking quietly as if in a confessional, making the miles-long cellar feel close and intimate, a space just for us. “Shall we try again?”
I nodded too enthusiastically, and his smile only flared wider in response, as if he found me endearing. I had no defenses against a man like this, and I knew it had little to do with my lack of experience and more to do with the fact that he was as near perfection as any man I’d ever known.
Devilishly handsome, powerful, kind, and complicated enough to keep my mind busy like a Rubik’s Cube, with endless combinations of enticement.
When he raised the glass this time, it was to his own lips, and I watched as his strong, tanned throat worked, Adam’s apple bobbing. Why was that so wildly attractive?
After taking his own sip, he sank a hand into the back of my hair to cup my skull and tilted me back slightly so my weight rested in his hand. It was a habit he had, I realized, of wanting me to trust him to balance me.
When his lips sealed over mine, slowly releasing the rich wine into my mouth, I drank it down greedily so I could taste the remnants on his tongue and teeth.
A dribble of wine leaked down my chin, but Raffa’s tongue was there before I could do anything, tracing the spill up my neck, jaw, and chin and back behind my teeth.
I was so wet that a draft of the cool cellar air teased my bared pussy like a feather. It made me realize Raffa still didn’t know I’d taken off my underwear.
He kissed the edge of the smile I hadn’t realized I’d been wearing. “Well?”
“ Divino ,” I said back at him, feeling emboldened by the press of the thick erection I felt against my thigh. “Almost as delicious as me.”
I was close enough to see the way his sunlit-whiskey irises thinned to frame blown-wide pupils, black holes of desire I wanted to throw myself into.
“Not quite,” he protested. “But we just began our experiment ...”
He trailed off to grab the bottle of wine, forgoing the glass entirely to hover it over my chest.
“Raffa,” I warned. “This dress cost you hundreds of euros!”
He shrugged, gaze intent on my breasts. “I have wondered all day if I could see your nipples through this dress if it was wet, and I intend to find out.”
I didn’t have a good argument for that, and my wetness was seeping down my pussy to the fabric beneath my bottom, so I figured the dress was beyond redemption already.
In response, I leaned back on my hands to expose my chest entirely, hair shifting down my back, breasts raised.
His gaze flickered up to mine, warm with pride. “Do you know how delicious it is to watch you be brave and bold like this? It makes me want to worship you on my knees.”
My mouth went bone dry at the thought of his dark head feasting between my thighs, big hands pinning me open for his hungry mouth.
Cool wine broke my flesh into goose bumps as Raffa splashed some at the base of my neck to watch it pool against my collarbones and trickle down my skin into the white linen, saturating it until the fabric was a wet pink press against my breasts.
“ Che bella ,” he murmured almost to himself before ducking his head to sip the wine from my neck, licking down my chest until he hit fabric and then blowing cool air on my wet-wrapped breasts. My nipples furled so tightly they ached.
Raffa made an appreciative noise in the back of his throat and then thumbed one peak, tweaking it in a way that felt like pure electricity.
His mouth followed, a welcome heat after the cold and the pain, his tongue curling around my nipple and his mouth pulling hard.
The suction and abrasion of the rough linen made my pleasure arch down my belly to my shamelessly wet sex.
“ Ambrosia ,” he said against the curve of my breast before sinking his teeth into the roundness to test its bounce.