8. Nova
— ? —
Nova
That Same Night
He kisses like he does everything else - with complete, devastating focus.
His mouth moves against mine, slow and thorough, learning me.
His hands span my waist, fingers pressing into the soft fabric of my nightgown, holding me steady while he takes me apart one brush of his lips at a time.
He tastes like wine and something darker, something that’s just him, and I’m drowning in it.
I’ve been kissed before.
Dante kissed me - perfunctory pecks, obligatory gestures, the kind of kisses that said I’m fulfilling my husbandly duty rather than I want you. Before Dante, there were others. College boys with clumsy hands. A few forgettable encounters in my twenties. Nothing that prepared me for this.
Nothing that prepared me for Luca Castellani kissing me like I’m oxygen and he’s been holding his breath for years.
His tongue traces the seam of my lips, asking permission.
I open for him, and he groans - actually groans, this sound from deep in his chest that vibrates through me - and then he’s tasting me, claiming me, his tongue sliding against mine in a rhythm that makes me think of other things, other rhythms, other ways he could move inside me.
My hands find his chest. He’s wearing a shirt - dark, unbuttoned at the collar - and I can feel the heat of him through the fabric, the hard planes of muscle I’ve been sleeping against for weeks. I want it gone. I want skin. I want-
He pulls back.
“Wait,” he breathes against my mouth.
“No.”
“Nova-”
“No waiting.” I fist my hands in his shirt. “I’ve been waiting. We’ve been waiting. I don’t want to wait anymore.”
Something flares in his eyes, something dark and hungry and barely leashed. His hands tighten on my waist.
“I want to do this right.”
“There’s no wrong way.”
“There is.” He presses his forehead to mine, breathing hard. “There’s fast and desperate and over too soon. That’s the wrong way. And I’ve spent three years imagining this - I’m not going to rush it because I can’t control myself.”
Three years.
The words hit me somewhere deep.
“You’ve been imagining this for three years?”
“Yes.”
“Imagining what, exactly?”
His laugh is low, rough. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do.” I pull back just enough to see his face. “Tell me. Tell me what you’ve been imagining.”
His jaw tightens. His eyes search my face, looking for something - permission, maybe. Proof that I mean it.
“Everything,” he says finally. “I’ve imagined everything. The way you’d taste. The sounds you’d make. Whether you’d be loud or quiet, fast or slow, whether you’d let me take my time or beg me to hurry.”
My breath catches. “And what did you decide?”
“I decided I wanted all of it.” His thumb traces my lower lip, his touch feather-light. “I wanted to start slow. Worship you. Learn every inch of your body until I could map it blindfolded. And then-” He stops.
“And then?”
“And then I wanted to make you come so many times you forgot your own name.”
Heat floods through me: my cheeks, my chest, lower. I press my thighs together, but it doesn’t help. Nothing helps when he’s looking at me like that, saying things like that, his voice low and rough and absolutely wrecked.
“Show me,” I whisper.
“What?”
“Show me. Everything you imagined.” I take a breath. “I’m yours tonight. Do whatever you want.”
Something snaps behind his eyes.
One moment we’re standing there, forehead to forehead, his hands gentle on my waist. The next, I’m being lifted - his hands under my thighs, my legs wrapping around his waist, my back hitting the door as he pins me there with his body.
“Whatever I want?” he growls against my throat.
“Yes.”
“You don’t know what you’re offering.”
“Then show me.”
His mouth finds my neck. Not gentle anymore, hungry. His teeth scrape against my pulse point, and I gasp, my head falling back against the door. His hips press forward, and I feel him, hard and thick through the layers between us, and I moan.
“That,” he says against my skin. “That sound. I’ve been dreaming about that sound.”
“Luca-”
“I’m going to take you apart.” He bites down on the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, and I cry out. “Slowly. Thoroughly. And when I’m done, you’re going to know-” Another bite, another mark. “-exactly who you belong to.”
His hands are moving. Sliding up my thighs, pushing my nightgown higher, fingers finding bare skin that’s never felt so sensitive. Every touch is electric. Every brush of his fingertips sends sparks shooting through my nervous system.
“Bed,” I manage. “Please-”
“Not yet.”
“Luca-”
“I told you.” He pulls back to look at me, his eyes black with want. “I’m not rushing this.”
He carries me away from the door. But not to the bed, to the chair by the window. The one that looks out over the moonlit grounds. The one where he sits and reads and does whatever else he does in the quiet hours.
He settles into it with me in his lap, my thighs bracketing his hips, my nightgown rucked up around my waist. The position is intimate, obscenely so. I can feel every inch of him through his trousers, hard and hot against my center, and when I shift, we both groan.
“Look at me,” he commands.
I look.
His face is all sharp angles and shadows in the moonlight. His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide. His lips are swollen from kissing me, and there’s a flush high on his cheekbones that makes him look almost feverish.
“I’m going to undress you now,” he says. “Slowly. And you’re going to let me look at you.”
“Okay.”
“No hiding. No covering yourself. I want to see all of you.”
I swallow. “Okay.”
His hands find the hem of my nightgown. They slide upward, inch by agonizing inch, taking the fabric with them. I feel the cool air on my thighs, my hips, my stomach. Feel his eyes tracking the reveal, his breath coming shorter.
“Lift your arms.”
I lift them.
He pulls the nightgown over my head and tosses it aside.
I’m not wearing anything underneath.
The realization hits us both at the same time. His hands freeze where they’d fallen back to my waist. His eyes drop to my breasts, my stomach, the space between my thighs. And he makes a sound - this raw, desperate sound that’s half groan and half prayer.
“Fuck.”
“Is that-”
“You’re perfect.” His voice is strangled. “You’re fucking perfect.”
I want to argue. Want to point out the imperfections - the softness of my stomach, the stretch marks on my hips, the body that Vivienne always made me feel ashamed of with her pointed comments about watching what you eat, dear and perhaps a smaller size would be more flattering.
But he’s looking at me like I’m a masterpiece. Like I’m something precious and rare and worthy of worship.
And for the first time in years, I almost believe it.
“Touch me,” I whisper. “Please.”
His hands move.
Not fast. Slow, deliberate, mapping. They slide up my ribs, counting each one, then cup my breasts like they were made to fit his palms. His thumbs brush my nipples, and I arch into his touch, a moan escaping before I can stop it.
“Sensitive,” he murmurs.
“Yes-”
He does it again. And again. Rolling my nipples between his fingers, circling them with his thumbs, learning exactly what makes me gasp and what makes me moan and what makes me grind down against him in helpless need.
“Luca - please-”
“Please what?”
“More. I need more.”
“More of what?” His voice is teasing now, edged with darkness. “Tell me what you want, Nova. Use your words.”
I can’t. I’ve never been able to - Dante never asked, never cared what I wanted, and before him I was too young to know. But Luca is looking at me expectantly, his hands stilled on my breasts, waiting.
“I want-” I swallow. “I want your mouth.”
“Where?”
Oh God.
“Here.” I take his hand from my breast. Guide it down my body. Press his fingers against me, where I’m wet and aching and desperate. “Here. Please. I want your mouth here.”
His eyes go impossibly darker.
“Good girl.”
He stands in one fluid motion, taking me with him, and then I’m being deposited on the bed - on my back, my legs dangling over the edge. He sinks to his knees in front of me, and the sight of him there - Luca Castellani, on his knees, his face level with my thighs-
“You’re shaking,” he observes.
“I know.”
“Are you scared?”
“No. I’m-” I don’t have words for what I am. Overwhelmed. Desperate. So turned on I can barely breathe. “Just don’t stop.”
“I’m not going to stop.” He presses a kiss to my inner thigh. “I’m not going to stop until you’re begging.”
“I’m already begging.”
“No, you’re not.” Another kiss, higher this time. “But you will be.”
His hands spread my thighs wider. His breath ghosts over my center, and I shudder, every muscle in my body tensing with anticipation. I can feel him looking at me, studying me, and it should be embarrassing, should make me want to close my legs and hide, but it doesn’t.
It makes me want more.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs. “So wet for me already.”
“Please-”
“Please what?”
“Luca-”
He licks me.
One long, slow stroke of his tongue from bottom to top, and I come completely apart. My hips buck off the bed. My hands fist in the sheets. A sound tears out of me that doesn’t even sound human, something raw and desperate and starving.
He does it again.
And again.
And then his mouth closes over my clit and he sucks, and I scream.
Not a metaphorical scream, not a gasp or a moan or a cry - an actual scream, loud enough that someone in the house probably heard, and I can’t bring myself to care because his tongue is doing things I didn’t know a tongue could do and his fingers are sliding inside me, two at once, crooking against a spot that makes my vision go white.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against me, and the vibration of his voice nearly sends me over the edge. “Let me hear you. Let me hear how good I make you feel.”
I can’t be quiet. I try - old habits, Vivienne’s voice in my head reminding me to be ladylike, to be appropriate - but every flick of his tongue tears another sound from my throat. I’m moaning, gasping, saying his name like a prayer, my hips grinding against his face in a rhythm I can’t control.
“You taste incredible,” he says, and the words are almost conversational, like he’s commenting on the wine at dinner, but his voice is wrecked and his fingers are moving faster and I can feel the tension building, building, building-
“Luca - I’m going to-”
“Yes.” His thumb presses against my clit, hard, and his fingers curl inside me, and his mouth closes over me again. “Come for me. Let me taste you.”
I shatter.
The orgasm crashes through me like a wave, like a storm, like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
My back arches off the bed. My thighs clamp around his head.
I’m crying out - his name, or maybe just sounds, I can’t tell anymore - and he keeps going, keeps licking and sucking and stroking me through it until I’m trembling, until I’m oversensitive, until I have to push at his shoulders because I can’t take any more.
He pulls back.
Looks up at me with wet lips and dark eyes and the most devastatingly satisfied expression I’ve ever seen.
“That,” he says, “was one.”
I blink. “One?”
“I told you.” He rises from his knees, crawls over my body, hovers above me with his arms braced on either side of my head. “I’m going to make you come until you forget your own name. That means we’re just getting started.”
***
Luca
She looks ruined.
Her hair is spread across my pillow like a golden halo. Her lips are swollen from biting them. Her skin is flushed from her chest to her cheeks, and her eyes - those beautiful, expressive eyes - are glazed with pleasure.
I did that.
I made her look like that.
All that wanting, all that imagining this exact moment - and the reality is better than anything I conjured in the dark. The sounds she makes. The way she tastes. The way her body responds to every touch like it’s been starving for this.
She has been starving, I realize. Two years married to my brother, and he never touched her like this. Never took the time to learn what she liked, what she needed, what would make her fall apart in his hands.
My brother is a fool.
But his foolishness is my gain.
“You’re wearing too many clothes,” she breathes.
I look down at myself. Still fully dressed: shirt, trousers, even my shoes. I was so focused on her, on tasting her, on watching her come apart on my tongue, that I forgot about my own state.
“So I am.”
“Take them off.”
It’s not a request. Something sparks in my chest - pride, desire, the thrill of hearing her demand what she wants.
“You want to see me?”
“I want to feel you.” Her hand reaches up, fists in my shirt. “I want to feel your skin against mine. I want-” She breaks off, blushing.
“Tell me.”
“I want you inside me.”
Fuck.
My self-control - already frayed, already hanging by a thread - snaps completely.
I rear back. My fingers find my shirt buttons, fumbling in my haste. She watches me undress with those dark, hungry eyes, and every second feels like an eternity. Shirt, gone. Shoes, kicked off. Trousers, unbuttoned, shoved down my hips.
And then I’m naked.
Her gaze drops. Takes me in. Her eyes widen, just slightly, and I feel a moment of concern-
“Oh,” she whispers.
“Is that a good ‘oh’ or a bad ‘oh’?”
“That’s a-” She swallows. “That’s a ‘you’re bigger than I expected’ oh.”
I should be smug. Part of me is smug. But mostly I’m just desperate - desperate to be inside her, to feel her around me, to finally, finally have what I’ve been dreaming about for three years.
“We’ll go slow,” I promise.
“No.”
I pause. “No?”
“I don’t want slow.” She reaches for me, her hands finding my hips, pulling me toward her. “I’ve had slow. I’ve had careful and gentle and boring. I want-” She looks up at me, and the heat in her eyes could burn down cities. “I want you to fuck me like you mean it.”
Jesus Christ.
“Nova-”
“I’m not fragile.” Her nails dig into my hips, hard enough to leave marks. “I’m not going to break. So stop treating me like I might.”
I should argue. Should insist on going slow, making sure she’s ready, being the careful, controlled man I’ve been forcing myself to be for weeks.
Instead, I grab her hips. Flip her over. Pull her up onto her hands and knees.
She gasps.
“Is this what you want?” I position myself behind her, my cock pressing against her entrance but not pushing in. Not yet. “You want me to fuck you like I mean it?”
“Yes-”
“Then hold onto something.”
I thrust inside her.