Chapter Thirty-Two
Valentina
I clasp Matteo’s face and kiss him, trying to convey to him everything he makes me feel.
The force of it is enough to topple him over. He takes me down with him, the forearm he has wrapped around my body keeping me glued firmly to his chest as he hits the bed.
A volatile look flashes through his eyes when I pull away.
“I shouldn’t kiss you,” I say, sniffling. The back of my throat feels sandpapery. “You’ll get sick.”
A slow smirk curls Matteo’s lips. His playful eyes grow heavy as they drop to my mouth and linger. “I’m already sick.”
I place my hand on his forehead, feeling to see if he has a fever. “What’s wrong?”
“No official diagnosis yet. My only symptom is my unrelenting obsession with you.” He blinks those gorgeous eyes at me, thick lashes sweeping across his cheeks. “Think I’ll live?”
Unrelenting.
My heart tries not to trip over the word.
“Sounds terminal,” I hum thoughtfully.
He nods somberly. "That’s what I thought." Then that charming, lazy smirk is back. “Grant a dying man his final wish and kiss me again?”
I bend towards him with a smile. “If you ever do get a final wish, I recommend you use it to ask for something a little more vital.”
Matteo reaches to cup the side of my neck, tracking my approaching mouth with heavy-lidded eyes. “There’s nothing more invaluable to me than dying with the taste of you on my lips. Now kiss me.”
I feel my cheeks heat as I press my lips to his. He’ll be sick tomorrow, but he doesn’t seem to care.
He flips me easily, trapping me into the mattress as his large body comes to loom above me. I shove my hands into his hair and pull him closer. He kisses a path from my mouth, along my jaw, and down to my neck where he buries his face into my throat with a groan.
“Do you know how incredible you are?” he demands, voice muffled against my skin. “How fucking strong and fearless you are?” My pussy clenches in response to his heated, insistent words. I shake my head, incapable of forming any type of response. “I’m in awe of you, cara . I admire you so much.”
I moan when his lips close around the skin along the column of my throat and he sucks it into his mouth. His teeth score the sensitive flesh, sending goosebumps fluttering all over my body.
“Fuck, I missed touching you, I missed feeling you,” he growls, frustration bleeding into his words. “I just fucking missed you.”
My arms close around his neck, pulling him closer, always closer. I should be pushing him away, creating distance, protecting my heart, but there is no protecting myself from Matteo. He’s already kicked through the doors, destroying all ten padlocks I had securing the latch in one go, and he’s storming in to claim every part of me.
His frantic hands shake with need as he pushes my t-shirt up my torso and over my head. He sits up only long enough to rip his own t-shirt off and then he’s back over me, his hands on my breasts and his mouth tracing a famished path along my collarbone and down my chest.
“Touch me,” I beg.
Matteo tilts his face up, his gaze dark with destructive arousal. “Touch you where?”
I writhe beneath him and whine, “Anywhere.”
An agitated look appears in his eyes. “Tell me you missed me too and I will,” he demands throatily.
“I missed you,” I reply instantly. “Of course I missed you.”
A harsh, low sound jerks from his lips. His pupils contract, turning his eyes so obscenely possessive it takes my breath away.
“Good girl,” he rasps, voice husky with arousal. “Seven days since I last ate your pussy. That’s too fucking long. Spread your legs for me.”
Matteo grins at the excited sound that escapes my lips. “So eager for it, my little slut,” he purrs, moving between my legs.
“So hungry for it,” I retort, ”My little w— oh my god !” I scream when Matteo laps at my pussy.
He chuckles, a deep, warm sound that echoes between my thighs and ricochets off my center.
“Not so mouthy now, are you?” he taunts. Before I can answer, his face is back buried in my pussy. “You’re drenched, cara . Absolutely dying for me, aren’t you?”
He dives into my folds, parting my lips and finding my entrance with practiced expertise. Garbled sounds of pleasure rip from my throat as his tongue pushes in slowly. His eyes pierce into me from above my pussy, not missing a second of my torment.
“Matteo,” I moan. “Matteo…ah. Ahh .”
His arms wrap around my thighs and tug me into him, bringing my pussy tight against his face. He only seems satisfied when he’s being suffocated between my thighs—I didn’t know that was a quality I needed in a man, but now that I have it, I know I won’t be able to live without it.
I rock into the swipes of his tongue, following the movements of his assault as I pant loudly. I’m thrashing against the mattress, fisting the sheets and arching my back as sizzling hot pleasure spreads from my core and through my entire body.
Matteo doesn’t eat me like a famished man. He eats me like a foodie who’s just been given his favorite meal. He’s slow, almost lazy with it, taking his time tasting every inch, every curve and valley of my pussy, lapping my juices up and twirling his tongue in a teasing dance along my lips, the combination of it all driving me mad with lust.
“You taste so fucking good, Leni. So fucking sweet,” he grunts. “So fucking mine .”
Arousal is coiled tightly in my belly. Matteo keeps me on the verge of an orgasm, edging me towards it and then drawing me back at the last second until tears of frustration pool in the corners of my eyes.
“Please.”
“Please, what, cara mia ?”
“Please let me come,” I implore, my pride forgotten.
Two fingers replace his tongue and plunge inside me. “Oh, fuck!” I groan, trying to turn on my side. Matteo splays a hand on my lower belly, keeping me flat on the mattress.
“Only if you promise to scream for me,” he answers. His palm slides up my stomach to knead my sensitive breast. He tweaks my taut nipple between his thumb and forefinger as his fingers curl inside me, brushing against the delicate skin of my walls.
Stars explode behind my eyes. When he lowers his head and closes his lips around my clit, sucking it into his mouth in tandem with the caress of his fingers, I close my eyes and come with an ear-splitting scream. My thighs clamp around his hand as I ride his fingers through the entirety of my climax. Spasms rock me to my core, clenching my muscles down around him as wave after wave hits me.
When I open my eyes, I find Matteo crawling over my limp body with a cocky grin on his lips. He slips his fingers into his mouth and sucks them clean as he watches me, his gaze hooding with thick, violent desire.
He groans in primal appreciation of my taste and releases his fingers, sitting up on his knees between my legs.
“I know you like a degradation kink,” he says, reaching into his sweatpants. “But tonight, all I want to do is praise you.”
He pulls out his throbbing cock and fists it in his hand. His eyes stay on me as he starts stroking himself. He’s so hard, his length looks almost angry. Veins protrude along the sides of him, his tip bright with color. Every muscle in his arms and torso are contracted, almost like it’s taking everything in him to hold himself back.
“What are you waiting for then?”
A tight, feral smile tugs the left corner of his lips. “I’m trying to calm myself down. Otherwise I’ll fuck you hard and rough and that’s not what I want tonight.”
I sit up, licking my lips as I reach for his cock. “I can help–”
Matteo growls. He grabs my wrist before I can touch him and pushes me back down on the bed, coming over me.
“ Fuck. No. I’m not coming down your throat tonight, which is exactly what’ll happen if you wrap your pretty lips around my cock. No,” he purrs, stroking my breasts with both hands. “I want to mark these tits with my cum and I want to watch you fall asleep with it drying on you.”
He hooks an elbow beneath my knee and pulls my leg up to his shoulder. Before I know it, I feel his cock pressing at my entrance, demanding entry. He doesn’t ask for it, he simply pushes in, parting my walls inch by inch as he sinks into me. His head falls forward, his chin going to his chest as a long, agonized moan rumbles up the length of his throat and past his lips. It’s then I realize he’s fucking me without a condom.
“I can feel everything,” he says in a strangled whisper. “Every warm, wet part of you desperately clenching around my cock.” His forehead comes to mine and he blows out a deep breath. “Fuck, cara . You might actually kill me.”
Then he drops his head and kisses me slowly. Exquisitely slowly, his fingers threading through my hair and pulling me closer. His lips moving languorously over mine. His tongue lazy and unhurried.
Matteo pulls back only far enough to separate our lips, but our noses touch, bumping against each other with every roll of his hips as he works himself entirely inside me. His lids are heavy as he moves languidly above me, his eyes half closed.
But he watches me.
His gaze burns into my face, leaving a trail of red on my cheeks. He watches me like he can’t look away. His eyes remain glued to mine as his rhythm evolves into deep, sensual thrusts so excruciatingly slow, they rip pleasure and frustration out of me with equal measure.
“Look at you,” he admires, voice thick with possession. “Such a good girl taking my cock like this. Aren’t you?”
“Y-yes.”
“Your pussy is so fucking tight.” He strokes my breasts, my ribs, my flat stomach, petting me with worshipful hands. “No matter how many times I fuck you, you take me like it’s the first time.”
I claw at his ribs, at his back, my face screwed in pleasure, my hands reflecting the desperation of my entire being. This is a different kind of dominance. He doesn’t use strength or force to command my body, but seduction. A sultry, sensual, carnal corruption of my body and soul alike. My moans are heady and shallow and extracted from impossibly deep inside me.
A pained groan leaves his lips. “You’re clenching so impatiently around me. You want more?”
I nod frantically, my hands closing at his neck. I arch my hips away from the mattress, trying to get closer. His arm wraps around my back and he drags me roughly into him. His other palm flattens next to my head as he holds me with one arm, erasing all distance between us.
He’s staring again and it’s too much.
“What are you looking at?” I moan, meeting his gaze.
A troubled, dangerously tormented look crosses his eyes. Then he buries his face in my shoulder, placing an open throated kiss against my neck.
“You. I’m always looking at you. You’re so fucking beautiful, cara mia ,” he breathes into my ear. “I want to tattoo your face on the back of my eyelids so I never have to look away from you.”
He keeps his mouth where it is, muttering endless praise, endless compliments, making me dizzy with his affection. I hold his head against me, clutching desperately at him with greedy hands.
Tomorrow, I’ll regret letting him fuck me like this.
He’s claiming me when he doesn’t plan on keeping me.
He’s ruining me.
But tonight, he’s not my family’s enemy, he’s not the brother of the man who killed my sister, he’s not another woman’s fiancé. He’s mine.
Simply, impossibly, undeniably, mine .
He fucks me slowly and gently and languidly, every stroke worshipfully adoring. He tells me he’s mine, even if he doesn’t know it.
And when I come, it’s a completely different orgasm than any I’ve had in the past, with him or anyone else. It comes from a different, deeper part of me that I’ve never opened to anyone before. I scream as the climax blasts through me, as I fall apart against him, shuddering and quivering for what feels like endless minutes.
Matteo fucks me through it all, his thrusts turning progressively deeper and more powerful until his face screws in concentration, until his teeth bite into his lower lip, until he pulls out of me, fists his cock, and comes all over my tits just like he promised he would.
Jet after jet of his warm cum hit my chest, his own orgasm as drawn out as mine. His eyes remain glued to my breasts, watching as his cum slides over my nipples and down to my belly. I run a finger through it and bring it up to my lips. His gaze turns scary dark, his features tightened by savage lust when I suck the finger into my mouth and lick his arousal like he did mine. I groan, closing my eyes and tipping my head back when the saltiness hits my tongue.
A dangerous growl rumbles up his chest and his cock hardens once more. He dives for me and I laugh as he wraps his arms around me and rolls us across the bed, uncaring of the fact his cum is still on me.
When he comes up for air from biting my neck, the look in his eye tells me he plans on taking me again.
I press a hand against his chest to stop him.
“You need to call the Famiglia doctor for me tomorrow.”
Matteo’s brow furrows adorably. “Why?”
“You fucked me without a condom.” I clear my throat awkwardly when his frown deepens like he still doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. “I need to get tested to make sure you didn’t give me anything before we do this again. You obviously know I’m—”
“Leni.” He cuts me off firmly. “I’m clean.”
“You can’t know that until you get tested.”
“I can.”
“Not—”
“I haven’t fucked anyone since I kissed you the night of Carnivale ,” he announces. “I haven’t kissed anyone either for that matter.”
It’s my turn to be silent, the words having suddenly disappeared from my throat.
“I just told you I’d like to die with the taste of you on my lips,” Matteo says. “I didn’t know when I’d have it again, so I wasn’t going to let anyone erase it.” He nuzzles my neck and finds my ear with a throaty murmur, “I waited for you.”
“I’m supposed to believe you’ve been celibate this whole time?” I ask, shaking my head. “I’m at the club with you almost every night, I see the endless line of girls that throw themselves at you.”
“And do I seem at all interested in them?”
“No,” I admit.
Aurora has had to hide the bar knives to stop me from using them. A week ago, she walked past me and plucked one right out of my fingers just as I was about to fling it across the room at an airheaded blonde who was doing everything short of stripping naked to try and get Matteo’s attention.
“You think I waited for you every Saturday night, and when you didn’t show up, that I took another girl home and fucked her?” The visual alone pisses me off so much, I look away. Matteo hooks a hand around my throat and forces my gaze back to his. “No, cara . I didn’t want anyone else except you.” He grins down at me with his signature playboy smile, one which he’s apparently been keeping exclusively for me these past two years. “Let me prove it to you again.”
This time, he flips me on my stomach, ties my hands to his headboard and fucks me from behind until I’m on the verge of calling “Cherry!”. It’s not sweet like before, it’s possessive and rough, with him slapping my ass and pulling my hair, and me screaming his name until we both come.
When I slump against the mattress, his cum is dry on my breasts and fresh on my ass. Matteo goes into the bathroom and comes back out with a warm towel. He cleans me diligently, telling me how beautiful I am the entire time, even though I’m so exhausted I’m already half asleep.
And yet, on the inside I’m on fire. The exhilaration in my blood, the shortness of my breath, the thrashing of my pulse in my veins, the sheer fucking high of being with him races through me. I realize I’m not sure how I’m supposed to live without it even as I realize that very soon I’m going to have to.
“We should end this now,” I whisper, too much of a coward to open my eyes and see his reaction. “Before it gets too complicated.”
Before it becomes unsurvivable .
Matteo picks me up and straightens me out on the bed so my head is lying on the pillow. He slides under the sheets next to me, molds his body to mine, brushes my hair behind my shoulder, and buries his face in the crook of my neck. When he’s settled, he simply answers, “No.”
Turns out this isn’t a fight I want to win, so I let him wrap his arm around my middle and drag me intimately into his body. His other hand curls loosely around my throat.
I miss the intimacy of being held. Of being comforted. Of someone else carrying the burden and the weight of it all for a bit, so the second his hands come around me, I fall asleep.
When I wake up a couple of hours later, he’s completely wrapped around me, clinging to me in a way that makes me question if he’s grown extra limbs overnight. He smothers me with his body, possessive even in sleep. I have to disentangle myself from the jumble of his limbs.
A discontented groan leaves him as I stand. He rolls onto his stomach, his arm extending to search for me, but he doesn’t wake. The early morning dawn light breaks over the horizon as I tread across his bedroom on tiptoes, quietly grabbing my clothes from the chair in the corner where Matteo left them to dry.
Not spending the night has always been a self-protective measure for my heart, but it’s getting harder and harder to leave. This time, I can’t resist a look back at him before I do.
He’s splayed on his stomach, the sheets bunched low on his waist, the tie he used on my wrists last night still hanging loosely from the headboard. One arm is stretched to the side of him, fingers extended towards where I got up and out of bed. The other is tucked beneath his pillow. His broad back is defined and muscled, mouth-wateringly attractive even down to the scarring his brother inflicted on him. It rises and falls evenly with every breath he takes.
Matteo mutters something, but it’s too soft for me to pick up from the doorway.
I walk back over to him, instantly mesmerized by the way his long, dark lashes fan over his cheek. By the marks the pillows have left on his face, those tiny imperfections doing nothing to diminish just how handsome he is.
I’m about to leave when his lips move again, whispering something still too low for me to make out completely. I get closer, bending so my face is level with his, and I wait.
Maybe I imagined it.
Then he breathes in, a deep, rumbling inhale. And when he exhales an equally heavy breath, I hear it again. Softly murmured as if on a prayer, his lips come together and whisper, “Valentina.”
I straighten abruptly like I've been shoved backwards, my heart squeezing violently in my chest.
“Valentina,” he repeats. The hint of a smile ghosts across his lips.
I stare at his sleeping form, willing myself to go, knowing I need to.
My feet are rooted to the floor.
I can’t make myself move.
“Leni…” he breathes, the two syllables heavy with longing.
He shielded me from the rain.
I don’t want to go back out into it without him.
I peel my clothes off and get back into bed beside him. The second he feels my body against his, Matteo closes his arms around me and pulls me into him with a contented sigh.
???
The next morning, I wake to find Matteo grinning down at me. “You stayed.”
I’m in his arms, still held as closely against him as I have been all night. “You’re clingy,” I grumble.
He laughs, his chest moving against mine with every deep chuckle, then he burrows his face in my neck. His breath tickles me as he announces, “I got hungry and had one of the pancake things you made. Hope you don’t mind.”
I freeze. He notices, straightening to look down at me. “You tried my arepas ?”
“Is that what they’re called?” he groans, licking his lips. “They’re unbelievable , Len. I mean, holy fuck, I had to stop myself from eating all of them.”
I stare at him, Adri’s words playing on a loop in my mind.
Before I can say anything, Matteo’s phone rings. He reaches for it with one hand, keeping his hold on me with the other.
“ Pronto ,” he says, smiling down at me.
I see the change in him before it happens. His eyes shutter, then the smile wipes off his face and he releases me.
He sits up, his feet finding the floor, his hand raking through his hair. “ Quando? ” he listens to the answer, then mutters, “ Cazzo .” He nods twice more. “ Arrivo subito .”
He hangs up, bringing the phone slowly down from his ear as he stares into the distance.
“What happened?” I ask, anxiety knotting my stomach.
Matteo glances over his shoulder at me. His eyes roam over my face before he answers.
“My father has been kidnapped.”