The Moon & His Tides (Impossible Universe Trilogy #1)

1. Sebastian

1

SEBASTIAN

S he was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

I knew a lot of beautiful women. Not only because I was Italian and my country was a great producer of three things––carbs, cars, and gorgeous people––but because my mother and three sisters were, biased or not, the most beautiful women I’d ever met.

Until I saw her.

I shouldn’t have been able to discern the curve of her delicate features in the murky light that illuminated the car from the passing streetlights, but she sat behind my seat, wearing a shade of white that picked up the light like a beacon and made her shine like an angel.

She looked like one.

My hands clenched reflexively on the steering wheel as I thought about peeling her slim form out of the fancy silk dress she wore. I knew she’d be slight and pale all over, pure like freshly fallen snow.

I wanted to mark all that fine, classy skin with my workingman’s hands, debase those delicate ears with foreign- accented filth as I described to her all the ways I was going to make her come for me.

She was beautiful, but she looked like a woman who hadn’t had a good orgasm in a long time. Of course, some women showed the promise of beauty, finely shaped and gorgeous like an ornate vase but filled, alas, with nothing.

I didn’t believe this beauty was that.

No.

Not when her wide pale eyes, fixed on a mark outside the moving vehicle, slid just a hair toward me whenever she thought I was preoccupied with the road. When her breath puffed softly from her moistened, parted lips, and her small hands––hands I wanted to fill up ––curled and uncurled restlessly in her lap.

And that was only the first time I drove her.

The second was midday two days later, and the light was bright but grey under London’s habitual low ceiling of clouds. My palms sweat inside the supple leather driving gloves the luxury car service provided all their drivers with, but I affected a casual pose of legs braced and arms crossed loosely while I waited for her outside Harrods.

She was wearing white again, this time a neat little suit under an undone coat that would have been demure to the point of dowdiness but for the fact that she paired the low-cut blazer with a sheer white camisole as thin and clingy as condensation against the slight swell of her breasts.

My mouth went dry, but I managed to take the heavy shopping bags from her and open the door to the Rolls Royce smoothly.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Meyers,” I’d said because it was the policy at Luxury Regent Car Service to do so.

I had a dossier provided by the company with all of her details.

Savannah Meyers, wife of Adam Meyers, the very famous British actor. Preference for classical music, heated interiors even on warm days, bottled Evian, and unsalted Marcona almonds.

So she was married.

It didn’t matter. She was so out of my league it felt blasphemous just standing too close to her. Even then, I wasn’t the sort of man who thought marriage was sacrosanct, at least not to most.

My father had cheated on my mother every day of my life. If not with other women, certainly with booze, cards, and shady backroom deals with Made Men.

But Savannah was married to Adam Meyers, a man I’d admired from afar since I was fourteen and fluent enough in English to watch every movie I could get my hands on. He was my idol, and his wife , his gorgeous wife, was in a car with me. There was something disturbingly sexy about that, about knowing his hands had been on her. I imagined I could see the marks they’d made on her skin like a highlighter, emphasizing all her feminine curves to lewd heights.

I got a whiff of her scent when I opened the door for her. Lilac or something sweetly floral, something clean and classy that probably cost hundreds of pounds because it came in an upmarket bottle.

My dick hardened.

I watched her as I pulled out into the street and began the journey to her home in Chelsea. Her eyes were once again fixed out the window, but her lips, painted a deep raspberry that I wanted to trace with my tongue, were tipped up at the corners in an enigmatic smile. One hand played at the low edge of her flimsy camisole, thumbing the lace border between her fingers.

A growl worked low in my throat as I thought about taking that lace in my teeth and tearing it in two. My animal brain wondered what kind of sound she would make as I exposed her, and it settled on a soft gasp, the noise of a damsel in distress.

Only I wouldn’t save her.

I’d ruin her.

Right there in the back of the Rolls, her berry lipstick smeared across the window as I held her face against the glass and worked myself into her tight pussy, her cum dripping onto the smooth leather seats as she convulsed around my driving cock.

The low edge of my growl worked its way up my throat before I could contain it. I flashed my gaze up to the rearview mirror and caught her wide, almost childlike blue eyes. I felt that gasp like a hot grip around my cock.

She tore her eyes away as a flush the same color as her lipstick warmed her pale skin.

I’d never been so turned on in my life, yet I’d seen next to nothing of her sweet body and knew even less about her life.

Che cavolo ! She didn’t even know my name.

Someone honked at me when I waited too long at a green light, and I cursed under my breath.

If I wasn’t careful, I’d run us off the road, and I needed this shitty job like Catholics needed the Pope. It was my lifeline. If I lost it, I couldn’t afford the rent in the one-bedroom apartment I leased with four other flatmates in Shoreditch. I wouldn’t be able to pursue the acting gig that had brought me to London in the first place, a leading role in a theatre company on the outskirts of the city.

If nothing came of it after the play’s run ended before Christmas, I’d have to slink back to Naples, back to my mother and sisters without the money to support them or the out to take them away from our stinking homeland. I knew exactly what would happen if I went back. I’d be railroaded into joining Tossi and his crew in our local Camorra affiliate.

I’d spent my entire youth working to stay away from the Mafia, and there was no way in hell, even for a woman as beautiful as Savannah Meyers, that I was going there now.

Despite my conviction, when she spoke, ten minutes into what would be a thirty-minute drive thanks to the late Monday afternoon traffic clogging London proper, I almost crashed the car.

“I’d prefer classical, Chopin or Bach if you have it.”

I didn’t hear a word.

My mind locked on the crystalline lilt of her words, the way they softly clicked together like chimes in a breeze.

“Excuse me?”

She asked again while I just stared at her like a stronzo .

“Sorry,” I said, flashing her a wide grin because even though I was probably younger than her and definitely not good enough for her, I couldn’t help but flirt. It was instinctual. “Your speaking voice is dolcissima .”

A frown folded the skin between her eyebrows. It made her look both haughty and adorable. I bit back my grin.

“You’re Italian,” she guessed.

“ Parla italiano? ”

There was humor in her voice but not in her carefully schooled face as she said, “No, not at all. I’m afraid English is it for me.”

I shrugged. “Lucky you. It’s a difficult one to learn.”

She shifted just slightly forward, but it thrilled me like it had when I was a boy and I’d caught a fish on the line, reeling it in, playing it slow but steady toward me.

“You seem to speak it very well,” she said, and I realized belatedly that she was American.

I grinned at her in the rearview as I flipped on the indicator and turned left into Chelsea. “My father was Irish.”

She raised her eyebrows, her mouth a perfect deep pink circle of shock. “Interesting combination. Hot-blooded, I suppose?”

I winked at her. “Passionate is my definition of choice.”

She smiled slightly. “I’m sure. And what brings a passionate Irish-Italian to dreary, proper London?”

“The women,” I said with a smirk. “I didn’t have enough money to make it to America, so I figured England was the next best thing.”

Her laugh was delighted. “My accent betrays me.”

I shrugged. “It’s charming.”

“Not more so than you,” she returned, those big blue eyes sparkling with humor.

“Ah, such a compliment from la duchessa , I will treasure it,” I teased her.

“Oh please, do stop speaking in Italian before I disgrace myself by going from ‘duchess’ to ‘pile of mush on the floor.’”

“I can’t say I haven’t turned a woman into a ‘pile of mush on the floor’ before, but usually, it involved more than just my voice,” I teased.

We smiled at each other in the rearview mirror for a moment before she seemed to remember herself, and I returned my eyes to the road. I could feel the air shift as she closed herself off again, tugging the mantle of class and poise around her shoulders like a mink coat.

“Classical,” Mrs. Meyers reminded me softly, primly. “Bach, if you have it.”

She didn’t speak or look at me for the rest of the trip.

But it didn’t matter; the damage was done. I was hooked on her brand of class, on the idea of stealing that wealth for myself and dirtying it up.

I went home that night and fisted my cock to an intense orgasm, picturing all the ways I’d do just that.