Chapter 15 Lucia
LUCIA
The warehouse is half-dark, cavernous, smelling of salt and rust and gunpowder, and it should be the last place on earth where anything tender happens.
But tenderness isn’t what’s driving us.
Adrenaline still claws through my bloodstream, sharp as broken glass. My hands are shaking, my heart hasn’t remembered how to slow down, and Giovanni is right in front of me—blood on his shirt, fury in his eyes, his body a barricade between me and the world.
He barks something in Sicilian over his shoulder but I’m too enraptured by the shape of his lips to clock what he just said.
His men hesitate.
A rumble builds under the fingers I still have splayed on his chest. “Go,” he snarls. “A hundred feet, minimum. And cover your ears if you value your lives.”
The absurdity of it hits me, hot and hysterical.
Even now, even here, he is Giovanni Dragoni.
Commanding. Controlling. Half-feral.
He turns back to me, and the dark savage look in his eyes steals whatever breath I have left.
“My unconventional wife,” he murmurs, voice roughened by something darker than anger. “I offer you a nice, marital bed, and you decide you want to be fucked for the first time against a wall in a warehouse in Red Hook?”
I lift my chin, fight and lust still swirling through my blood stream. “I want what I want. Are you going deny me?”
A look flits through his eyes, and in another light I would’ve called it helpless surrender, even a droll acceptance of his powerlessness where I’m concerned. But in the next breath those same eyes are firing up with purpose and challenge. With heat so feral and primal, my heart flipped twice over.
Powerful hands circle the back of my thighs, and in the next moment, I’m lifted high, pinned harder against the wall. Wedged so tight, the imprint of his cock against my heated centre is immediate and undeniable.
“Deny you? Absolutely not. But you might wish you’d waited for a better moment that this, me duci,” he says. “Because I cannot guarantee I will be gentle.”
My fingers delve into his hair, gripping the strands tight, then tighter, glorying in his hiss, in the grip that convulses at my waist.
Then moves high over my ribs to cup my breasts.
It’s my turn to gasp and shake as his fingers pinch my nipples, displaying the lack of gentleness he warned me about. But far from being alarmed, my senses screech in delight, my back bowing into his touch.
“Diu miu, you don’t care, do you?”
Staring into eyes black with hunger, I flick out my tongue, slowly lick his bottom lip. “About you not being gentle with me? Not tonight, Gio.”
With a groan, he cups the back of my head, angles his face. And then he’s delving back in too, capturing my mouth in a decadent kiss that’s wet, demanding, consuming. His other hands continues pinching and tormenting my nipple, drawing gasps and groans he devours as his due.
Between my thighs, I’m shamefully, hopelessly slick. Insanely needy and unable to stop my hips from rolling into his seeking friction to ease the ache.
He mutters more filthy words as he meets my frantic movements, the steel pipe of his erection scaring and thrilling me in equal measure.
I whimper in protest when his hand leaves my breast but it’s only so he can shove down the neckline of my dress, yanking it down with my bra so my breasts spill out.
He pulls back to stare down at me, his nostrils flared wide. “You’re so fucking beautiful.” Swooping down, he captures one nipple in his mouth, groaning as he draws the diamond-hard nub into his mouth, rolling it over his tongue before he sucks hard.
“Oh God!” The back of my head bumps the hard stone wall but even that slight discomfort only heightens every sensation singing through my veins as I hold his head tighter to me, pleading hoarsely for more more more.
He distributes his attention between both peaks, suckling until it’s sore and I’m dripping between my thighs. The scent of my arousal rises to mix with the dank, abrasive smells from our disturbing surroundings.
“I smell you, and Christo, you wreck my head so good.”
“Gio…please.” I’m not sure what I’m even begging for, but when his hands slide beneath my dress, between my bottom and the wall and I feel the hard tug of my panties being ripped off, I cry out in delight.
One hand emerges with my tattered garment in his fist, a feral smile on his face as he lifts it to his nose to inhale long and deep, his manic eyes boring into mine before he stuffs it into his pocket.
Then he’s yanking his belt loose with that same hand, lowering his zipper.
And for the first time since we met, and married and parted and came back together, I feel the naked flesh of my husband’s cock against my pussy.
Eyes pinned hot and implacable on mine, he glides his massive shaft languorously through my dripping folds, his breath emerging in soft pants as one shudder after another moves through both of us. “Is this what you want, dragunnida? What you couldn’t wait until we got home to take?”
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Until a frantic scream builds in my throat. Until my hands convulse on his shoulders, attempting to move an immovable mountain.
“Answer me, Lucia,” he slurs hoarsely.
“Gio?”
His brows lift. “Si, duci?”
“Shut up and fuck me,” I whisper, shaking with need and fury and everything I’ve been holding back since the island. “Or I swear to God, I’ll shoot you again myself.”
A laugh tears out of him, sharp and disbelieving.
Then it fades.
His gaze drops to my mouth, to my throat, to the pulse beating there like an invitation.
“You take my breath away, Lucia,” he says hoarsely. “Fuck. I haven’t taken a single breath since the moment I set eyes on you. And not all for the best reasons.”
“You’re still talking,” I challenge, even as my body betrays me, leaning closer. “Maybe you don’t want me that bad—”
He moves.
In one brutal, inevitable motion, his hands frame my face as though he needs to be sure I’m real, and his mouth crashes into mine.
The kiss is even less gentle than before. It is hunger and fear and possession all tangled together, a vow spoken in the only language he trusts.
I make a sound I don’t recognise.
His breathing stutters. “Say it,” he growls against my lips. “Say you’re here.”
“I’m here,” I whisper.
“And you’re not running.”
“I can’t,” I admit, the truth ripping out of me. “Not anymore.”
Something in his expression fractures. Relief and rage and devotion so sharp it hurts.
His hands slide down my body like he’s memorising, like he’s afraid if he doesn’t touch every inch he’ll lose me again.
And then he notches his broad head at my entrance and the world narrows to sensation, to heat, to the unbearable rightness of finally crossing the line we’ve been circling for months.
Giovanni’s control is a thin veneer now, stretched over something primal.
“You’re mine,” he rasps, voice shaking with it. “From your pretty head to the tips of your fucking toes. No one else will ever have you, Lucia. Accept this. So we can live in harmony.”
Yesterday’s me would’ve argued. Fought and challenged such blatant possession and declaration of ownership.
But the me of today, watching the savage need in his eyes destroy the words before they form? I swallow, overwhelmed by the gruffness of him, by the rabid, reverent way he looks at me like I am both his sin and his salvation.
Then he stops waiting for permission.
“It’s going to hurt, baby. And you’re going to scream for me. Scream your pain and your pleasure so it echoes in my mind for all my life.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes—”
I’m barely done with the last yes before he surges inside me.
I scream because yes, it hurts. And yes, I’ve waited what feels like a lifetime for this.
No way his men missed that. But I don’t care.
And apparently neither does he, because he’s pulling out slowly, his eyes riveted to the place we’re connected.
And then I see what’s got his entire focus.
The traces of blood on his cock.
Virgin blood.
My primitive, possessive husband’s chest heaves and his eyes are so dark I can barely make out the pupils.
I swallow, overcome by the moment, by the gruffness in his tone. By the wild, rabid look in his eyes.
Then, apparently done teasing and tormenting, he slams back into me.
He’s not giving me mercy and I want none.
He’s just proven to me how savage he is about protecting what’s important to him. And I’m fully on board with him displaying that savagery between my legs.
So I throw my head back against the filthy wall, scream again when he pistons in and out. In and out.
Driving me higher with each thrust, then dragging me down on top of his rigid shaft.
Stars dance behind eyes I didn’t remember closing.
My nails dig into his jacket. Then dive beneath, craving skin-to-skin contact.
I hear a rip and I know I’ve dislodged several buttons.
But his chiselled perfection is bare to me and I whimper in delight and hunger as I lean forward, lick his collarbone, uncaring that I taste his blood, drag my hands down his torso.
Then lower. To where we’re joined.
I open my eyes to look down and his gaze follows as he shudders.
“Go on. Touch yourself,” he commands gutturally. “Show me how my little virgin pleased herself before I came along to take over the job.”
It’s absurd that after all we’ve been through, all we’ve done to each other in the short weeks I’ve been back, that this should make me blush.
But heat suffuses my face and my head drops a little even as my hand creeps lower.
For a moment I’m arrested by the sight of Giovanni moving inside me. By the pleasure he’s dragging out with every surge of his cock.
“Lucia,” he warns at my prolonged hesitation. “Do it. Now.”
I touch myself, stroke the swollen bundle of nerves.
My muscles clench as the electricity charging through me doubles.
I cry out, uncaring, unashamed.
His men can hear.
Let them. Let the whole city hear.
This is what it means to belong to Giovanni Dragoni.