Chapter 12
GIADA
For a suspended breath, nothing moves.
The lamp spills a soft halo over the bed as I perch on my knees, my body bare, feeling desperately exposed with my wimple a dark spill on the sheet and my pulse a drum I can’t quiet.
Renzo looks at me like a starving man who’s just remembered he has tastebuds.
‘Tell me if you want to stop,’ he says, voice low, ruined. ‘Say the word and I’ll burn for it alone.’
‘I don’t want to stop.’ The truth startles me with its clarity. ‘I want to… know. Be known.’
Something tight and dangerous flashes in his face. ‘Oh, I’m going to know you all right, ragazza. I’m going to know you so damn good.’
He reaches for me with his stronger arm as if he’s approaching a skittish creature, closes his hand around my waist to draw me closer to where he’s reclining on the headboard. ‘Come here, angel.’
His palm is hot on my skin, enough to make my hands tremble where they find his shoulders. He’s careful drawing me nearer, careful as if I’m made of glass, and then not careful at all when his mouth finds mine and the carefulness turns to the hottest blaze.
I gasp, then lean in, letting myself be taught.
His kiss is different tonight, not so much a storm but a building tide.
Slow at first, then stronger, filling every corner until there’s nowhere in me he hasn’t touched with breath and warmth.
He licks my mouth like it’s his favourite thing, offering his own taste of wine and something darker, something I think is the part of him he never lends to anyone.
When I open for him, he groans, a raw sound that pulls a helpless echo from my throat.
‘Tell me,’ he murmurs against my mouth. ‘What are you feeling?’
‘Frightened,’ I whisper. ‘And… not frightened.’
‘Good. More, baby. Say more things.’
‘Hot. Unsteady. Like I’m trying to stand in a moving boat.’
His laugh is a thread of sound, pleased and pained. ‘I’ve wanted you to say it. Keep saying it.’ His hands slide to my back, mapping the line of it, memorising. He moves me until I’m straddling his lap, his thigh braced under me, his breath turning rough. ‘Is this better?’
My reply is in the way my body finds him, in the tiny involuntary sound that escapes me. Heat pools low; the world narrows to a rhythm I’ve never known and somehow recognise. He watches my face as if the answer to every question he’s ever had is written there.
‘Look at you,’ he says, reverent. ‘So fucking beautiful. You’re learning me. Let me learn you back.’
He lowers his mouth to my throat. The first brush is light, a test; the second has intent.
He presses a kiss where my pulse trips, then another at the hollow above my heart.
Everywhere his mouth goes, something inside me answers, bright and startling.
I cling harder, the room tipping gently around us.
‘Too much?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Not enough,’ I hear myself contradict, and he curses softly, gratitude and hunger knotted together.
His hands are everywhere, both of them now, and I see how much stronger he’s become when his left hand grips me tight, curving, cradling, caressing. It occurs to me that perhaps this was what he was aiming for all along. And the thought thrills me way more than it should.
The hand on my hip moves me over him, and I gasp into his mouth when I feel the steel stalk of him between my legs, shamelessly imprinting on my sensitive place.
He is hovering between devouring and devotion, and I feel the battle of it in the way he pauses, steadies himself and returns to the slower pace. ‘Tell me when it’s good,’ he says. ‘Tell me when it’s not. I want the map.’
‘You already have it.’
‘Maybe.’ He nips the edge of my lip, soothing it with his tongue. ‘But I want it in your words.’
I try. It’s clumsy at first, shy, a litany of fragments. ‘Warm… dizzy… right there – yes – wait, not so – oh.’ He listens with his whole body, adjusting when I ask, pushing when I beg without knowing that I am. The shyness burns away in the asking until I’m telling him everything.
His praise is a rush of thick words, low and rough and threaded through with dominance and awe. ‘Good girl. Brave girl. Look at me. There you are.’
I can’t keep my eyes open under the praise; they seem to flutter, then fix on his. Then flutter again when desire thickens in my blood.
He holds my gaze, holds me, guides me into that rhythm again – slow, then quicker, then slow, like a tide learning the shape of a shore. My body finds a heat-staggering glide against him, and the pleasure builds with a patience that feels like being carried to a high place on someone’s shoulders.
He touches me like he’s delving back into a language he speaks fluently, with arrogant confidence and a purpose that sends heat spiralling up my spine.
His fingers trace the seam of my thighs, then over the last scrap of fabric shielding me from his gaze.
Every breath I take stutters against the wicked patience and promise in his eyes.
‘I’m going to make you come now, baby. Would you like that?’
My response is an expelled breath that ripples with yes, even though I’m not entirely sure what coming entails.
Stings of guilt have peppered my shameful exploration in the past, heavy enough to force me to abandon what the older sisters insisted was a sin, but which right now doesn’t feel like that.
At all.
On the contrary, it feels like a celebration waiting to happen when the warmth of his palm, the surety of his hold, and the way his breath catches when I soften under him, opening without thinking, makes me elated.
Like my body recognises him faster than my mind can catch up.
The room narrows to where his hand anchors me, to the slow, coaxing rhythm that steals my voice and replaces it with trembling, wanting silence.
Between one heartbeat and the next, he rips the panties from me and in a way, I’m glad it wasn’t a drawn-out thing. That he’s brought this too to the open and all I have to do is accept it.
Accept when his fingers travel up my inner thighs to my hot, wet core.
Accept when he leans in, his forehead touching mine, his lips brushing the corner of my mouth as if tasting each shiver.
‘That’s it,’ he murmurs, voice low, wrecked, intimate.
‘Let me touch your beautiful pussy. Let me feel you. Fuck, you’re wet for me. For this. Aren’t you?’
His words move through me like a pulse, tugging something deep and unnamed to the surface. My hips tilt of their own accord, my fingers twisting in his shoulders – seeking, pleading, meeting the rhythm he sets.
Every small movement, every shift of pressure, draws a trembling sound I don’t recognise as my own as his finger glides back and forth over my swollen flesh.
As he swallows the sounds I make with a kiss against my cheek, his breath breaks as if the way I melt for him is undoing him just as much. ‘Beautiful,’ he says again, rougher now. ‘You’re… God, you’re beautiful like this. Good, ride my finger just like that. Yeah, fuck yes.’
As I move back and forth, feeling very little shame and very intense pleasure, Renzo angles his head and flicks his tongue over one pebbled nipple.
Twin streams of fireworks whistle through my blood. ‘Oh!’
I look down and the sight of his broad tongue licking me, tasting my flesh, is… dizzying. Intoxicating. As is the sight of the dark, unvarnished pleasure moving over his face as he watches me.
‘More?’
‘Yes.’
‘Say my name.’
‘Renzo…’ It tastes like the sweetest honey on my tongue. Even better than the sublime cannoli Siciliani I had last night.
He shudders as if the name itself is touch. ‘Tell me what you want.’
‘I don’t know the words,’ I confess, breath catching.
‘Then show me,’ he says, and he gives me the steadiness to do it, hands sure at my hips, thigh taut beneath me, mouth at my throat, my shoulder, the curve where my breath turns to sound. At his next pass, he pauses with his finger at my entrance and his eyes intent on my face.
I know what he’s asking. What he intends to do.
My breath shudders out of my parted lips, my face flaming at the wetness I feel dripping out of me. ‘Yes, inside,’ I whisper.
He immediately presses his finger deeper. My head falls back on a moan at the feel of him, of Renzo Salvatore, inside me.
‘Fuck, yes. So tight. So fucking good. Saints take me but I’m going to enjoy fucking this tight hole.’
I moan louder but it’s nowhere near expressing the sensations ramping up inside me. My hips move, almost of their own accord, and when he encourages me, I ride him deeper, a little faster, chasing the sensation building between my legs, spreading throughout my body. Taken over my senses.
‘Oh… oh God.’
‘Normally I wouldn’t mind that, but let’s try gasping something else, hmm?’ He presses his hand deeper, grunting with satisfaction when I shudder and shake.
‘Renzo!’
‘Much better. Now, come for me, ragazza. Drench me with that sweet juice. Your man is fucking thirsty.’
Instinct tells me the only way to break this move faster is to ride that finger with everything I have. And I do.
But somewhere under the pleasure, under the heat and the startling sweetness of being wanted this deeply, a truth rises sharp as a blade.
This is too fast.
Too much.
Too powerful to be anything close to holy.
I was meant to be preparing my soul, not my body. I was meant to be stepping towards vows, towards God, not—
Not this.
Not him.
A flicker of guilt hits me, bright and serrated. It must show on my face.
He catches it instantly.
His hand slides to my jaw, thumb stroking once, slow and certain. ‘Don’t,’ he warns, eyes burning into mine. ‘Don’t pull away into that place. I won’t fight Him for you, baby.’ His voice deepens into something possessive and terrifyingly sure. ‘Because He’ll lose.’
My breath fractures. And alarmingly, I’m beginning to think that for this suspended time, in this fragile, burning moment… Renzo will win.
‘Do you feel safe?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you feel mine?’
There’s no room in me for a lie. ‘Yes.’