Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Isabella
The rain doesn’t let up. It hammers, pools in the cracks between the pavers, and runs in cold rivulets down the back of my neck, yet I cannot feel any of it.
All that registers is him. The heat of his hands through the wet fabric of my dress.
The way his words have settled low in my stomach and fucking detonated.
I’ll fuck you right here and let the rain wash the rest of him off you.
“Yes.”
His hands are already on me before the word leaves my mouth.
One slides through my soaking hair, gripping the roots, and he kisses me so hard I taste rain on his lips.
The scorching pressure of his mouth presses down through my chest, a burning heat radiating through my stomach and beyond, as if a hot iron has been branded onto my very core.
I push into it and give it straight back.
My hand is on his throat, his skin slick, cold and warm all at once, and he groans against my lips.
His mouth breaks from mine and moves to my throat, shifting down the column of my neck, rainwater and skin, and bites at the base of it, teeth pressing in and holding. I tip my head back against the weight of his hand in my hair as his tongue traces the mark he just made.
His other hand pushes the soaked straps of my dress clean off my shoulders, and his mouth follows, open and hungry along my collarbone.
I sense his control slipping as his lips grow less patient.
His hand lets go of my hair and shoves the hem of my dress up my thighs, palms scorching against cold, wet skin.
I can’t help myself. I’m so turned on that I roll my hips forward slowly, detect his hard cock, and what I do to him.
Lorenzo’s forehead drops to my shoulder.
His breath is ragged against my skin, and his hands on my thighs have gone completely still.
He suppresses a ripple through his chest, and I fucking love every second of it.
Lorenzo, who controls every room he walks into, every conversation, every outcome, undone by the roll of my hips in the rain. So I do it again.
“You’re fucking killing me, Bella,” he says, the words coming out rough, pressed against my shoulder, then his hands glide between my thighs, and he pushes my underwear to one side.
The second his fingers find me, I stop breathing entirely. Two fingers move inside me in slow deep strokes, his thumb finding my clit. His mouth is back at my throat.
The sound he makes against my skin is feral.
“Fuck, Bella.” His lips press to my neck, my jaw, the words hot against my wet skin. He says my name like he is tasting it.
His fingers move deeper, his thumb pressing harder, and my hips roll forward, chasing it. “You’re fucking soaked for me.”
“It’s the rain,” I say.
“That’s not rain, Bella.” His mouth comes to my ear, the tone of his voice dropping. “That’s how much you want me.”
His thumb skims my clit and my whole body pulls tight. I press my face into his shoulder, close my eyes, and let the sensation take me—the deep, rolling pressure of his fingers, the precise, maddening work of his thumb, the rain on my back, and his heat everywhere else.
A low moan rumbles in my chest, escaping like a breath I can’t hold, as every nerve ending I possess seems to alight on the spot where his hand moves against me.
He pulls me closer causing his fingers to delve deeper.
I move against his hand and take control, rolling my hips to the rhythm that drives the pressure higher. The moans leave me.
“Look at me,” he says.
I lift my head and see his eyes are dark, rain running in rivulets down every line of his face and dripping from his jaw.
“Don’t stop,” I tell him.
“Stop?” He says almost amused. “What would you do if I stopped right now, Bella?” His fingers go entirely still. I make a sound of outrage and roll my hips, trying to recreate the friction he is withholding.
His fingers thrust deep and curl, causing me to cry out.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, as he starts to move again, harder this time. I grab his wet shirt and hold on.
His mouth is at my ear. “You have the most perfect pussy I’ve ever touched in my life. You know that? The way you feel around my fingers right now—” He curls them again and I moan loudly into his neck. “That sound. That’s fucking mine. Every single sound you make from now on is mine.”
His thumb circles faster and the pressure climbs sharp and fast. “You own every fucking part of me. You understand that? Every fucking part.”
The pressure peaks.
It’s fast, and I don’t try to muffle it as his fingers work through every second without mercy.
His spare hand dives into my hair again, and he pulls my head back, fully exposing my throat. His eyes drop to it for a moment, with an expression that is purely predatory, before they come back to mine.
I am right there, right on the edge of it, his fingers still moving, thumb still working that same devastating circle.
A tremor hums deep within me, a coiled spring at the base of my spine.
His gaze holds mine captive. The air crackles with an unspoken tension, and I can only stare like a prisoner to his intent.
“Eyes on me,” he commands, leaving no room for negotiation. His fist tightens in my hair, holding my face exactly where he wants it, tipped up toward his, exposed. “When you come, you look at me. You understand? You look at the man who did this to you.”
The orgasm breaks. Starting deep where his fingers are buried and radiating outward in long violent waves, through my thighs and up my spine and into my chest. I am loud, embarrassingly loud, as his name and my moans leave my mouth.
My back arches against his grip causing my whole body to curve.
He keeps his fingers working through every single second of it, drawing it out, extending it past the point I think I can bear.
Lorenzo pushes my face toward his and kisses me. His mouth swallows the sounds still coming out of me. He’s unraveling. His kiss, once a forceful claiming thing, now feels like a desperate need—a torrent he can’t control, no longer something he’s doing to me, but something he’s lost within.
I understand, then, that my sounds do to him what his hands do to me.
So I give him every single one of them. Every sound my orgasm pulls from me, I feed directly into his mouth.
Every rolling wave of oversensitivity, every sharp, bright pulse where his thumb still moves, I let it all out against his lips and experience what it does to me.
His kisses turn harder and hungrier before he pulls back from my mouth.
He removes his fingers from me, and the loss draws a small sound from my throat.
Both of us are breathing like we have finished running a marathon. His eyes drop to my mouth, to my swollen lips, and something shifts in his expression, something darker moving through the hunger already there.
He lifts his hand, and his thumb traces my bottom lip.
“If you weren't hurt, Bella, I would fuck this mouth,” he says, eyes meeting mine. “I would tell you to get on your fucking knees.”
I hold his gaze, slide off his lap, and sink to my knees on the wet stone.
"Are you sure, Bella, because I don't know if I can be gentle once I start."
He stands up, looking down at me as rain runs down his face.
At this moment he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
I want to give this to him. I want to erase the feel of my brother's fingerprints from my face and replace it with him, no matter if it hurts.
My hands go to his trousers. I can feel him through the fabric, hard and straining, and I take my time with the button, the zip, watching his face the whole time while I do it, watching his jaw work and the way his chest rises and falls.
When I free his hard cock, I wrap my hand around him, and his breath punches out hard.
I lean forward, run the tip of my tongue over the bead of precum on the head of his cock, and look up at him through wet lashes before I take him into my mouth properly.
His head falls back, and the groan that leaves him is long, coming from deep in his chest. I hollow my cheeks and take him as deep as I can, holding it there to let him pulse against my tongue. His thighs lock rigid beneath my hands.
“Fuck.” The word barely makes it out. “Fucking hell, Bella.”
I pull back slowly. Achingly slow. My tongue, a slick, sensitive map, traces the underside of him, its every ridge and pulsing vein a vivid sensation against my own. Through lashes still beaded with rain, I glance up and catch the gleam in his eyes.
I do it again. My warm mouth moves down his hard shaft, tongue pressed flat, taking my time. I hold it there for a few moments before sliding back up. When I slide back up and reach the head, I seal my lips around the tip and suck softly. His hand grips my hair.
“Stop.” His voice is unsteady. “Stop doing that, or I swear to God, you will fucking make me come quicker.”
I smirk and do it once more.
The sound that comes out of him is guttural, and his fist tightens in my hair hard enough to sting, and I moan at the pain of it.
“Your fucking mouth, Bella,” he says, before his hips begin to move.
One hand is fisted in my wet hair, but the restraint doesn’t last. I take more of him, hollow my cheeks, and suck hard on every withdrawal.
He loses control and takes over.
Holding me exactly where he wants me as he finds his own rhythm.
It’s deep, urgent and relentless, his hips driving forward in short, powerful strokes, fucking my mouth with the focused intensity he brings to everything, and the sounds coming from him are nothing like the Lorenzo anyone else gets to hear.
Low rough grunts that punctuate every thrust, involuntary and unguarded.
His breathing is ragged and I work my tongue against him while he moves, pressing it flat to the underside, finding the sensitive ridge just below the head that makes his rhythm stutter every fucking time.
His hips drive forward, harder this time, and I take it.
The sounds above me are barely human, a deep, broken groan that the rain only partly swallows. I moan around him, aware of him throbbing against my tongue.
“Moan again,” he says, voice desperate as he unravels. “Do that again, Bella.”
I moan and suck harder, and his whole body shudders as his rhythm becomes urgent and frantic. There’s no more restraint or careful, measured strokes from Lorenzo, just him using my mouth and losing his mind doing it.
“I have thought about this mouth every single day since I fucking married you.” The words come out in fractured ragged breaths as his hips drive forward in a rhythm he has stopped pretending to control.
“Every time you sat across from me. Every time you argued with me. Every time I had to sit there and watch your mouth move, thinking about nothing but having it exactly where it is right now.”
A deep groan tears out of him as I hollow my cheeks. “This is all I have thought about. You. Your mouth like this, every fucking day.”
I take him as deep as I can and then swallow around him. It hurts my jaw, but I push through the pain for him.
“Oh fuck, Bella, I’m going to fucking…”
His face when he comes is the most unguarded thing I have ever seen in him.
His head drops back, throat exposed to the rain, jaw falling open, and every hard controlled line of him dissolves at once.
A deep broken groan tears out of him that starts low and climbs, his hands pulling me in rather than back, and he pulses against my tongue in long rolling waves.
His cum is hot as I take everything, swallowing each pulse down.
His hands tremble in my hair as I listen to the sounds of him still coming.
Eventually, his hands loosen in my hair as if the sensation is returning to them slowly. His chest heaves as I pull back slowly and free his cock from my mouth.
I meet his eyes.
He looks down at me, rain running down his face, jaw loose, chest still shaking with the effort of breathing. His thumb traces my bottom lip with a strange sort of tenderness.
“Bella,” he says. His hands gently cradle my face as the rain falls between us, and he looks at me like I am the only fixed point in the world. He pulls me to my feet.
“I love you.”
Simple.
Certain.
Immovable.
“I loved you the moment you walked in wearing that black wedding dress and told everyone to fuck off.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, and his eyes never leave mine. “I was done the second I saw you. I have been done every second since.”
“I love you,” I tell him. “I love you, Lorenzo.”
Something in his face breaks open completely. He pulls me against his chest, his arms cross at my back, and his face drops into my wet hair. He holds on with the grip of a man who has found the one thing he refuses to lose. I press my face into his neck and hold on just as hard.
The rain falls softly around us. Neither of us speaks for a long time.
His hand moves slowly through my wet hair, and then he pulls back just enough to look at me, his eyes dropping over my face with that particular focus of his, the one that sees everything.
“Your father and your brother,” he says quietly. “They will never come near you again. I am going to make sure of that. You will never stand in a room and feel trapped by either of them again. Not in my house. Not anywhere.”
His hand cups my jaw. “That‘s a promise, Bella.”
“Lorenzo, I need you to listen to me.”
I press my palm flat against his chest, feeling the steady, thrumming pulse of his heart beneath my hand, a solid rhythm against my skin.
“I need you to be careful.” My voice drops, and something raw moves through it that I can’t stop. “I have lost people I love to this world, and I can’t… if I lost you.”
My throat closes around the words. “If something happened to you, I wouldn’t survive it. Do you understand me? If I lost you the way I lost Ethan, I wouldn’t survive.”
His expression shifts entirely. Both hands come to my face as his eyes search mine, and what moves through them is not the alpha certainty of a moment ago but something deeper, quieter, and more devastating.
“Look at me,” he says softly.
My eyes meet his.
“I am not Ethan.” His thumbs brush my cheeks. “And I’m not going anywhere. I have survived this world for a very long time, and I intend to keep surviving it.” His forehead rests against mine. “You’re not going to lose me.”
Tears escape my eyes, and the rain takes it away. “Promise me, Lorenzo,” I whisper.
“I fucking promise you, Isabella.”
I close my eyes and press into him. His arms come back around me as the rain falls, and this time I let myself believe that we might just survive this world that is ours.