Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Gemma
The first thing I notice when I wake up is it's too warm.
The second thing is the heavy arms across my waist. It lies across my waist, heavy, the weight of it pinning the blanket down.
I'm on my right side, facing the window, and the light coming through the curtains is gray.
Behind me there's a chest against my back, rising and falling slow, and breath moving through my hair at the crown of my head.
Luca. I asked him to stay.
Then I feel the third thing.
He's hard. Against my butt, through the blanket and his clothes. It presses into me every time he breathes.
I lie still. My heart's racing now. My skin, where his arm crosses my stomach, is hot, and the heat is spreading down instead of making me want to run.
He's asleep. If he wakes up and finds himself like this against me, I already know what he'll do. He'll pull back and put a wall of apology between us that'll last a week.
I want to see his face.
So I turn, slow, an inch at a time, lifting my shoulder and easing my hip under his arm. His breathing changes when I'm halfway around, and by the time I'm facing him, his eyes are open.
Green, and awake all at once. There's no groggy middle stage with him. Asleep, then armed, even without the gun.
He registers where his arm is. Then he registers the rest, and his jaw tightens, his weight shifts back, the arm starts to lift off me.
"Gemma." His voice is rough. "Shit. I didn't mean to—"
I press my lips to his.
He goes rigid. His mouth is warm and completely still under mine, and for three full seconds nothing in him moves, not his hands, not his breath. Okay. Maybe it wasn't the right thing to do.
His hand catches the back of my head before I get there.
Then he kisses me. His mouth opens over mine and his fingers push into my hair. The sound he makes low in his throat lands somewhere below my stomach. My hands find his chest.
His other hand comes up to my jaw. It's shaking. He must feel me notice, because he breaks the kiss and pulls back far enough to look at me. His breathing is wrecked. So is mine.
"Sorry," I say. "You were asleep, and I didn't want you to wake up and do the thing where you apologize and leave. So I went first."
He stares at me. His thumb moves along my cheekbone once, unsteady, and he doesn't take his hand away.
"You need to understand what you're doing," he says.
"I know what I'm doing."
His eyes go over my face, slow, my mouth, back up. The shaking in his hand hasn't stopped.
"If you kiss me again," he says, quiet, "I won't fucking stop. So decide now."
I lift my chin and kiss him.
The sound he makes isn't a word. It comes from low in his chest, rough, and then his weight moves and he's over me, one forearm planted by my head, his hips settling between my thighs through the blanket. The mattress dips and I sink into it under him.
He kisses me hard, no gap left for either of us to think, his tongue in my mouth and his hand fisted in my hair. I make a sound against his lips that I don't recognize as mine. My hips lift into him.
He drags the blanket down between us and his hand finds the hem of the shirt I slept in. He pulls back an inch, breath ragged.
"Arms up," he says. "Now."
I put my arms up. He strips the shirt over my head in one pull and drops it off the bed.
He goes still, and his gaze travels over me slow, my breasts, my ribs, the goosebumps rising everywhere he looks. His jaw works once.
"Cristo santo," he says, quiet.
I reach up and get my hands on him. His stomach jumps at my touch, muscle tightening under my palms, and I keep going — up his ribs, over his shoulder, down his back where the skin is smooth and hot. He shudders. I run my palms over every part of him I can reach.
"Gemma." My name breaks in the middle when my nails drag down his spine.
He drops his mouth to my throat and everything in me pulls tight. His lips are soft there but his stubble isn't, and the two together make my back arch off the mattress.
He kisses under my jaw, down to where my pulse is slamming, and he must feel it against his mouth because he groans and presses harder, teeth grazing.
"Luca—"
His mouth moves up to my ear, his breath is hot inside it, and the moan that comes out of me is loud in the quiet room. Embarrassing, honestly, but I'm past caring. My fingers dig into his shoulders and my thighs tighten around his hips. I can feel him hard against me through his sweatpants.
He curses into my ear, low and filthy, and rocks down against me once. Sparks run from where we're pressed together all the way up through my stomach.
Then he lifts his head.
His forearms cage my face and he holds himself there, hips still, breathing like he's run stairs.
His pupils have swallowed most of the green.
A muscle stands out in his neck from the effort of not moving, and both his hands are trembling where they frame my head.
He could take anything he wanted right now.
"Tell me you're sure," he says, and his voice is scraped down to gravel. "Because I'm one fucking second from not being able to hear the answer."
My answer comes out steady. That's the part that surprises me.
"Fuck me, Luca."
His eyes close for one second. When they open, whatever was holding him back is gone.
Luca
I hook my fingers in the waistband of her pants. She lifts her hips to help me. I pull them down her legs, underwear with them, and drop both on the floor.
"Luca," she says, and stops there, like my name is the whole sentence.
"I know." My voice comes out lower than I intend. "Let me look at you."
The dawn through the blinds puts gray light across her stomach. I put my mouth there first, below her ribs. She's warm.
Her breathing changes. Shorter.
I move down her thigh, kissing as I go. Her knee. The inside of her calf. Then I lift her leg, hold her ankle in my hand and I kiss my way down from her ankle to the back of her knee, then up again along the soft inside of her thigh. She makes a sound in her throat.
I set her leg down and put my hands on her knees.
"Spread them," I say. "Open for me, Gemma. All the way."
She hesitates for one breath. Then she does it, slow, watching my face the whole time, and I look at her pussy, wet already, pink and open. My mouth waters.
"Cristo," I say.
"What?" Her voice is thin.
"You're fucking beautiful. That's what."
Her cheeks go pink. She looks away, toward the window, like she can't hold the compliment and my eyes at the same time.
I bring one finger to my mouth and lick it, and her eyes come back to me fast. I hold her gaze while I press that finger inside her, slow, feeling her heat close around me, and her back arches off the mattress.
The moan she lets out is quiet at first, then breaks open at the end. She grabs the sheet with both fists.
"That's it," I say. I move my finger in her, unhurried, learning her. "Look how wet you are. You've been thinking about this."
"Yes."
I press my thumb against her clit and rub small circles, and her hips lift into my hand like they've made a decision without her.
"Tell me how it feels," I say.
"Good. God — good, don't—"
"Don't what?"
"Don't stop."
"I'm not going to fucking stop." I press harder with my thumb and she gasps. "I'm going to make you come with my fingers, then with my mouth, and you're going to be loud about it, because I want to hear you."
"Luca—"
"You like it when I talk like this. Say it."
"I like it," she says, breathless.
I can't wait anymore. I pull my finger out of her and I lower myself between her legs. Her thighs are warm against the sides of my face. I kiss the inside of one, then the other, then I put my mouth on her pussy and lick, one long slow stroke. She cries out, her hand flies into my hair and grips.
I lick her again, slower, and her whole body shudders under my hands.
"Oh God." Her hand tightens in my hair.
I close my mouth over her clit, sucking, and her hips jerk up against my face. I press my forearm across her stomach to hold her down. She fights it. She fights it because her body wants to move. I don't let her, and that makes her louder.
"Luca — Luca, I can't—"
She can. I keep going, licking and sucking in a rhythm I don't change. Her thighs start to tremble against my ears. Her breathing turns ragged, then stops holding any pattern at all.
She comes screaming. A scream, full and open, her whole body seizing under my arm while her heels dig into the mattress.
I stay on her through it, working her with my mouth.
She screams again, shorter, sharper, and then her hands are in my hair pulling my head away from her pussy because she can't take any more.
She's still shaking. Her thighs won't stop.
I sit back on my knees and look at her. Flushed down to her chest, hair stuck to her forehead, eyes half open and glassy. My jaw is wet with her. I don't wipe it.
I get my pants off, one leg at a time. When I hook my thumbs in my boxers and push them down, her eyes drop and stay there.
"Wow," she says.
The laugh comes out of me before I know it's there.
"Wow," I repeat. "That's the review."
"Shut up." She's smiling. Shaking and smiling.
I take myself in my hand and stroke once, slow, watching her watch me. "You're going to do better than wow before I'm done. You're going to say my name so many times you'll be sick of it."
Her breath catches.
"Once I'm inside you, there's no fucking going back. Not for me. I don't do halfway. You understand what I'm telling you?"
She holds my eyes. The gray-blue of hers is steady now, the shaking gone.
"Get in," she says.
"Turn around," I say. "Knees. Hold the headboard and don't let go."
She turns. She kneels up on the mattress facing the wall, her hands closing around the top rail of the headboard, her back to me, and the sight of her ass nearly finishes me before I've touched her.
I move in behind her, knees to knees, my chest against her spine. She's warm everywhere. My left hand slides up her sternum, over her collarbone, and closes around her throat. I pull her head back onto my shoulder so her ear is at my mouth.
"Feel that?" I say. "That's my hand on your throat and my cock against your ass. In one second I'm going to fuck you until the only word left in your head is my name. Breathe, amore."
She breathes. I line up and push inside her.
Tight, wet heat takes me in, and I have to stop halfway and grit my teeth for a second. Then I bury myself the rest of the way. She cries out, and I start to move.
I fuck her hard. The headboard knocks the wall in time with my hips, and she's screaming again, my name. Her body pushes back to meet me. I keep my hand at her throat and my mouth at her ear and I tell her she's mine now, mine, every inch, and she sobs yes.
I won't last. I know my own body and it's already climbing, too fast, too much.
"Gemma—" It's the only warning I can manage.
I pull out and come across her back and her ass in long pulses, my forehead dropping to her shoulder, my breath tearing out of me. My whole frame shudders.
She sags against the headboard, gasping. I hold her hip so she doesn't fall.
"Okay," she says to the wall. "Okay."
I press my mouth to the back of her neck, to the damp hair there, and I say the only thing that's true.
"That was only the very beginning."