Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Siena’s heart was thumping too hard for her to do more than snatch ragged breaths. The hot breaths being exhaled in her neck were coming in ragged snatches, too. Through their crushed chests, she could feel Elio’s heart pounding as hard as her own.
Her fingers were still knotted in his hair. She had no recollection of him taking her other hand, but their fingers were tightly laced.
As the spasms that had engulfed her slowly seeped out of her and the world righted itself, her stupefied brain knitted itself back into thinking mode. Tears prickled her eyes.
Closing her eyes, she swallowed hard to hold the tears at bay.
The face in the crook of her neck lifted. She felt his stare on her.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded. Her thinking brain wanted her to push him off her. The rest of her wanted to hold him even tighter.
He was still inside her. She could feel his erection loosening, but he was still there. Still a part of her. The scent of their sex filled the air around them.
Oh, God, it had been beautiful, which only made the tears stab harder.
After that awful incident when she was fourteen, she’d never believed she would be capable of finding the pleasure so many other women enjoyed, had believed that part of her had been switched off.
To find it hadn’t, to discover that her body could experience bliss…
Her heart expanded with a sharp swell of emotion, and she’d lifted her head and kissed him before she even knew she was going to do it.
“Thank you,” she whispered, gazing into his silver stare.
The man who hated her, whom she’d believed would make her spend her time in their marital bed degrading herself, had made love to her with tenderness and care. He’d wanted to make it good for her. He’d wanted her to experience pleasure.
It had been the most divine experience of her life.
He breathed in deeply through his nose before dropping a gentle kiss to her mouth. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Would you care if I wasn’t?” she asked tremulously.
She’d asked a variation of that question only one night ago. His answer had been a mocking negative.
“As things are right now, yes, I would care.”
So he was feeling as thrown by what they’d just shared as she was. It shouldn’t matter. She shouldn’t care.
“I want to push you off me,” she confessed even as she scratched her nails through his hair.
“And I want you to push me off you,” he said even as he brought his mouth down for another kiss.
Another sharp swell of emotion filled her chest. “When I push you off, we go back to hating each other, don’t we?”
He closed his eyes and nodded. Looking back at her, he smoothed his fingers over her forehead. “While we have these last moments of not hating each other, assure me that I didn’t hurt you.”
She palmed his thickly stubbled cheek. “You didn’t hurt me.”
He turned his cheek to kiss her palm. “Good. I would never have treated you like I did last night if I’d known you were a virgin.”
“Why should it have made any difference?”
“I hate the air you breathe, but I never want to hurt you.”
“You just want to degrade me.”
“Wanted,” he corrected. With a deep sigh, he touched his forehead to hers and quietly said, “You need to understand, my feelings for you have always been complicated. Who you are, what you represent, everything about you. You’re a sexy, sexy woman, Siena, and the times we found ourselves in the same club or bar, and you met my eye, I would see the same awareness I felt for you, but then you would turn your nose up and move your stare away as if I were scum. ”
Only the intimacy of the moment they were sharing allowed her to admit, “You unnerved me. Your stare was always so intense.”
His intense stare gleamed. “I unnerved the sexy, glamorous, self-assured Siena Esposito?”
She slid her hand down his neck with a sigh. His skin was so beautifully smooth. “Wasn’t that your intention?”
“Yes.”
“Then why assume I was turning my nose up at you?”
“Because you were.”
“Yes, but not because you’re a Ranieri.” Elio had frightened her before she’d learned who he was. But he’d fascinated her too. Those damned vampiric eyes had drawn her like a magnet to him.
It felt like she’d spent her entire adulthood walking into bars and clubs with her gaze darting everywhere, seeking him out. It had got to the stage where she would find herself more on edge if he wasn’t there than if he was, almost as if she were disappointed at his absence…
“Because you turn your nose up at any man who shows his interest in you?”
Siena swallowed, disturbed at the train of her thoughts. Disappointed not to have seen him? She really needed to push him off before her mind played any more tricks on her, not keep gazing into his mesmerising vampiric eyes. “Not many men are as bold as you were in the way they show it.”
“Not towards you,” he conceded. “But you are not a normal woman. You’re Siena Esposito, Lorenzo Esposito’s daughter, and you have a fierce reputation of your own, which is why it never crossed my mind that someone could have hurt you enough to put you off men and relationships. Who was it?”
He asked the question so gently and casually that he caught her off guard. By the time she’d untied her tongue enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her denial sounded so feeble, even to herself, that it acted as a jolt of much-needed sanity.
She was sharing the most intimate conversation of her life with Elio Ranieri.
She was revelling in sensations and allowing hidden emotions air to breathe, and all for the man she despised, who’d married her for vengeance.
But, even though she knew it was vital, it was all she could do to blink any emotion away, put her hands on his shoulders and push. “You can get off me now.”
Eyes narrowing, he gazed at her a moment longer before rolling onto his back.
She immediately turned over and drew the bedsheets up to her chin. Without his body heat, her skin felt chilled.
“Was it Stefano? Did he hurt you?” The gentleness of tone had gone, but not the casualness.
Incapable of comprehending how someone who hated her so much could be so damned intuitive, frightened at how much she wished he was still covering her with his body, Siena drew her knees to her stomach.
“I told you before, I might be your possession, but my thoughts are my own. Whatever happened between me and Stefano is none of your business.”
That was better. Beautiful sex did not change a damned thing between. Nothing could change the fact that they were enemies.
“And I told you before, you’re my wife, and that makes you my business. If someone hurts you, they hurt me. That’s how marriage works. You and me until death do us part.”
“Yes, but when death parts us, it’s likely going to be from one of our own hands. You’d still put a bullet in my head if you thought it was necessary, and I’d do the same to you, and you giving me my first orgasm doesn’t change that.”
She felt him shift. “Your first orgasm? Are you serious?”
She came within a breath of twisting around. “You can’t have already forgotten that I was a virgin until a day ago?”
“Of course not, but I was masturbating for years before I lost my virginity.”
“Yes, but that’s because all men are wankers.”
He gave a short bark of laughter before she felt his stare on her. “Shall I ask one of your brothers if it was Stefano?”
This time, she couldn’t stop herself from whipping around to face him.
“Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “You might think you own me, Elio, but you don’t.
Whatever baggage I have belongs to me. I let you screw me, but I didn’t give you my soul because, as we have already established, neither of us has one. ”
His beautiful eyes – God, when had she started thinking of them as beautiful? – held hers. “If you don’t have a soul, then why do you look like you’re going to cry?”
Emotion punched through her again, and for one long, horrifying second, she feared he was right. Swallowing hard, she fought for control of herself. “Don’t try to make this marriage into something it isn’t. You married me for who I am, not for me, and I don’t owe you a damned thing.”
“Other than your loyalty as my wife,” he pointed out softly, reaching his hand into her hair.
“You know where my loyalty lies. If you want it, too, then it’s on you to earn it.”
Her heart thumping, she turned away from him again and wriggled to the edge of the bed. A moment later, the room plunged into darkness.
* * *
Siena woke to hazy morning light, and with a warm body compressed into her back and an arm slung over her waist.
She closed her eyes and resisted the dream-like urge to turn over and cuddle into him. That she was in the middle of the bed meant that at some point in the night, she’d made her way back to him.
This was the third morning in a row that she’d woken like this. That she felt no urge to escape before he woke frightened her more than when she’d got into bed the night she lost her virginity to him… Was that really only five nights ago?
Closing her eyes even tighter, she filled herself with the resolve needed to slip away rather than turn to him.
She shouldn’t need resolve.
She could just about forgive herself for craving sex with him, but craving his embrace was madness.
It was hard enough feigning indifference when she climbed into bed with him, her body already simmering with anticipation at the thought of him being inside her again, but when it was over, and he was lying on top of her, their bodies meshed together…
Finding the strength to push him off and turn her back on him was becoming close to impossible.
Last night, she’d held him so tightly that her arms had stubbornly ignored the commands from her brain to push him for a time that seemed to last forever.
She’d moved barely two inches when the arm she was trying to escape tightened around her, and Elio’s warm body closed the small gap she’d created.
“Not trying to escape before I’ve had my good morning kiss, are you?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.