Chapter Twenty-Three What He Waited For
The morning after Elena told him she loved him, Dante didn't leave for the city at all.
He sent word to his men that he wasn't to be disturbed — an act so unprecedented that Marco, relaying the message to the rest of the staff, reportedly checked twice to make sure he'd heard correctly — and spent the day doing nothing that resembled the Don of the Moretti family at all.
He lay in bed with Elena until well past noon, tracing lazy patterns against her spine, reading passages of her favorite battered paperback aloud in a voice gone rough and unhurried, stopping every few pages to press his mouth to her shoulder, her jaw, the soft skin below her ear, as though he simply couldn't help himself.
"You're going to fall behind on business," she murmured, laughing, when he abandoned the book entirely to trail kisses down her throat.
"Business can survive one day without me." His hand slid beneath the hem of her shirt, splaying warm against her stomach. "I've spent fifteen years making sure of that. I intend to collect on it."
"Collect how?"
"Let me show you." His voice had dropped, gone rough and unsteady in a way she'd never heard from him before — the sound of a man who had spent fifteen years mastering every muscle in his body suddenly losing his grip on all of it at once.
He undressed her fast this time, none of the earlier patience surviving the look she'd given him, his hands shaking faintly as he worked at buttons and clasps like a man starved.
"I've thought about this all morning," he admitted against her throat, voice wrecked.
"Watching you sleep, watching you laugh at that damn book — I couldn't concentrate on a single word of business today because every thought I had came back to this.
To you." He nipped at her collarbone, hard enough to make her gasp, his control fraying visibly with every sound she made.
"I don't want to be gentle right now, Elena.
I don't think I know how. Tell me to stop and I will, but God help me, I don't want to. "
"Don't stop," she breathed, arching into him, her own hands just as urgent, dragging his shirt over his head. "Don't you dare stop."
That seemed to be all the permission he needed.
He kissed his way down her body with none of his earlier restraint, hungry and unhurried in intent but rough in execution, groaning against her skin like a man who'd lost a fight he'd barely tried to win.
By the time he settled between her thighs, Elena was trembling, arching into every drag of his mouth, his name breaking from her in a way that made him growl against her skin like it was the sweetest sound he'd ever heard.
"Dante —" Her fingers tangled in his hair, tugging, and he answered by dragging her closer, rough and unrelenting now, all patience burned away, until she came apart around his mouth with a cry she couldn't have muffled if she'd tried.
He kissed his way back up her body fast, almost desperate, before finally settling over her, forearms braced either side of her head, his eyes dark and half-wild as he looked down at her flushed and wanting beneath him — every ounce of his usual iron control visibly gone.
"Tell me what you want," he rasped, his voice barely his own.
"You. All of you. Now, please —"
He didn't need telling twice. He drove into her hard, no careful inch-by-inch this time, a groan tearing out of him at how perfectly she took him, his hips setting a rhythm that had nothing measured about it at all.
"Christ, Elena," he bit out against her throat, hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise, "I have never wanted anything the way I want you.
I can't — I can't slow down, I've tried all day and I can't—"
"Then don't." Her nails dragged down his back, urging him on, her own control fraying just as fast. "I don't want slow. I want you exactly like this."
Something in him broke loose entirely at that — every last trace of the controlled, calculating Don of the Moretti family gone, replaced by a man wholly undone by wanting his own wife — and he drove into her harder, faster, one hand sliding beneath her hip to angle her exactly where she needed him, the other threading through her hair to hold her gaze even as pleasure built white-hot between them.
She came apart first, crying his name against his mouth, and he followed only moments later, groaning her name into her throat like it was the only word he had left, his whole body shuddering with the force of it.
Afterward, they lay tangled together, breathless, his forehead pressed to hers, both of them slick with sweat and utterly wrecked in the best possible way.
"I keep thinking," he murmured, once his breathing had steadied, tracing idle patterns against her hip, "that a man like me isn't supposed to get this. A wife who loves him. Mornings like this. I built my whole life around the assumption that softness was a weakness I couldn't afford."
"And now?"
"Now I think I was wrong about almost everything, except wanting you." He pressed a kiss to her temple, gathering her closer, and for a long while neither of them spoke again, content simply to exist in the quiet, golden hush of a day neither of them wanted to end.
It was the last day of true peace either of them would have for a long time.