Chapter 22 Natalia
NATALIA
The buzz from girls’ night carries me all the way home.
We danced until my calves burned and my dress stuck to my back. Ronnie spun me into a dip that almost sent us both to the floor. She’d laughed so hard she snorted her margarita, and I’d laughed because she laughed, and for three whole hours, I was just a normal girl at a bar with her friend.
She noticed, of course. “You’re glowing,” she said while we waited for our drinks. “Like, annoyingly glowing. Spill.”
I told her it was the sea air. She told me I was full of shit.
She’d met “Johnny”. She’d seen the way he watched me across the bar that afternoon at the fish shack, the way his hand found the small of my back when we left. Ronnie doesn’t miss things like that. But she also doesn’t push when I shut a door, and I shut it hard enough that she let it go.
I’m not ready to tell her I lost my virginity to the man staying in my house. She’d have questions. I can’t share the answers.
I kick off my sandals inside the front door, dropping my purse on the catch-all table.
My body warms, a completely different kind of buzz starting up low in my belly.
I left Luca here, sketching on the couch, a lazy smile on his face.
The memory of our afternoon, of his hands and his mouth, is a vivid, electric thing.
I’m sore, exhausted, but my mind immediately leaps to the possibility of a repeat performance.
Get a grip, Natalia. You can’t get addicted after one time.
But the living room is empty. The couch holds nothing but a discarded blanket. A flicker of disappointment, sharp and unwelcome, cuts through me. I find him in the guest room, still shirtless, hunched over his sketchbook on the bed.
The lamp on the nightstand throws his shadow long across the wall, catching the planes of his face, the hard line of his shoulders. He doesn’t look up when I lean against the doorframe.
“Hey. There you are.”
Nothing. His pencil moves in short, deliberate strokes, and I watch the muscles in his forearm flex with each one. I’ve seen him draw before, loose and easy. This isn’t that. His grip on the pencil is white-knuckled. His jaw could cut glass.
I cross the room and sit beside him. He still doesn’t acknowledge me, so I look at the page instead.
A man’s face stares back. Older. Handsome in a severe way, with deep-set eyes and a mouth that looks like it’s never once been uncertain.
There’s something in the bone structure that reminds me of Luca, the same broad forehead, but this face is harder.
Colder. The kind of face you’d see across a negotiation table and know immediately that you’d already lost.
“Who is he?”
“My uncle.” His voice is rougher than usual. The words seem dragged out of someplace deep.
I look at the drawing again. The man stares back with eyes that could audit your soul and find it lacking.
“He looks intense.”
A humorless breath leaves him. Not quite a laugh.
“Yeah.”
I wait, hoping he will offer more. He doesn’t.
The silence stretches. I can hear the ocean outside, the scratch of the pencil, my own heartbeat. There’s a part of me that wants to reach for the easy thing, to tell him about Ronnie, about the bar, about nothing. But that would be pretending not to feel what is sitting in the room with us.
“You’re really talented, Luca.”
That gets me a look, finally. A real one this time. Not soft, exactly, but present.
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
His mouth shifts almost imperceptibly. “I used to draw a lot.”
I turn toward him a little more. “You remember that too?”
He nods. “I’ve been drawing since high school. Never showed anyone.” He pauses. “You’re the first.”
“Me?” The word is a breath. My pulse stutters. He’s showing me a part of himself he’s kept hidden his whole life. “That’s… Thank you, Luca.”
His gaze slides away, finding a point in the middle distance. I can almost see the gears turning in his head, the memories slotting into place, faster and faster now. But they don’t seem to be bringing him peace.
“Kept it secret,” he says, his voice flat. “It wasn’t… encouraged. My family has other priorities.”
“That sounds ominous.” I try for a light laugh, but it catches in my throat. Something is wrong. This isn’t just a new memory. This is a shift in the very ground beneath my feet.
He doesn’t smile. Just stares at the sketch he set aside, and I watch something move behind his eyes, fast and dark, like a school of fish scattering from a shadow.
He’d warned me, in his halting way, that his past was blood and violence, like my family’s. I thought I was ready for that. I wasn’t ready for how different he would feel with more of it back inside him.
He’s remembered more than he’s saying. A lot more.
And it’s upsetting him. I’ve spent my life reading dangerous men, learning to spot the subtle tells that signal a coming storm.
The rigid set of his shoulders. The careful blankness of his face.
The unnerving stillness in his hands. These are all warning signs, red flags snapping in a gale-force wind. And I’m walking straight toward them.
My hand covers his. It’s a reflex, an instinct to offer comfort. His skin is cool. He flinches, just for a second, before his eyes snap to mine.
“It seems like you remembered more,” I say softly. “Anything you want to talk about?”
I want to be his safe place. The person he can come to when the world gets too heavy. He’s done that for me. I want to do it for him.
“No.”
The word comes out hard and final. No hedging, no softening. I wait. He squeezes my hand, flips it over, runs his thumb across my palm. The gesture is gentle, but the tension in his shoulders hasn’t moved.
“Are you sure? You seem...” I search for the right word. Dangerous. “Off.”
“I’m sure I don’t want to talk about it right now.” He pulls in a breath and lets it out slow. “Just trust me. Okay?”
A month ago, that sentence from any man would have made me laugh. Trust is what my father asks for when he’s about to take something from you. Trust is what Nikolai demands before he breaks a promise.
But Luca isn’t them. Or at least, the side of him I know isn’t.
“Okay.” I give him a small smile. “We don’t have to pick at it.”
But his gaze drops to the sketch again, and I catch the flinch. Quick, barely there, the kind of micro-expression most people would miss.
Whatever Luca remembered tonight, it didn’t just upset him. It scared him.
I take his chin and turn his face to mine, pressing my forehead against his. “After everything, I just want you to be okay.”
I hover my lips over his, a silent offering of comfort. I want to soothe him, to erase the harsh lines around his eyes. I want to give him a reason to stay in the light.
But the moment our lips touch, everything changes. His hands fly up to my face, pulling me into a kiss that isn’t gentle or comforting. It’s desperate. Messy. A raw, hungry claiming.
Through the chaos, I hear him whisper, “You’re too damn good.”
His tongue is in my mouth, deep and demanding, and I can’t keep up. His hands are clawing at me, as if he can’t get close enough. My head spins. This isn’t what I intended. This is something else entirely.
“Luca, I—”
“Shh.” He silences me with another bruising kiss, one hand moving to my throat, his thumb pressing against my pulse point. The other hand finds the shoulder of my wrap dress and shoves it down, rough and impatient.
My body and my mind are on two different tracks. One is screaming at me to ask questions, to demand answers. The other is melting under his touch, craving more of this wild, dangerous energy.
The craving wins. His lips leave mine, trailing a hot path down my neck, his teeth grazing my skin. The cool air hits my breast as he exposes it, the lace of my bra a flimsy barrier. He tears it away. Literally. The sound of ripping fabric is a shock in the silent room.
“Luca!”
“You have more,” he snarls, his voice a whip crack. “Don’t worry about a fucking bra.”
What has gotten into him?
And why don’t I want him to stop?
My dress is pooled around my hips, held only by the sash at my waist. His eyes drop to it, hot and predatory. He unties it in one sharp tug, pulling the silk free.
His eyes drag over me.
That look should embarrass me. Maybe it does, a little. But it does something else too. Something hotter. My nipples tighten under his stare. My thighs press together on instinct.
Then his mouth is on me and I stop thinking entirely. No warning, no slow approach. His lips close around my nipple and he sucks hard enough to make me gasp, then bites down just shy of pain.
“Luca—”
He doesn’t answer.
This is not how I expected tonight to go.
His hand fists in my hair and pulls my head to the side. Teeth scrape the curve of my neck, then sink in. Not gentle. Not playful. A claim. The sharp pain sends a jolt straight between my legs that surprises me so much I make a sound I’ve never heard myself make.
“You’re mine.” His voice is dark, rough, almost unrecognizable. “Say it.”
“I’m yours.”
The words leave my mouth before my brain signs off on them, and the raw truth of it, the way I mean it completely, should scare me more than it does.
He turns off the lamp. Darkness swallows the room whole, and suddenly all I have is sensation. His hands on my hips, spinning me to face away from him. The rasp of his pants against the backs of my thighs. His breath against my ear, ragged and too fast.
He hooks his fingers into my underwear and drags them down.
I step out of them because there’s nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and I don’t want to go anywhere else anyway.
His foot kicks between mine, spreading my stance, and I grab the edge of the mattress for balance as he bends me forward.
I’m shaking. Not from cold, not from fear.
From the disconnect between the man who held me so carefully this afternoon and the one whose grip is bruising my hip right now.
Both of them are Luca. Both of them are real.
And this version, the desperate, rough, taking version, is doing something to me I didn’t know I wanted.
His fingers find me and I hear his sharp intake of breath.
“Soaked.” The word is almost reverent, almost angry. “Fucking soaked.”
I bury my face in the mattress. I should want to slow this down. I was a virgin this morning. My body is still tender, still learning the shape of this. But his fingers are circling my clit with a pressure that’s just this side of too much, and the sound I’m making into the sheets isn’t a protest.
He pushes two fingers inside me and I arch backward, chasing it. There’s no buildup. No teasing. He curls them hard against that spot he found earlier, and my vision goes white even in the dark.
“Luca, oh god—”
“That’s right.” His other hand presses flat between my shoulder blades, holding me down. “Say my name.”
I do. I say it when his fingers find a rhythm that makes my thighs shake. I say it when the orgasm hits so fast it almost hurts, crashing through me before I’m ready. I say it while I’m still pulsing around his hand and hear the metallic hiss of his zipper.
Then his cock pushes into me in one long, relentless stroke, and the sound I make isn’t his name or any word at all.
The stretch burns. I’m still sensitive from earlier, still swollen, and he’s not being careful. He’s not being anything except desperate. His hips pin me against the mattress edge and he pulls back and drives in again, hard enough that I have to brace my hands against the bed.
“Fuck—” The word tears out of me. My body can’t decide if this is too much or not enough.
Too much. Definitely too much.
Don’t stop.
He doesn’t. His pace builds fast, punishing, and somewhere in the dark I lose the thread of what I should want and surrender to what I actually want, which is this. Exactly this. His hands bruising my hips, his breath ragged behind me, the filthy sound of skin on skin in a pitch-black room.
“Say it again.” His voice is wrecked.
“Yours,” I gasp. “I’m yours.”
He groans and his rhythm turns erratic, unraveling.
“Nat.” It sounds like a prayer, a plea, a curse.
I stop thinking. My fingers twist in the sheets, my cheek flat against the bed, and the only thing that exists is the heat of him behind me and the sound of my own voice chanting his name over and over.
He buries himself to the hilt and I feel him let go, feel the pulse of him inside me, as warmth floods through me. My body clenches in answer, and the second orgasm drags me under—slower than the first, deeper, the kind that doesn’t crest so much as swallow you whole.
He collapses over me. His forehead between my shoulder blades, his breath scorching my skin. His hands loosen on my hips and I know there will be marks tomorrow. I’ll press my fingers into those bruises and remember this.
We stay like that. I don’t know how long. The dark makes time irrelevant.
When he finally pulls out and eases me onto the bed, I’m boneless. He arranges the blanket over both of us and pulls me into his side. I can feel his heartbeat against my back, still too fast.
My eyelids are lead. Sleep is pulling me under fast, and I should fight it, should circle back to the conversation he derailed so expertly, but my body has made its decision.
Just before I go under, I feel him shift. His arm tightens around me, and his mouth presses against my hair.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
My eyes flutter open. The room is still dark. He’s holding me like I might disappear.
Sorry for what?
But sleep takes me before I can ask.