Chapter Fourteen #2
“You can unwrap me as quickly or slowly as you like.”
He grips the back of my head and draws me forward, kissing me deep and long. He’s fierce, intense, and I love him for it.
This is everything that I let myself avoid. Everything I told myself I couldn’t have. I equated strong feelings with addiction. Distraction. And I took beautiful possibilities for myself. But not forever. Maybe I was just waiting for him. Maybe it just needed to be him.
God, I want him. All over me. In me.
I kiss his neck, down his chest, unbuttoning his shirt as I go. Then I drop to my knees before him, undoing his belt as I free his cock and wrap my hand around it. “You have a gift for me too,” I say.
“Lindsay,” he growls.
But I don’t take the warning. Instead I lean in, touching my tongue to the broad head of his arousal, and then I suck him into my mouth, taking him the way that I fantasized.
But it’s been impossible, because the times we’ve been together have been so hard and fast. But I want to taste him. Everywhere. So I do.
I take him as deep as I can, relishing the uncontrolled growl.
And I’m lost in it. In him. In this. In the glory of making him mine. As he has done to me. He arches his hips forward, his cock hitting the back of my throat, and I gag on him, loving the roughness of it. Loving how close to the edge he is.
I don’t want normal. I want spectacular.
That’s what I’ve always wanted. I’ve never wanted logical.
I wanted to reach for the stars, even when it was impossible for me to have them.
I tried to climb up to the sky and grab a handful of Stardust, and now I have him.
All this Stardust right in front of me. Glittering and impossible and perfect.
Maybe I can’t have everything, but I have him.
I know so many young women have felt this way. Have told themselves they don’t need all their dreams as long as they have their man.
But he’s himself magic. And I love him so much it’s like the emotion was invented just for us.
Certainly it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
And the intensity of knowing he’s the father of my baby, that we are going to make a family together, it’s this beautiful sweet symphony inside my soul that’s nothing I’ve ever felt before.
I don’t think anyone’s ever felt it.
Because I know how rare it is. I know what it costs. I know how badly I want him. How badly I need him. I know what my life feels like without him in it. This hardscrabble existence that I’m just so tired of. And now I’m not by myself. I have him.
And so I lavish everything inside of me on him. On this.
I show him just how much I need him. Just how much I want him.
He growls, grabbing the back of my hair, tugging me up to my feet, holding me fast as he kisses me on the mouth.
He’s wild for me, and I’ve never needed anything more.
“Are you going to fuck me in bed this time?” I ask, knowing that I’m baiting him. That I’m pushing him.
He takes the bait. “I will fuck you wherever I wish.”
“For the rest of our lives?”
I smile at him, satisfied with my version of vows, raw and dirty and everything that we are.
“What will I do with you?”
“Keep me,” I say.
He lifts me up off the floor, holding me tight, just like he did so many times in the house on the island. But this time, when he carries me to the bedroom, he’s not taking me there to lock me in.
Instead, he sets me down on the bed, the mattress soft as a dream, and him hard and hot on top of me.
He kisses his way down my body, down my stomach, and takes me in his mouth.
He licks me, sucks me, thrusts his fingers inside of me as he builds a steady rhythm designed to torment me.
Push me over the edge. And when I cry out his name, he’s there to steal it from my lips, and I can taste my own pleasure on his tongue.
He thrusts deep inside of me, claiming me, and this is another way of making vows.
I’m certain of it then. “Lindsay,” he growls, taking me over and over again.
“Ciro,” I whisper.
I hold onto his shoulders, my fingernails digging into his skin.
And when we reach the peak, we do it together. A perfect climb into madness, and a fall down into the sea where the waves crash over us. We’re demolished, dashed against the rocks, and left spent and breathless.
We lie there in bed for a long time.
His clothes long shed, my lingerie awkwardly pushed aside. I remove the bodysuit, and snuggle up beside him. I put my hand on his chest, tracing the shapes there. “Are you ever going to tell me what your tattoos mean?”
“There’s no reason to talk about it,” he says.
“Of course there is. I love you. I want to know everything about you.”
I’ve said it. I didn’t wait for a momentous moment. I thought that probably wouldn’t be the best with him. I thought maybe I could just say it, and it would be something casual. Something easy.
But he freezes, his hand closing down over the top of mine.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? I do.”
“No,” he says. “You cannot love me.”
“Why not? You’re the father of my baby. You—” I feel cowardly using that as a descriptor.
“You’re the only man I’ve ever wanted. You literally neutralized the biggest crime rings in the world with your connections, your cunning and your willingness to give up power when it would serve the greater good. What woman wouldn’t love you?”
“Everything I did was penance. I am not a good man.”
“And yet you want to raise this child with me?”
“I will do everything in my power to give our daughter the best life possible.”
I sit up, staring down at him. “Yes. I know that. I know it, and that’s why I love you. I don’t understand why you’re acting like I can’t.”
“Because if you knew…” His voice is harsh and cold.
He sits up, putting his face in his hands.
“If you knew. Lindsay, I have gone to places that you cannot simply come back from. I have done things that change you. They steal pieces of your soul.” He puts my hand on his neck, right on the snake.
“I got that ten years ago. After I dispatched a man in my own group who betrayed me. Who betrayed all of us. It’s a reminder not to trust anyone.
Including myself. Taking lives is something that changes you. And I wear it on my skin.”
I look at the vast tapestry of ink on his body. I understand what he’s saying. What he’s trying to tell me. That he’s a man of violence. He has been, anyway. When he’s had to be. But I understand what it’s like to grow up in a life that you had no choice in.
“You did the best you could to survive. That’s all any of us can do.”
“Some people don’t have a body count.”
“No. But most of us don’t have a crime lord for a father. You did. And in the end, you put a stop to all of it. In the end, you fixed all of it.”
“I am only fixing what my bloodline has broken. I am only fixing what I spent so much time being part of. Even my grandfather… He was not a good man, Lindsay, and I was forced to do his bidding in order to gain his alliance, and I was willing to do it because I needed it.”
“It was a war. And you fought in it as bravely and ethically as you could.”
He’s angry at me because I won’t be pushed away, and I can see that.
“You are blinded. By sex. By your youth. By your desire to have this happy family, but none of this is so simple.”
“That’s what you think,” I say. “I think it can be quite simple. Let’s not be miserable. What if we were happy?”
“Some people don’t get to be happy.”
“You can’t stop me from loving you.”
He sighs heavily, and takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I will never say it back.”
I meet his gaze, knowing that my eyes are filled with steel. “That’s okay. Neither did my parents. I think I’ll survive.”
With that, I get up out of our bed, and leave him there. If he wants to exist in torment, that’s up to him. I’m going to choose love.
Because I need to believe that it’s more powerful than any other force around us.