Chapter 32 Gabi
GABI
Ivan has me by the hand and guides me out of my room.
“You shouldn’t sleep alone,” he says softly, but in a no-nonsense tone. He closes the gate behind us, and it shuts with a clink, locking me in.
I’ve no idea where he’s going with this, but for once I don’t have in me to fight…
or to run. I just can’t and I no longer want to.
Not with him having been everything I needed as I spilled my guts.
I never talk about that interim phase. Only Mother Lucia knew, because I told her once when I was much older.
When I found my voice and enough time had passed and the horror of those days in Antonio Mancuso’s cellar grew numb.
Ever since, I’ve been holding back, not wanting to relive any of it again.
His bedroom beckons. I never slept in Ivan’s bed while he was away.
I mean, how could I? The linen carried his scent, and the fantasy of him, without clothes as he just dropped the towel and got into bed, skin still shower-warm and wet, sensual, with all that ink playing hide and seek with me under the sheets.
I already had a lusting problem. Sleeping in his bed was the last thing I needed.
The possibility of him deciding to come home from the office for the night and finding me in his bed was a situation begging for exploitation.
Never mind every desire pulsing through me, my mind wouldn’t leap over the stumbling block of sin, but even more important: I’m not going to be the nanny who sleeps with the dad while he’s planning to wed another.
I might not have much, but I have my dignity.
I stop short outside his room. “Where will you be sleeping?” I don’t want to barge into his life like this. It isn’t my place.
“I’ll sleep in the treasure chest when I come to bed.”
Mere yards away in the same room, essentially. I won’t be able to see him. He won’t be able to see me.
That’s not the only thing making me hesitate. I still have so many questions, I can’t let him go yet. Plus my body… I want him with me, until I fall asleep. Even the treasure chest is too far.
“Ivan?”
I don’t know when I slipped into calling him by his first name. During our phone calls, it was always Mr. Petrov.
“Yes, moya ptichka?”
“What happened here?” I ask, delaying him with the one question that still hangs between us. “The house…I saw one of the rooms in Milana’s suite, all the bullet holes, the ruin—”
He sighs, and with a squeeze of my hip, tries to nudge me along the corridor, but I stand my ground. “Just a Fourth of July party that got a bit wild.”
“It got a bit wild?” I stare wide-eyed at him. “A Fourth of July party? Like Independence Day?” My American history knowledge is basic, but that’s what you get when you spend most of your school years in Italy.
What happened here was way more than a wild Bratva party.
“Yes, moya ptichka.” He leans closer. “What’s it going to take to stop you asking so many questions, hmm?”
A kiss, obviously, a voice pops up in my head, but it isn’t Chiara’s. It’s my own...
I blink as my gaze drops to his mouth, those lips that soothed along my temple, along my hairline, whispering comfort to me as I clung to him.
Down to the soft scrub of his beard, and his Adam’s apple that bobs with a swallow, lower to the beautiful smooth skin exposed by the open collar of his shirt.
I bet if my gaze keeps traveling, dips lower and lower, I’ll see what I felt earlier as I sat in his lap.
What I saw that night when he came out of the bathroom.
Long ago, Chiara told me a man can give immense pleasure with it. I lick my lips. She also said wedded bliss is just that. Bliss. And that it is even better outside of wedlock because it’s sin.
What she never told me is how the right man can light you up in all the right places by just looking at you.
But with Ivan, it’s even more. I’m not sure how he can make me swing like this—one moment revealing my past, the next craving something that has me traumatized, except this is Ivan.
It’s not him or the types that came to Mancuso’s cellar. Ivan will never hurt me.
“Looks like you’ve been thinking about it, haven’t you?” he murmurs as his fingers run along my temple, gathering stray strands and gently hooking them behind my ear.
Like every touch, this one leaves a rush of desire in its wake.
“Thinking about what?” I breathe as he keeps on caressing a delicate line down my temple, lower, to the sensitive skin on my neck. My nipples harden under his featherlight touch, and I push my breasts out, wanting his hand to slip down all the way and touch me there.
Feeling like this is totally normal…if you haven’t been caught in the trap of Catholic religion where anything physical outside of marriage is sin. And even then, some acts are blasphemy.
“Your first kiss, and how you’d like it to be.” He dips his head so the tip of his nose follows in his finger’s path, retracing every sensual line he’s already drawn on my skin, lower, and even lower.
I want more. I need more. And can’t stop myself from dropping my head to the side as I open up for him, for his warm breath to flow over me, to spread a wildfire of goosebumps over my chest, pebbling my nipples even more, having me press myself to him.
He groans as our bodies connect, the curve of my belly settling against the hard ridge in his pants, and I stop breathing. This—
My eyes are long closed, but now, I hold my breath as his lips close over the place where my shoulder slopes up into my neck.
“Breathe, moya ptichka,” he whispers as he kisses me again and again. “Just breathe.”
I drag in slow, shaky breaths, my mind focused only on his mouth.
His kisses. Soft, warm, and utterly arousing as he retraces the route his fingertip took earlier, exploring, tasting, licking and nipping, and I lean even deeper into him as he grounds me with his hands on my hips, my hand snaking up his chest and around his neck to anchor him to me.
I don’t want him to stop, and he is taking his delicious time, making my knees weak as he kisses his way up to a spot right below my ear, culminating his voyage up my neck in such a hot spark of deep desire that I brush my body up against his, seeking friction.
And then his fingers dig into my hair, angling my head as he hugs me to him, engulfing me in his arms. His mouth homes in, tender, sweet, full as he presses soft lips against mine, and I’m already opening for him, my body no longer mine to command with stern thoughts, warning me how wrong this is.
No, everything is happening as if part of me has split off, taking just what it needs as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
I moan into his mouth as his tongue sweeps over mine, a wanton sound that startles me as much as it turns me on, and then…and then he closes off the kiss and pulls away.
He cups my head and presses me closer to him in a hug that’s so comforting, his lips pressed to my hair, but between us we have trapped all the evidence that he wants more.
If he’d just slip a hand between my legs, he’d find me wet and wanting, but with every reminder of why I dread and beg for this at the same time intact.
I can’t do this again, not when I lose all control like I did just now.
Ivan gently lets me go, in full control of himself and this situation. “Sweet dreams, Gabriella,” he whispers as he steps away from me, before turning me in the direction of his bedroom door. “Sleep in my bed. If I find you sleeping on the sofa, there’ll be repercussions.”
The loss of his strength and warmth as he steps away is almost too much, but his words—his words tempt and warn me at the same time. I’m playing with a man fifteen years older than me, who has all the experience in the world and who clearly can do just as he pleases and have me succumb to him.
And yet, he didn’t. He could have had me, and all the evidence is there that he wants me, as much as I want him, and yet he backed off. I’ve never encountered a man with this level of self-restraint and something else blooms in me for Ivan, trust laced with the sweet perfume of respect.
I’m dumbstruck and can only watch in the dark as he strides to the gate. He opens and closes it, not looking back.
With a sigh I head into his bedroom and ease quietly onto the bed beside the two sleeping girls, need pulsing along every nerve I have. What has he done to me?
He has shown me how it could be, how it should be, and left me hanging, begging for more.
Oh, Chiara…if you could see me now. The rabbit hole to lust is just an optical illusion; it really has the shape and scent, the words and whispers, the lips and kisses of Ivan Petrov, and once you’ve slipped and tumbled, it’s a free fall to heaven.