Chapter Nine #2
He nearly choked on his wine. ‘No,’ he spluttered with a laugh.
If she only knew how few and far between those lovers had been she might get the wrong impression.
‘No, I haven’t been back here since…’ He trailed off, realising just when it had been.
His gut clenched as the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
‘Since?’ Ivy asked gently.
His gaze narrowed on his hands. ‘Since I was eighteen,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘I didn’t realise it had been that long.’
‘Yes, because you’re such an old man,’ Ivy teased, giving him an out, he realised. Giving him the chance to change the subject. He could do it. If he wanted to. But she had been vulnerable with him, truthful with him. She deserved only the same in return.
He dropped his head, a small smile failing to pull his lips into submission, before they flattened.
‘I last came here after I met my mother,’ he admitted, and it took Ivy a moment to realise that he wasn’t talking about Alessia.
‘I didn’t… I didn’t know you’d met your biological parents,’ she said.
‘Parent. Just the one.’ He shrugged, before looking back up at her. The pain in his gaze was masked quickly. ‘And no one knows. Alessia never will,’ he said, the warning clear in his voice.
‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ she assured him, but he shrugged, nonchalantly, though it was clear that the ripples from the meeting had become waves that had changed things for ever.
‘At eighteen, my adoption records were unsealed. After my mother’s husband had left, I…’ He clenched his jaw. ‘I stupidly thought that I’d like to meet them. I was handed the paperwork and, for the first time, I had the name of the woman who had given birth to me.’
Ivy waited, her hand having found its way to his shin—the small touch barely there, but enough to connect them.
‘When I met her, the first thing she asked me was “What do you want?” And in the space of a heartbeat, I saw her take in my appearance, my clothing, and that question morphed into “What can I get?”’ Antonio said, his swallow hard.
‘She wanted money?’ Ivy asked, her heart breaking for him, unable to imagine how deeply that must have cut. Her mother had left them, chosen someone else over her own children. But Antonio’s mother? She had used him, taken from him. Anger and pain shook her from deep within.
He nodded.
‘And you didn’t give it to her,’ Ivy stated, not even beginning to comprehend what that must have felt like.
‘I did,’ he said, much to her surprise. ‘I gave her what she wanted. It meant nothing to me, and everything to her,’ he replied dispassionately.
But he was wrong, Ivy realised. It had meant something to him.
It had cost him a piece of himself. And he’d borne it alone with no one knowing.
No one there to support him or help him.
He’d been left with a scar, a wound, that he carried with him still.
Because that was how Antonio controlled the world around him.
Money. Paying people to do things—her to marry him.
Paying people back—his mother with the house he’d bought her, Maria with the company he’d help her get through marriage to him.
Every relationship for him had been transactional.
‘Why didn’t you take the money? Why didn’t you want the money for yourself?’
The questions he’d asked her took on new meaning then, because she’d confounded him by not playing by the rules he understood. Because he’d never allowed anyone to care for him without an exchange, without something specific and tangible to justify that care, that love.
‘Antonio, I—’
He shook his head, raised his hand between them as if to ward off what she was about to say.
It hurt, yes. But she understood why he felt unable to hear the words she would have given him freely. She understood that it wasn’t about her, and chose to shelve the pain that caused. The prick of a thorn that would bleed and ache more in the time to come.
Ivy couldn’t give him what he wouldn’t accept, but there was something she could give him.
Something that he welcomed from her. And as she looked around this magical glade, the place he’d brought her to, she realised that she could remake his memories of this place.
Refocus and reframe this part of his world for him.
She reached for his hand and pressed her mouth to his palm, the tenderness of the gesture spreading warmth between the two of them. Warmth enough to melt the ice that had held Antonio stiff.
The hardness in his gaze softened into heat, and he reached for her, pulling her across him and arranging her legs either side of him.
Straddling him like this, she relished the feel of the hard length of him, his need for her so much more obvious but equal to her own.
She reached for his other hand and pressed it against her breast, Antonio not needing any further encouragement to palm it and then tease her nipple taut with deft fingers.
He reared up to take that same breast in his mouth, hot, wet, over her linen shirt, his arms wrapped around her, holding her to him desperately.
In these moments it was impossible to remember that there was no future for them, that there was no love, because what else was this when she felt worshipped by him?
Wanted to the point of madness. Desired in a way that made her see herself differently.
A hand swept up beneath her skirt, stroking the outside of her thigh, sweeping between them to find the ache at her core, sparking quivers that pulsed and throbbed and fizzed and hissed across her entire body.
He swept aside her panties and teased her, keeping her on the exquisite edge of pleasure.
Her body rose to meet him, to take what it needed, urged on by some hedonistic instinct.
Sensations were all she knew, the feel of his mouth around her breast, his hand between her legs, his length beneath her, impatient and straining.
He thrust from beneath her, mimicking what she wanted more than her next breath, and he growled as she moaned, his mouth finally moving up from her breast to her lips as his tongue took full possession of her.
Her hands flew to his hair, holding him in place, needing just this moment…
a kiss, to taste, to tease, to fill him as much as he filled her. To show him what he meant to her.
His hands stilled on her body as if he—just for this moment—was willing to let her show him, let her body tell him, what he refused to hear in words.
Cradling his head between her hands she kissed him, possessed him, consumed him as he had done her.
Her fingers scratched against his skull, unable to rest until they had shaped his head then, hungry for more—just like her lips—explored the rest of him.
She pulled his shirt free and tore the buttons, needing to feel him, to memorise every inch of his body.
The dips and hollows of his collarbone, the swirls of hair over his pectorals…
Her hands followed it down to the buckle of his belt.
She pulled it apart and reached further still, wanting to feel him, hold him, grasp him.
He growled into her mouth as she took him in her hand, squeezing as he thrust into her palm.
She wanted him to feel this, needed him to feel what she felt for him.
Antonio let her have her way with him for as long as possible.
It had taken all his restraint to let her lead, let her explore…
but the moment she wrapped those cool fingers around his length, the shivers that rippled across his skin became a violent need.
To participate, to act, to taste, to touch, to possess.
Antonio drew her shirt to the side and bared Ivy’s breast to his mouth. Heaven. He was in heaven.
‘Up,’ he commanded, the words pressed against her lips. ‘Up,’ he repeated with gentle impatience.
He helped her rise to her knees as he pulled her knickers down her thighs, supporting her as he slid them from her legs. He fisted her panties in his hand and thrust them into his pocket, before retrieving his wallet and the condom from within.
‘ Cara , you have me behaving like an untested youth,’ he complained as he tore the corner of the foil packet with his teeth. ‘Taking you here? Amongst the trees and the grass?’
She looked down at him, settled further back on his thighs as he covered himself with the condom.
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ she said, and he felt it.
The truth of her words. He wanted to tell her that neither would he.
That she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever been with and that he was half convinced that she’d ruined him for ever, but the words clogged his throat, unable to get out.
He couldn’t give her the words she needed, the ones she so deserved to hear.
But he could give her this…he could give everything he had to this .
He lined himself up and despite everything in him urging him to possess, to take, to have, he forced himself to show restraint.
Slowly, taking in every single change of expression on Ivy’s face, he entered her, filling her, stretching her, luxuriating in the way she came down onto him, taking what she wanted…
He’d let her. He’d let her take all that he could give, even if he couldn’t give her more than that.
Her head fell back and he pressed open-mouthed kisses to the long slender column of her neck, his hands palming her breasts as she moved over him, driving him out of his mind.
His hands, desperate for more, fell away from her breasts and anchored on her hips, holding her in place, in that one precise point that made her breath hitch and her cries moans and her body tremble and her muscles tighten around him.
And there, under the clear blue sky, there was no one but him to see how glorious Ivy was as she rode him to the end of an orgasm so sweet he’d feel it even after she had left Italy for England.