Chapter 21 Naomi
NAOMI
Ilast five minutes in bed. Ten, if I count lying to myself.
The suite is too quiet, the Amalfi night too bright, the sea outside too relentless with its shush-and-drag, like it’s trying to soothe a child who won’t stop crying.
I stare at the ceiling fan, at the soft spool of shadows, at the place on the pillow where his scent lingers—bergamot and skin and the particular salt that only ever means him—and I admit defeat.
The robe slips off my shoulders as I stand.
Underneath, moss-green silk clings to me with wicked memory.
I forgot how little this set covers, with its thin straps, demi cups and a slip of lace at my hips like a secret I should not be carrying into a war room.
I tell myself I’m going to talk. I tell myself he’s in the next room and I am an adult who can have a conversation without losing my nerve.
My hand on the connecting door shakes once. I breathe through it and turn the handle.
He hasn’t made the sofa into a bed.
He’s sprawled across it like a man who promised himself he wouldn’t sleep and did anyway, shirt still open at the throat, one forearm thrown over his eyes, the other curled on his stomach.
The lamp by the window is on, turned low; the room is storm-light intimate, the kind of light that makes every truth look expensive.
“Can we talk, Vasso?” I ask, and my voice betrays me—soft, hoarse, a stranger in my own mouth.
He moves his arm and looks at me with heavy, brooding eyes.
Heat hits me like a thrown coat. His gaze drags once, slow, from the strap biting my shoulder to the lace that barely pretends to be a panty to the line of my legs, and then back to my face. His eyes blaze the way they do when he’s about to finalize a deal that was never not going to be his.
“No,” he says, and the word cracks open something inside me and pours fire in. “We communicate so much better in a different language.” His mouth lifts, not kind. Parts his muscled thighs and resettled his arms on them, a predator awaiting his prey. “Come here, Naomi.”
I should turn. I should leave. I should say we will do this with words or not at all.
My traitorous feet propel me across the room as my body sparks and ignites to life.
The first touch is a collision; everything after that is deconstruction.
He drags me into his lap with hot hands on the back of my thighs, hard enough to leave intent, and the breath leaves me in a sound that isn’t a yes and isn’t a no, just plea.
His mouth finds mine like it’s been hunting through the dark for hours and finally caught the thing it wanted to kill or keep—teeth, tongue, anger.
It’s messy, hungry, wrecked. I taste salt and sleep and the edge of the accusation we didn’t finish.
“Do you know,” he growls against my mouth, “what you do to me?”
“Yes,” I gasp, because I do, because my body knows the answer even when my mouth is a liar. “Yes.”
“Say it.” He bites my lower lip, gentle only at the last second, thumb pressing into my hip like a lesson. “Say what you do.”
“I ruin your control,” I whisper, then louder when his eyes cut warning, “I make you forget vendetta and minutes and optics and everything except me.”
His laugh is a blade licked clean. “Exactly.”
He palms my breast through the silk, rough, reverent, both.
Teases and torments my nipples until I have no choice but to arch into it because my spine is a traitor.
He cups my face with his other hand and holds me there as he kisses me again, slower this time, deeper, like he’s pouring something back into me he thinks I wasted.
I roll my hips without meaning to; he swears into my mouth, low and obscene, and the sound strips every inch of pretense from my skin.
“Will this always be how we communicate best?” I manage, breath scraping.
“Don’t knock it,” he says, and the unfair, impossible smile punches straight through me. “Not when it’s this effective. Even when you shut up and scream for me.”
Shame and desire collide and explode into something I can’t label. I want to be furious with him; I want to be forgiven by him; I want to be unmade under his hands and rebuilt as something braver. “You’re an arrogant bastard.”
“And you’re wearing my favorite color and pretending you came to talk,” he returns, fingers slipping under silk with intent that makes my knees tremble on either side of his thighs. “One language at a time, agapita.”
We fall out of words. We use mouths for other things.
He lifts me like I weigh about as much as a promise and sets me on the edge of the sofa, knees parting my thighs, and looks at me like penance and prize at once.
When he slides to the floor and drags me to the edge, when his hands press my knees wider, when his mouth descends with a reverence that might break me, I hear myself make a sound I don’t ever make outside churches.
“Vasso,” I gasp, fingers threading into his hair, tugging, holding, pleading without saying please. “Oh, God—”
“Not God,” he says into me, smug and wrecked, voice too rough to be a joke, and then his mouth finds the exact thing that detonates the rest of my sentence. “Your husband, eating your beautiful pussy as is his right and privilege. Now say my name.”
I say his name like a rosary. And he makes me forget every other word except yes and more and please and right there.
He talks to me while he wrecks me, filthy and tender both, tells me exactly what I taste like, exactly how he’s going to do this again when I stop shaking, exactly how many times I’m going to come before he puts his cock inside me and makes me remember who I belong to.
The crude words land like home because they are his, because they are mine when he says them, because we are both too far gone to dress this in pretty.
“Look at me,” he orders, and I do, and the sight of his mouth on me, his eyes black with purpose, is enough to tear the top off everything I’ve been trying to contain since I mailed misguided betrayal in a velvet box.
I break, hard and helpless, a sound that will never fit inside a polite sentence.
He holds me through it, hands brutalizing my thighs in a way that will leave a visible claim in the morning, mouth relentless until I try to close my legs and he drags them wider with a warning that makes me whimper and obey.
“Again,” he says, lifting his head to bite my inner thigh, gentle, then not. “You owe me another.”
“I can’t,” I sob-laugh, the edges of me molten.
“You can,” he murmurs, thumb circling where his mouth was, voice the dark thing it sometimes becomes. “You always can for me.”
He is right. I always do for him.
When he finally rises, when his body presses me into the cushions and he kisses the tears off my cheeks like he wants to own even these, I reach for him like I’m drowning.
He hisses when I slide my hand over him, hot and heavy, and the curse he spills against my throat is pure blasphemy.
He doesn’t make me beg to take him inside.
I don’t make him beg to be allowed to. We are past begging; we are inside the part of language that only bodies speak.
Vasso fucks me torrid and furious and so stupidly tender in flashes I could crack. He brackets my face when the angle makes me see stars; I drag my nails down his back, and he tells me to do it again; we lose the shape of the sofa and remember it in bruises.
I speak, too much and too honest, and he answers, too crude, too perfect.
When I fall apart the second time, he’s right there with me, pulsing long and deep inside me, shuddering, swearing my name like he wrote it.
Silence after is a different creature. He stays inside me long enough to kiss my eyelids, my mouth, the corner where my laugh lives when it isn’t hiding.
He pulls out with a curse that sounds like regret.
I turn into him because there is nowhere else that makes sense and he lets me.
He tucks me against his chest and strokes my spine until my breaths stop tripping over themselves.
“Don’t do that again,” he says into my hair, a command with a plea hiding inside it.
“I won’t,” I whisper, and mean it in the small, selfish way of nights.
He rises, sweeps me into his arms, and carries me back to our bed.
We drift. Wake. Drift. I don’t know when I fall fully under; I only know that when the room lightens to the pale blue of a very expensive morning, his chest under my cheek is warm and steady.
But when I wake hours later, the sofa holds only a fold in the cushion and the shape of us in the rumpled throw. The lamp is off. The door to the suite is closed. On the coffee table, beside a glass with the ghost of his mouth on it, a note leans against the lily vase.
Rest and recharge today. Headed to Florence first. Damage control. Meet me in Milan tomorrow. We’re keeping our date with haute couture and the press. —V.
I pick the card up with shaking fingers.
He didn’t write Harrison. He didn’t write trust vote.
He didn’t write we’re fine or we’re not.
And he doesn’t answer my texts as the morning ticks forward; he doesn’t pick up when I call.
By mid-afternoon, my stomach is a fist. I sit very still and listen to the sea being infinite while the rest of me is finite and frantic.
Mara answers on the first ring. “Kincaid,” she says, brisk. “He asked me to make sure your car is at eleven.”
“What happened?” My voice is paper-thin. “Is it—did something leak—”
“I can’t discuss specifics,” she says, and I can hear the capital letters in can’t. “He left me a message to relay if you call: pack for two days, Milan by noon, you have a 3 p.m. with Valdi and an evening welcome at Palazzo Aurelia. He said—his words—‘We’re not letting her father win.’”
Not her or her father.
The distinction lands like a heavy but welcome weight as I press my thumb into the corner of his note until the card bends. Maybe it’s a completely foolish idea, but I let in the most fatal of emotions...hope. “Thank you.”
“Naomi,” Mara says, softer, and her voice shifts from COO to woman who has seen too many men weaponize silence. “He’s angry. He’s also already moving pieces to protect the things and people he cares about. Show up. That’s the only rule.”
“Right.” My laugh is a raw thing. “I’m very good at showing up in nice dresses.”
“Make this one armor,” she says, and hangs up because that, too, is mercy.
I shower because it’s a ritual that convinces my body I can be clean.
I dress in travel silks that don’t dare wrinkle in front of cameras and then I pack the way I have always packed: efficiently, like a woman who might have to run and still look like she meant to arrive.
I leave a text message he might not read.
I’m coming. I’m sorry. I’m not done learning the right language.
On the drive up the cliff, Amalfi shimmers with the kind of beauty that inspires poetry.
I watch the sea curve away from me, relentless as time, and count the hours to Milan.
To the dress. To the cameras. To the man who wrote we on a card and then left me to translate what it costs to keep that word.
I tuck the note into my clutch like it can hold my spine up and, for once, don’t check my phone.
He told me to meet him.
I will.