Chapter 13 #3
I slid my panties down. His breath caught. His hand reached for me, then stopped, fingers curling into the duvet.
I climbed onto the bed and straddled his hips.
“Emily,” he breathed, his hands settling on my waist, restraint carved into every line of him. “I need you to know I’m clean.”
I stilled for half a second, forehead brushing his. “I’m on the pill.”
His fingers flexed against my skin. “Are you sure?”
I kissed him, slow and certain. “Yes.”
Then I rose over him and took him slowly, deliberately, watching the last edge of his composure fracture beneath me.
The sound that tore from his throat was low and wrecked, and sparks skittered up my spine.
He filled me completely, a deep, aching stretch that stole my breath, and for a moment neither of us moved.
His hands tightened on my hips. Every muscle in him was coiled with the effort of staying beneath me, tendons standing out in his neck, jaw locked. He had handed me the reins, and every second of surrender cost him something.
I started to move.
His eyes locked on mine, cataloguing every reaction as I found my rhythm. When my pace faltered—the stretch sharper than I'd expected, the adjustment taking a moment—he noticed immediately.
"Too much?" The heat in his eyes softened with concern.
I shook my head, forehead resting against his. "No. Just...big."
A ghost of a smile. "Sorry," he murmured, sounding anything but.
"Don't be," I whispered, and meant it.
I changed the angle, found what worked, and built back into a rhythm that sent heat coiling through every part of me.
His hands stayed on my hips, firm enough to steady me but never enough to command.
That was what undid me: the knowledge that he could have guided me exactly how he wanted, could have taken the rhythm from me with one flex of those hands, and chose instead to let me keep it.
To let me learn him. To let me watch every breath I stole from him.
The tremor returned in his thigh, faint and persistent, something his body gave me because he could not hold everything back.
The vulnerability this powerful, dangerous man undone beneath me and choosing tenderness anyway was what finally broke me open.
My orgasm hit hard and fast, stealing my breath, my whole body clenching around him as I cried out his name.
He followed with a hoarse shout, hips jerking up into me once, the pulse of his release drawing out the last shuddering waves of mine.
I collapsed against him, boneless and trembling, and for a moment all I could do was breathe.
Pietro gathered me close at once, one arm wrapping tight around my back while the other came up more carefully, his hand sliding into my hair with a tenderness that felt almost unbearable after all that intensity.
He kissed the crown of my head once, then again, as if he couldn’t quite stop himself. The gesture was so gentle it made something inside me ache.
“Easy,” he murmured, his voice roughened almost beyond recognition. “I’ve got you.”
And he did.
What stayed with me in the quiet after was not the heat of his body under mine but the way he held me like something precious.
There was no distance in it, no casual satisfaction, no sense that the moment had ended now that the worst of the hunger had passed.
If anything, he seemed softer with me now, not less attentive but more.
His fingers threaded through my hair, and when I shifted, he adjusted with me immediately, as if my comfort mattered to him as instinctively as his own.
“You all right?” he asked quietly.
I lifted my head just enough to look at him. His face was still flushed, his mouth relaxed, his eyes darker than usual but steady on mine with a kind of reverence I had never seen turned my way before.
“I’m okay,” I whispered.
His hand came to my cheek then, thumb brushing lightly across my skin. “Good.”
I let myself sink back down onto his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart under my ear while his fingers moved slowly through my hair.
Every now and then his lips found the top of my head again, quiet little kisses that felt so natural to him and so new to me that they made my throat tighten.
“What are you thinking?” he asked after a while, his voice low and rough in the dim quiet of the room.
I closed my eyes, making peace with the answer before I gave it to him.
“That I didn’t know it could feel like this.”
His arm tightened around me by the smallest degree. “Like what?”
I swallowed. “Safe.”
The word hung there between us, soft and fragile and far more intimate than anything else we had done tonight.
Pietro went completely still beneath me. Then he tipped my chin up, just enough to look at me properly, and whatever he saw seemed to hit him somewhere deep. He brushed his thumb once across my cheek before leaning in to press a slow kiss to my forehead.
“Good,” he said quietly. “Because that’s the only way I ever want you to feel with me.”
And wrapped in his arms, with his heartbeat under my cheek and his mouth still lingering at my temple, I believed him.