Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Amanda
The knock lands in the middle of our second toast, and Vittoria and I both freeze with our glasses halfway up like we've been caught running a speakeasy out of her childhood bedroom.
"It's open," Vittoria calls.
Valentino fills the doorway the way he fills every doorway, seeming too large for the space somehow. His eyes find me on the bed, wine in hand, legs tucked under me, and something in his expression turns quiet and hungry at the same time.
It does absolutely criminal things to my pulse.
"Vittoria." He nods at her, then looks back at me. "Is it all right if I take Amanda to my room?"
Vittoria sets her glass down very slowly.
I know that expression. That's the expression she wore right before she told Pietro his new security protocol had the structural integrity of wet bread.
"Is it all right," she repeats.
Then she starts laughing. Full-bodied, head tipped back, delighted in a way that makes Valentino's mouth flatten by one careful degree.
"Oh my God. All my life I've known this man, and he's never asked permission for anything. He apologized to Bruno once after punching him in the face, and people still bring it up every Christmas."
"Vittoria." His voice carries a warning that doesn't reach his eyes.
"No, no, this is beautiful. Valentino Conti, knocking.
Asking." She wipes under one eye with her finger, careful of her mascara even mid-cackle.
"You know what? Yes. Take her. Take her immediately, because I'm a married woman and yet my husband is downstairs talking about shipping routes instead of taking me to his room, so the two of you can get the hell out of my face before I become bitter. "
"You've been married eight months," I say. "You're not allowed to be bitter yet."
"Watch me." She points at the door with the wine bottle. "Out. Both of you."
I'm already standing, already feeling Valentino's attention on me like sun through a car window.
"And Amanda?"
"Yeah?"
"Cousins," she says, grinning. "We're going to be cousins."
Valentino closes one eye at her, slow and deliberate, the closest thing to a wink that man's facial muscles will legally permit.
Vittoria makes a sound like she's just witnessed something she never thought she'd live to see.
"Go," she says. "Before I start crying again."
His hand finds the small of my back and steers me into the hallway. The door clicks shut on my best friend yelling something in Italian that I'm choosing to believe is a blessing.
We don't talk on the way to his room. The hallway is long and dim and smells like lemon polish and old money. His palm stays on my spine the whole walk, warm through the silk of my shirt, and my body follows that touch like it knows better than I do where I'm supposed to go.
His room is at the end of the east wing. He opens the door, lets me through first. I get exactly two seconds to register dark furniture and a window full of Chicago night before the lock turns behind us.
"Kneel."
One word. The wine stops helping. Whatever I felt in Vittoria’s room burns off the second he looks at me.
I turn around, and he's standing with his back to the door, still fully dressed, jacket and all, watching me with that stillness he gets when he's already made a decision and is waiting for me to understand it.
Heat climbs up the backs of my thighs. My pride makes one last, useless attempt to keep me standing, but my knees soften anyway.
The thick rug cushions my shins. He crosses the room without hurry, and I tip my head back to keep his eyes. He hasn’t touched me yet, and my breath already catches.
""You knocked on Vittoria's door," I say, because my mouth has never once respected a moment. "Very polite. Very civilized.”
"I'm done being polite." He reaches down and drags his thumb along my lower lip, pressing just enough that I taste the salt of his skin. "Open."
He doesn't take off the jacket. He doesn't take off anything.
He pulls his zipper down with one hand, and takes his cock out, thick and hard and already flushed dark at the tip.
The rest of him stays buttoned and pressed.
Composed like he's about to chair a board meeting.
The contrast short-circuits something in my brain.
A moan slips out of me, embarrassing and honest, and the corner of his mouth lifts at the sound.
"There she is," he says, low.
I lean in and take him into my mouth, and the groan that comes out of him vibrates all the way down my spine.
He's heavy on my tongue, hot, and I wrap one hand around the base of him, letting myself sink forward until my eyes water.
Because two weeks is a long time, and I've been thinking about this with a frequency that would alarm a mental health professional.
His hand gathers my hair off my face, slow at first, almost gentle. Then his fist closes.
"Did you miss me?" His voice has dropped and become rough. As if he's swallowed gravell. "Hm? Did you miss this?"
I moan around him. Apparently it's the right answer, because his grip tightens and his hips move. He stops letting me set the pace. He fucks my mouth in deep, measured strokes, deeper each time. I breathe when he lets me and gag when he doesn't. Tears stream from the corner of my eyes.
I have never in my life felt more wanted than I do right now.
"Look at me."
I drag my eyes up. He's watching me with his jaw tight and his control fraying visibly at the edges.
The sight of it, this man who walked into Enzo Basile's compound like death had invited him personally, coming apart because of my mouth, sends a pulse of heat straight between my legs.
My free hand fists in the fabric of his trousers just to hold on to something.
"Two weeks," he says, rough, thrusting slow and deep enough that I feel him at the back of my throat.
"Two weeks I couldn't touch you the way I wanted.
Couldn't bend you over anything. Couldn't make you scream.
" His thumb strokes my wet cheek, tender in a way that doesn't match anything his hips are doing.
"I lay on my stomach in that fucking hospital bed and thought about this exact mouth. "
I hum my agreement, my approval, my entire foreign policy, and he swears in Italian, soft and vicious, and his rhythm stutters for the first time.
He pulls out of my mouth so suddenly I sway forward, gasping, lips swollen, and his fist in my hair tips my head back so he can look down at the wreck he's made of my face.
"Not yet," he says, breathing hard, and his eyes are black and his composure is hanging by a single thread that I personally want to bite through. "When I finish tonight, it'll be after I have fucked your sweet pussy."
Valentino
"Stand up," I say.
She stands slowly, dragging her palms up my thighs on the way. Her knees are pink from the floor, and I already know the next room full of men talking business will have to compete with the memory of her on her knees.
"Turn around."
"Bossy," she says, but she's already turning, already gathering her hair off her neck without being asked. The obedience underneath the sass undoes me more than the sass ever could. She knows it, too. That's the problem with Amanda. She knows everything I don't say.
I reach around her and open the button of her jeans. I drag the zipper down and peel jeans and underwear over her hips in one pull, down to her thighs. She exhales through her nose, a soft sound she'd deny making.
The lamp by the bed throws gold across her bare skin.
Somewhere down the hall, a door closes. Vittoria, probably, or one of a dozen relatives who'd give a kidney to know what's happening in the east wing right now.
The whole house smells of my mother's cooking, garlic and slow tomatoes drifting up through old vents, and I'm about to fuck the love of my life ten feet from where my aunt is saying the rosary.
God can chastise me later. I have a long night planned.
I turn us both, walk her two steps, and put her hands flat on the wall beside the door.
"Hold on," I tell her.
She laughs, low and breathless, but the laugh cuts off clean when I push inside her.
Cristo. She's soaked, tight, hot enough to make my vision blur, and her whole body bows toward the wall like the plaster might save her. It won't.
Nothing in this house will save either of us, and that's exactly how I want it.
I seat myself fully and stay there, buried, my chest against her back. The stitches along my back pull and complain, but I couldn't give less of a damn. Pain is just a feeling. This is the only feeling that matters.
"Valentino—"
"Quiet." I take her chin in my hand and turn her face toward me, my mouth at her ear. "You wanted me to finish in your mouth like I haven't been starving for this pussy for two weeks. Greedy girl."
"You're the greedy—"
I move, and her sentence dies.
I keep the pace slow at first, deep, each stroke a full statement, because rushing this would be a crime against everything I survived to get here. Her breath hits the wall in short, uneven bursts. I press my lips to the curve of her neck where her pulse is sprinting and feel her clench around me.
"You feel that?" My voice has dropped to the register I save for confessions. "That's mine. Every inch of you, mine. I lay in that fucking hospital bed planning this. The wall. The angle."
She pushes back on my cock. She can't help herself.
"There she is," I murmur, and bite her ear, and the moan that comes out of her is loud enough to reach Sicily.
My hand leaves her chin and seals over her mouth before the second one escapes. Her eyes go wide, then narrow, and against my palm I feel her grin a heartbeat before her tongue drags slow and wet across my skin. The little provocation goes straight through me like a current.
So I give her what she's asking for and slide two fingers past her lips. She closes her mouth around them and sucks, and I have to lock my knees because she tightens around me at the same time, like her whole body decided to answer.
Her teeth grazing my knuckles, the same knuckles that killed for her, and she kisses them between strokes like she's blessing the violence.
I fuck her harder, hard enough that her palms slap the wall and the framed photograph beside the door knocks against the plaster.
"Come for me," I say against her hair. "Right now, on my cock, with my fingers in that smart mouth. Show me what I almost died for."
She breaks.
It rolls through her in a long shudder, her cunt gripping me in waves, her cry muffled around my fingers, her hands curling into fists against the plaster.
I hold her through it, hips still moving, dragging it out until her legs give and I’m the only thing keeping her upright. I take her weight against my chest. The stitches scream, I hold her anyway. I'd hold her with my back split open.
I slide my fingers from her mouth. She gasps like a swimmer surfacing.
"Oh my God," she manages.
"Wrong name."
"Don't you dare make me laugh while you're still inside me."
I pull out, and the loss of her heat is its own small grief.
Then I turn her around by the shoulders.
Her face is wrecked in the most beautiful way I've ever seen.
Flushed, glassy-eyed, lipstick smeared soft at the corner of her mouth, her chest heaving against her bunched-up shirt.
She reads my expression, and her eyes darken, because she always reads me first.
"Kneel," I command.
She goes down without a word, jeans still tangled at her thighs, and tips her face up like an offering.
The sight of her takes the last of my control out at the foundation.
Three rough strokes of my fist, and I come with a sound I grind down to almost nothing, painting her cheek, her parted lips, the line of her jaw, while she watches me through it with those eyes that have owned me since a black dress and a party I never let myself remember.
For a second, all I hear is our breathing.
She licks the corner of her mouth, slow, holding my gaze, and smiles like she knows exactly what she just did to me. "Welcome home.”
I crouch in front of her, ignoring the fire across my back, and wipe her cheek with my thumb, gentler than anything else I've done tonight. She leans into my hand. For a moment neither of us speaks, and the silence doesn’t press for anything. I didn’t know it could feel like that before her.