Modern Romance November 2015 Books 5-8. Кейт Хьюит
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It was infinitely harder to tilt her head closer and to press her lips into the hollow between his pectoral muscles, like the apology she didn’t dare utter. That she was afraid to admit she wanted to speak out loud at all.
Rafael sighed, or perhaps it was a groan, and tore the rest of his shirt off without her having to ask. And then he stood there, bared to the waist, even more perfect than he’d been all these years inside her head.
She couldn’t read the look on his face then, nor define what rose in her in response. What tore at her and threatened to rip her apart, and it was all there in the dark gold of his eyes. In the constriction in her chest, making her wonder if she’d ever really breathe again.
“Turn around,” he ordered her. She froze, but he only stared back at her implacably, his eyes too dark and too bright. “Do not make me repeat myself.”
She obeyed without quite meaning to, turning so her back was to him and she faced the scrolled height of the nearby settee.
“Rafael—” she began, but cut herself off on a sharp intake of breath when he came up hard behind her, that mighty chest of his pressed into her back, making her feel dizzy with need.
That endless, delirious, life-altering need.
“These are your choices, Lily.” His mouth was close enough to that sensitive place just behind her ear that she could feel the tickle of it, a sharp, impossible electricity that seemed to bolt straight through her to linger in her core. She was surrounded by him, sex and scent and strength, and she didn’t know what she felt. Who she was anymore, when she was with him. What the hell she was doing. But she also couldn’t seem to stop. “You can walk away right now, go to sleep, dream of all the ways we’ve wronged each other so we can tear bigger chunks from each other in the morning. I won’t blame you if you do.”
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, but that was her, she understood, making that rough sound. That harsh breathing a little too close to outright panting.
“Or...?” she asked, in a voice that hardly sounded like hers.
But it was. She knew it was.
So did Rafael.
And he was hard and hot and perfect behind her. “Or you can bend over that settee and hold on tight.”
* * *
Rafael expected her to bolt. To take a breath and then hurl herself away from him. Run screaming from him. Maybe some part of him wanted her to do exactly that.
Maybe he didn’t know which one of them he was trying to scare.
He heard the deep, shuddering breath she took. He braced himself for her to walk away. Told himself that he would let her. That he had no other choice.
“And...” She shifted from one foot to the other. “And what happens if I do that?”
He didn’t pretend he didn’t know which that she meant. Triumph lashed at him, more potent than the whiskey he’d tossed back, and he smiled. Hard.
His hand smoothed down the length of her side, all that silken heat and the tattoo he knew waited for him beneath her dress. She bucked slightly against him, then went too still, as if she couldn’t control herself any better than he could.
And he found that made all the difference. It clarified things.
It didn’t matter how messy this was. What they’d lost. How they’d lied.
It didn’t make her any less his.
Nothing could.
“Bend over, Lily,” he ordered her, as gruff as he was certain, and he was animal enough to enjoy the trembling reaction he could see her fight to repress when he said it. “Now.”
LILY STEPPED AWAY from him, and Rafael found he hardly breathed as she stood there for a moment, as if she hadn’t quite made up her mind. Not quite yet. She shifted her weight again and he heard the faint rustle of her skirt like a shout before she twisted around to look over her shoulder at him.
Her eyes were so blue. Like that fathomless California sky. He’d thought he’d never see them again, that marvelous color. He’d had to content himself with memory. He’d had to settle for lesser blues, minor marvels.
He wasn’t going to settle again.
Rafael had a thousand things he wanted to say to her, but none of that mattered when what they boiled down to was the same thing: she was his. No matter the distance, the years. The hurts lodged and the lies told. What she thought of him, them, the past, the future they’d have to work out now that there was Arlo to consider. That was all noise.
Lily was the sweet, deep quiet at the center of all of that.
She was his.
He saw her breathe in, then let it out. He saw her decision flash in her gorgeous eyes, a resolve that lifted her chin again and made every part of him clench tight in anticipation and a spark of something much too close to fear—
She turned away from him again and took another step, then bent herself forward, gripping the back of the settee the way he’d told her to do.
Lust and need and a deep kick of pure triumph punched into him then. So hard it hollowed him out. He wanted her so badly in that moment that if he touched her, he imagined he’d simply implode. And that wouldn’t do at all.
So instead, he made her wait.
He went back over to the bar and poured himself another drink. He took his time with it, watching her intently.
“Do not move,” he ordered her, more silk than reprimand, when he saw her shift as if she meant to straighten. “It is your turn to wait, Lily. I waited for five years with no hope that you would ever return. You’ve waited five seconds so far and you know exactly where I am. You can suffer the unknown a little while longer, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t know you were into torture,” she retorted, and he could see her defiance in the way she braced herself against the ornate little settee, too fussy to be a couch. The way she tilted her head to one side, sending all that heavy, slippery strawberry blond hair of hers cascading over one shoulder. “Is that a new hobby?”
“You have no idea,” he murmured.
“You could simply kiss me like a normal person,” she pointed out, almost chattily, as if she wasn’t standing there in a remarkably provocative position, awaiting his pleasure. “Or is that too pedestrian for a Castelli heir in a Venetian palazzo?”
“Ogni volta che ti bacio dimentico dove sono.” Every time I kiss you I forget where I am. He hadn’t meant to say that.
But the truth was, he didn’t simply want this woman. He admired her. He craved her sharp tongue as much as he wanted to feel the wet heat of it against his skin. He had never managed to reconcile himself to the loss of her. He had been made a different man entirely by her loss—and he didn’t know, now, how to pull those different pieces of himself together into one again. If that was even possible.
He set his drink back down untouched and roamed back toward her, eyeing the picture she made as she waited there with the dress the color of the sea all around her and her exquisite form within it like some kind of mythical creature, too perfect to be believed. Yet this was Venice, after all. It was easier to believe all things were possible in a city that should not exist, propped up like so many dreams nailed fast to alder trees and left in the sea for centuries.
But Lily was here again, wasn’t she? She lived, as his brother had pointed out to him. She had not died in that car accident. This was not a dream, despite the many, many times he’d had dreams just like it. Rafael could call this—her—a miracle if he chose, and he told himself he would