I was worried the intimacy of our day would falter after we discovered someone was effectively stealing from the winery and had an awkward run-in with his sister and best friend, but Raffa proved me wonderfully wrong. If anything, he seemed filled with intent, his attention keen eyed as he showed me the fattoria’s well-organized cellar suffused with the sweet musk of aging wine and barrel wood. Imelda had made herself scarce after setting up the wine-tasting table for us, and Raffa himself seemed determined to be my sommelier.
“I am beginning to think you have a kink for teaching me,” I teased him as he poured a splash of Chianti Classico into my glass after explaining the specifics of its bouquet to me.
“Maybe,” he admitted, watching with dark eyes as I placed my nose at the top of the glass to breathe in the scents and then breathed in again through my mouth before taking a sip that I aerated with my teeth. “It seems in this I do not have to.”
I laughed and admitted, “My father is Italian, remember? He taught my sister and me about wine well before we could drink it.”
Gemma had loved the science of viticulture and was studying to be a sommelier herself. One of the reasons she had decided to live abroad in Albania for a year was to study in one of the oldest wine-making regions in the world. It made me feel close to her, tasting wine in an Italian cellar, knowing she would have loved it like I did.
“More evidence that we do not know each other very well,” he chided with a cluck of his tongue as he leaned against the table across from me. “You have not spoken much of your own sister.”
“She died,” I confessed softly, staring into the garnet liquid so he wouldn’t see the agony in my face. “Last year. It was a really rare form of heart attack. She was living abroad when it happened, and we just . . . weren’t expecting it. Of the two of us, it always seemed more likely I would be the one to die young because of my illness.”
“Mi dispiace,” he said softly, reaching across the table to draw two fingers down the back of my hand. “I lost my father four years ago, and it still feels fresh.”
“You were close?” My curiosity sprang like water from a tapped well. Raffa had shared so little about himself in contrast to how comfortable I felt in his company. I was eager to know more, especially after his best friend had been rude to me and Martina had seemed shocked he would’ve played the white knight for anyone.
“In some ways,” he mused. “In others, we were at odds. It is often the way with parents, I think.”
I winced a little, hiding my reaction behind the glass as I raised it to take another sip. After swirling the wine around my palate, I spat the liquid into the silver spittoon.
When I looked up, Raffa had a brow raised. “I will not think less of you if you want to actually drink the wine.”
A blush fired my cheeks. “I didn’t think so. I just have to be careful with alcohol.”
His other brow joined the first. “Because of your condition.”
“Yes. I would have to watch my intake anyway, but I had a kidney transplant when I was sixteen, so I have to be doubly cautious.” I hesitated. “My sister was the donor.”
He made a noise in the back of his throat that was somehow sympathetic without being coddling. “It is not such a bad thing. As much as most Italians are loath to admit it, alcohol is not exactly a health food.”
I laughed, shocked that he continually found ways to put me at ease. “That’s true.”
“But you enjoy it?” He nodded at my glass.
“I know Chianti is made specifically to pair with food, but it’s lovely.”
“Lovely,” he murmured, coming around the table to my side, where he seemed to reach for me before crossing my body to grab another bottle of wine to pour into two clean glasses for us both. “That is not a word I would use for wine, but for a woman.”
“I think it works for both,” I breathed, my nipples pebbling from the brush of his forearm across them as he replaced the wine.
“Both,” he mused, wickedness slowly pulling his mouth into a crooked grin. “I cannot say I have tasted both to know if you are right.”
“No, not together,” I started to correct him, but my words were lost to a gasp when Raffa picked me up by the hips and placed me on the table. “What are you doing?”
“This is a wine tasting,” he said drolly. “I am tasting my wine.”
I opened my mouth to say something but forgot entirely when he lifted my glass to my nose so I could smell the red before he tipped it against my mouth.
“Open,” he coaxed, a light flush on his pronounced cheekbones. “Taste.”
I shivered as cabernet sauvignon pooled on my tongue, all red fruits and a shadow of oak.
“Do not swallow,” he ordered in that domineering, faintly cold way that made my skin flush.
I waited obediently, instinctually, and had the gratification of his wide smile, white teeth and pointed canines almost lupine and entirely too gorgeous.
“Molto bene,” he praised before stepping in close between my thighs so my dress rode up almost all the way to my hips. One hand rose to grip my chin, tilting it slightly so that when his mouth descended on mine, we fit perfectly.
At first it was closed lips, just the trace of his tongue against my lower lip and then pushing beyond to touch my teeth. Then he was slipping inside, drinking the wine from my mouth. When it was gone, he languidly sucked the taste from my tongue until I moaned around a full body shiver.
“Mmm,” he hummed, pulling back an inch to stare at my wine-stained lips. “Perhaps lovely is not the word for either. È ambrosia. Divino. Come una droga.”
It is ambrosia. Divine. Like a drug.
Unwittingly, I squeezed Raffa’s lean hips between my thighs, trying to relieve the ache he’d placed at their center. His answering expression was low lidded, one corner of his full bottom lip depressed by a sharp tooth.
“Do you agree, cerbiatta?” he asked me in a husky drawl.
“Well,” I said, my voice choked off with desire. “I can’t say for sure after only one taste.”
“Ah, fair,” he declared softly, and I realized we had both been speaking quietly as if in a confessional, making the miles-long cellar feel close and intimate, a space just for us. “Shall we try again?”
I nodded too enthusiastically, and his smile only flared wider in response, as if he found me endearing. I had no defenses against a man like this, and I knew it had little to do with my lack of experience and more to do with the fact that he was as near perfection as any man I’d ever known.
Devilishly handsome, powerful, kind, and complicated enough to keep my mind busy like a Rubik’s Cube, with endless combinations of enticement.
When he raised the glass this time, it was to his own lips, and I watched as his strong, tanned throat worked, Adam’s apple bobbing. Why was that so wildly attractive?
After taking his own sip, he sank a hand into the back of my hair to cup my skull and tilted me back slightly so my weight rested in his hand. It was a habit he had, I realized, of wanting me to trust him to balance me.
When his lips sealed over mine, slowly releasing the rich wine into my mouth, I drank it down greedily so I could taste the remnants on his tongue and teeth. A dribble of wine leaked down my chin, but Raffa’s tongue was there before I could do anything, tracing the spill up my neck, jaw, and chin and back behind my teeth.
I was so wet that a draft of the cool cellar air teased my bared pussy like a feather. It made me realize Raffa still didn’t know I’d taken off my underwear.
He kissed the edge of the smile I hadn’t realized I’d been wearing. “Well?”
“Divino,” I said back at him, feeling emboldened by the press of the thick erection I felt against my thigh. “Almost as delicious as me.”
I was close enough to see the way his sunlit-whiskey irises thinned to frame blown-wide pupils, black holes of desire I wanted to throw myself into.
“Not quite,” he protested. “But we just began our experiment . . .”
He trailed off to grab the bottle of wine, forgoing the glass entirely to hover it over my chest.
“Raffa,” I warned. “This dress cost you hundreds of euros!”
He shrugged, gaze intent on my breasts. “I have wondered all day if I could see your nipples through this dress if it was wet, and I intend to find out.”
I didn’t have a good argument for that, and my wetness was seeping down my pussy to the fabric beneath my bottom, so I figured the dress was beyond redemption already.
In response, I leaned back on my hands to expose my chest entirely, hair shifting down my back, breasts raised.
His gaze flickered up to mine, warm with pride. “Do you know how delicious it is to watch you be brave and bold like this? It makes me want to worship you on my knees.”
My mouth went bone dry at the thought of his dark head feasting between my thighs, big hands pinning me open for his hungry mouth.
Cool wine broke my flesh into goose bumps as Raffa splashed some at the base of my neck to watch it pool against my collarbones and trickle down my skin into the white linen, saturating it until the fabric was a wet pink press against my breasts.
“Che bella,” he murmured almost to himself before ducking his head to sip the wine from my neck, licking down my chest until he hit fabric and then blowing cool air on my wet-wrapped breasts. My nipples furled so tightly they ached.
Raffa made an appreciative noise in the back of his throat and then thumbed one peak, tweaking it in a way that felt like pure electricity. His mouth followed, a welcome heat after the cold and the pain, his tongue curling around my nipple and his mouth pulling hard. The suction and abrasion of the rough linen made my pleasure arch down my belly to my shamelessly wet sex.
“Ambrosia,” he said against the curve of my breast before sinking his teeth into the roundness to test its bounce.
I cried out, one hand clutching his thick, lush hair to keep him pinned to my chest.
He cooed something soothing before going to work on my right nipple, giving it the same treatment. When he was done, the fabric over my peaks was paler pink than the surrounding linen, almost sucked clean by his mouth. His lips were swollen and vividly red against the black stubble lining his jaw. But it was his eyes, dark, dangerous, and glinting like a predator’s in the night, that made me physically tremble with want.
I wanted him to devour me, bones and all.
There was no fear or shyness, no trace of a virgin’s mindset. The hunger that had lain dormant in my gut for so long was fully roused and ravenous.
“Raffa,” I told him, breathless, chest heaving. “I think you should know . . . I’m not wearing anything under this dress.”
The growl that rumbled through his chest was the sexiest thing I had ever heard. He tugged me closer to the edge of the table and dropped to his knees, unthinking of the hard ceramic tile. He didn’t even wince, though, the full weight of his focus between my thighs as he pushed them open with his palms and stared at my bare figa.
I could feel my blush in my scalp and my toes, but the embarrassment only amplified my desire, compressing it from burning coal to something clear and diamond bright.
“How do I say ‘lick me’?” I asked him, playing into his teacher kink.
He bit sharply at the soft flesh of my inner thigh to watch me squirm before lifting his black eyes to mine. “Leccami la figa.”
“Leccami la figa, prego, Signore,” I said.
Lick my pussy, please, sir.
“Such a good girl,” he praised, and his approbation was headier than any amount of fine Italian wine. “Hand me the wine.”
I did so without hesitation and watched with my lip between my teeth as he poured some at the crease of each thigh. After placing the bottle on the floor out of the way, he refocused his attention on my pussy, and it felt like a physical touch. Like a promise.
Suddenly, his tongue was on me, lapping up the alcohol from my thin-skinned groin without really touching my core. I thanked Gemma for gifting me sessions of laser hair removal for my eighteenth birthday, because the feel of his tongue against my bare skin was so exquisite I had to curl my hands around the edge of the table to resist pushing his head closer to the leaking center of me.
“Look at how wet this pussy is,” he mused, resting his cheek on one inner thigh to stare intimately at my folds, using the thumb of his other hand to lightly trace from beneath my aching clit to just before my ass. When he raised his fingers to show me, they glistened as if with dew.
I started panting when he slid them into his mouth and sucked them, cheeks hollowing.
“Come una droga,” he repeated, this time about my taste.
Like a drug.
Without hesitation, he wrapped his arms under my thighs, lifting me to his mouth, his hands pinning my hips still so he could attack me with his lips, teeth, and tongue.
I shouted, head dropping back between my shoulders as if my spine had been cut like a thread. Sensation exploded so sharply through my entire body, emanating from his magical mouth, that I felt like I would come out of my skin. His tongue found my clit, testing it with slow, languid strokes before increasing the pressure, wrapping his lips around it and pulling.
Under any other circumstances I might have been embarrassed by how quickly I came, hips juddering uselessly under his strong hands, pussy spasming like an open-and-closed fist around an ache even the pleasure couldn’t quench. But the entire day had been a prelude to this. A slow-burn seduction of my body and mind that left me as wanton and ready as a seasoned courtesan in the historical romance novels I loved so much.
This was so much better than anything I had ever read about it.
Raffa licked me through the climax, moving away from my throbbing, sensitive clit to tongue at my entrance. The sound of his mouth licking up my cum was shameless and unbearably hot.
My hands wove into his hair and pulled tight.
“Voglio di più,” I told him in Italian, because it seemed like the only language that could hold all this desire without breaking under the weight.
His response was a muttered curse and a sharp bite to the meat of my thigh. My hips jumped at the pain before it transformed into something with roots that dug deep into my pelvis and thighs.
“Ancora,” I cried, needing his mouth on me but also his teeth, his pain like a punctuation mark of ownership on my skin.
Instead of biting me, he moved his mouth back to the wet slick of my pussy and reached up with both hands to pinch my nipples hard between his fingertips.
I cried out, voice breaking, pleasure shattering, vision whiting out with pinwheels of bright color popping through. His name was in my mouth like a prayer, a hymn I would never forget even long after I went home and left him behind forever.
Raffa, Raffa, Raffa.
I wanted to tattoo the word on the inside of my mouth because it tasted just as good as that wine and my sex.
My arms collapsed, dropping me to my elbows on the table, my bare feet—sandals long dropped to the floor—pressed to his broad shoulders. I was more exposed than I’d ever been in my life, and as I fought to find earth again, I wondered vaguely if my slight curves and skinny ribs could be attractive enough to him.
But then he was rearing up, wiping his glistening mouth with the back of his hand before he tore his belt open, his zipper down, and pulled out his cock.
I’d only ever seen one in porn or anatomy classes, and they certainly didn’t look like this.
Vivid purple red at the broad, leaking head. The shaft so thick and long even his big bare hand seemed insufficient to handle it. The skin looked soft as silk, the precum pooling in the head creamy.
My mouth watered, and before I could think to stop myself, I begged softly, “Can I taste it?”
Raffa’s groan vibrated his entire tensed body. “Certo, piccola.”
His thumb swiped over the head as he stepped closer. One hand pressed down on my belly to lay me flat against the low table, and the other, salt slicked, painted my panting mouth with his seed.
My tongue darted out instantly, tapping the sharply saline, faintly bitter taste of him. He was watching me with burning eyes, one hand fisted at the base of that big dick like a vise, precum leaking down onto my thigh as he loomed over me.
“Come una droga,” I told him honestly. I licked my mouth clean, already thinking about drinking straight from the source.
“Sei un sogno erotico,” he rasped. “You are already covered in wine, but I want to make you filthy with cum.”
It was an expression of desire and a question. His entire body was coiled tight enough to snap, the muscles in his exposed abdomen and forearms corded, tendons and veins popped. If I told him no, I thought, he wouldn’t. If I told him he was scaring me, that this was too much, he would put that painfully hard erection in the cage of his zipper and belt and walk away.
It made something real, something that had lain in the center of my chest since he’d taken care of me through my sickness and concussion, germinate and take tentative root.
I reached for him, wrapping my fingers in his shirt to tug him down so he had to brace a hand on the table, his hair falling from his forehead into his eyes, tangling with his long lashes.
“Come for me,” I said as I pulled the front of my dress down, the loose straps sliding down my shoulders so most of my breasts were exposed. “Vieni per me. Vieni su di me.”
Come for me. Come on me.
Raffa loosed an animalistic rumble as he started to jack off his dick over my torso, his eyes pinned to my face as if the sight of me, Guinevere Stone, was enough to make him climax. Not my body, even. Just my eyes, locked to his blown black gaze as he furiously striped his cock and then came a minute later with a muted roar. His eyes squeezed shut, his full, kissed-pink mouth falling open as he came all over my skin.
I could have climaxed again from the sight of him and the feel of his hot seed marking my flesh like a brand.
I’d never felt so connected to anyone in my life, and for the first time in a long time, I was grateful for my virginity so I could have this first experience with him.
In the cellar of a vineyard in a €1,000 dress we’d destroyed because it was fun and sexy to do so.
I laughed, a high, bubbling sound that trickled out of me like water from the cupid fountain in the garden. Raffa opened his eyes, looking down at me as they creased at the corners with his small smile. In answer, I shook my head and pulled him down so I could share the laughter on my tongue.
“Tears after our first kiss, laughter after our first orgasms together,” he murmured against my mouth, but his tone was playful. “You could give a man a complex.”
I laughed again, then framed his impossibly beautiful face in my hands just because I could. Just because I somehow had license to touch this man all over.
“Well, I think you’ve destroyed mine,” I admitted with a cheeky grin. “Goodbye, Madonna. Hello, whore.”
“Vera,” he said, eyes flashing. “I will not have you saying that. Enjoying pleasure should be a fact of life, not a sin or an insult.”
“No,” I agreed. “I’m saying I see that now. Thank you. You made me feel invincible even as you took me apart. I’m not sure how you did it.”
He nosed at my cheek before pressing a kiss there. “In English or Italian, you are nothing short of brilliant. So bright, I could not ignore your light even when I wished to. If I made you feel that truth for a moment, I am happy.”
“Sweet,” I told him as I had in the car earlier that day.
He grunted a rejection, but I noticed, as he pulled away to reach for a hand towel meant for the wine-bottle condensation and started to clean me with it as best he could, that there was a smile tucked into one cheek.
“Um, Raffa,” I said after he’d wiped the cum from my belly and helped me sit up. “What are we going to do about my dress?”
We both looked down at the wine- and cum-stained garment and burst into laughter simultaneously.
