“Stop pacing,” Martina said through her laughter. “A woman cannot be rushed.”
I checked my Rolex again as I turned on my heel and walked back along the path I had been tracing for the last fifteen minutes. There was being fashionably late, and then there was being late. But that wasn’t the entire reason I was anxious.
Guinevere’s reaction to my aggression that afternoon had both eased and excited something inside me. I had acted instinctively, as I would have if he had insulted Mama or my sisters or Martina. No one insulted the women in my life and remained unscathed.
Apparently, Guinevere was now among their ranks, and truthfully, it was hard not to question if I would go to the same lengths for her that I had and would go to for my family after knowing her for all of two weeks. It was so unlike me and so wildly stupid that I could not quite digest it.
But I knew it was the truth.
Especially in the car, after she’d questioned me. When she had blinked those luminous dark eyes, filled with their usual curiosity but also a notable degree of acceptance and even a little arousal. When she had taken my face in her hand and kissed me in a way that felt like a stamp of approval.
“Okay,” she had said, “I can accept it for four weeks or four decades.”
I rubbed a hand over my eyes as a fantasy of those four decades unfurled like cinema roll behind my lids.
Enough.
It was one thing to indulge in this affair. To enjoy Guinevere while I had her. And quite another to dream of any future.
She was as bright and hopeful as a shooting star across my dark galaxy, and I had to remember that. Fleeting, but lovely to behold.
“The dress fit?” I asked Martina, even though I had asked her twice already.
That was the other reason I was pacing.
I could not wait to see Guinevere in that dress.
It was one she had seen in the window of a boutique we’d passed on our run to Piazzale Michelangelo the other night. Midstride, she had halted and turned to the window as if drawn by gravity. I had stopped immediately and then followed behind her silently as she crossed to the display and raised her fingers the way she had in the car our first day out in Florence. There was reverence in her face as she stared at the gown, and when she finally realized I was beside her, she startled as if awaking from a dream.
“Sorry,” she’d murmured, that gorgeous flush spilling from her cheeks to her chest. “I’ve never seen something like this before.”
“A dress?” I asked with an arched brow to tease her gently.
A little shoulder shrug any Italian would be proud of. “It looks like art.”
I sent a soldier out to buy it the next day.
“It fits,” a voice said, slicing my thoughts to ribbons. “And it’s gorgeous.”
I followed the sound up the grand staircase leading from the second floor to the marble-floored foyer.
And there she was.
Italian writers had coined the term sbigottimento, which referred to a phenomenon that had no direct English equivalent but meant the profound and arresting feeling of being confronted with the object of your desire. It was almost sickening in its extreme. I lost my breath to it, heart knocking too hard at my breastbone as if it was fighting to escape my chest and go to her.
Guinevere.
Gliding down the stairs toward me in a diaphanous dress of sheer layers hand painted with vague impressions of flowers in light pastels. It made her look like a nymph shrouded in fog, picking up petals as she walked through dew in some blooming spring pasture. All that thick dark hair had been loosely curled, some caught up at the back of her skull where I liked to cup my hand. I imagined the end of the night when I could take out the clip and watch the heavy fall of mink around her bare shoulders.
Proserpina, indeed.
Without my consent, my hand had found its way to my chest, where I was pressing it as if I could force my heart back inside the cage of my ribs.
Too fanciful for a capo. Too dangerous for a man in my position, and yet there I stood.
Struck by il colpo di fulmine.
A lightning bolt of passion so acute it felt like it could be love.
“You haven’t said a word,” Guinevere noted as she took the last step and floated toward me, made taller with her heels but still so much shorter than me I had to bend my head to maintain eye contact. “Don’t tell me you hate it?”
“I hate myself for agreeing to take you as my date,” I admitted caustically. “Because I will be the one having to fight off a room of admirers.”
Her laugh was delighted, the antidote to the angst burning like acid in my gut.
“We must stand as a united front, then, because you look absolutely . . .” She drifted off as her gaze dipped to my polished dress shoes and rose up the length of my black Dolce & Gabbana suit. Her fingers ran lightly up the velvet lapels to the open throat of my black dress shirt. I swallowed against the press of her touch and watched the way her mouth fell open on a little sigh. “Stunning.”
I grasped her fingers and brought them to my mouth. “Thank you, but it does not hurt my pride to know that I pale in comparison to you. You are lucky—otherwise I would be angry we are late.”
“He has a thing about time,” Martina inserted helpfully from her seat on the antique velvet sofa. “You get used to it.”
I leveled her with a cool look that ordered her to be quiet.
She mocked zipping her lips and then throwing away the key like the insolent soldato she was.
“I have a present for you,” I told Guinevere, reaching into my pocket for the gift I’d found in a small shop in Santa Croce the other day on my walk home from meeting with my man at the local bank.
“Raffa, no.” She was suddenly fierce, pushing my hand back into my pocket. “Equals, remember? I’m not here for gifts and palaces.”
I stared at her implacably, waiting for her to take her hands from mine.
“I’m here for the sex,” she declared loud enough for Martina to snort Peroni through her nose. “If you must know.”
I pursed my lips to hide my smile and merely raised my brows until she sighed and let go. Only then did I lift my closed fist between us.
“This is a gift I bought for fifteen euro in a local shop,” I told her dryly. “But it is something I thought would be fitting for a girl whose nickname in America is Jinx.”
I turned my fist over and opened my palm to reveal the red coral pendant attached to a gold chain.
“This is a cornicello. In the south, where my father was from, it is a good luck charm. There are many stories about how people came to wear them that date back to the Neolithic period, but my favorite is that it was first derived from a crescent moon, for the goddess of the moon. She is also the goddess of the hunt, and her symbol has always been the deer. So what better lucky charm to give to my unlucky little fawn?”
Guinevere reached out tentatively, mouth open in a little moue as she touched the twisted coral horn with her pinky. “It’s beautiful, Raffa. And very, very sweet,” she teased, looking up at me with black-velvet eyes strewn with glitter.
I turned her around, so she would not see the way she affected me, and efficiently clipped the necklace around her throat. When she faced me, I could see that the pendant rested in the hollow of her throat.
“It’s your favorite color too,” she murmured, touching it against her skin. “I love it.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at her with blatant displeasure. “Really? I could not tell. Did we not talk about how I expect to be greeted just a few hours ago?”
She rolled her eyes, but there was no curbing her wide smile. She practically sparkled with happiness.
“Oh, I think I remember something about that. Let me . . .” She braced a hand against my chest and rolled to the tips of her high heels, using her other hand to tug me down by the back of my hair when she still couldn’t reach. When her lips touched mine, I could feel the shape of her smile.
“Better?” she murmured.
“No.”
When she opened her mouth to speak, I sealed it shut with my own and kissed her the way I’d wanted to for the last two hours. I cupped her neck instead of her head so I did not ruin her hair and pressed my other hand to the base of her spine so I could tip her slightly over my arm and absolutely plunder her mouth. I could feel her knees weaken at the onslaught, the feathery moans of her pleasure like a siren’s song urging me to take her right there in the middle of the foyer.
It had been almost a week since I’d last really touched her, and every inch of me burned to teach her more, show her how explosive I knew it would be between us.
A harsh cough splintered the moment.
“Ah, now you are really running late,” Martina called out with faux helpfulness.
“Togliti di torno.” I told her mildly to fuck off, and both Martina and Guinevere laughed.
“So,” Guinevere asked after I’d helped her into my Lamborghini and she had rolled her eyes at my excess. “What is the charity we are raising money for tonight?”
“For the museum itself. There are ongoing construction and restoration for a building constructed in the sixteenth century.”
“Fair enough. You don’t seem like the kind of man who would enjoy events like this.”
“I am not.” In fact, I tried to send Martina or Carmine in my place whenever I could. I rarely even visited Florence proper, running most of my business from Villa Romano and traveling through the north as needed.
“Then why are we going to this one?”
“Two reasons. The first is that I have not made an appearance in Florentine society in some time, and it is a beast that requires at least infrequent feeding. There will be many people there I should rub elbows with. Even then, I might have canceled last minute if it were not for my second reason.” I slid a hand over her thigh and squeezed. “Seeing you in that dress, and later, seeing you out of it.”
Her laugh was light and as frothy as overflowing champagne. “Raffa, trust me, you do not need to take me to a gala to see me naked.”
“No?” I arched a brow.
“No,” she said firmly, linking her hand with mine. “Honestly, I think if you snapped your fingers and looked at me in that way you do sometimes like I am prettier than Botticelli’s Venus, I would do almost anything you asked.”
“Even though you are a virgin?” I asked, despite never having explicitly spoken about her sexual history.
Her blush was obvious even in the dim car. “Maybe because I am. It makes me feel wanted and confident to have your attention. To earn your praise like I did in the car on the way to the vineyard the other day. I’ve always been very goal oriented.”
I laughed, startled by her endearing honesty although I should have been used to it. “Well, I am happy to oblige. Tonight, you will come back to the palazzo with me.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But I’m afraid I don’t have any pajamas at your place.”
Cazzo, her coquettishness was making me hard just as we pulled up to the valet drop-off for the gala.
I put the car in neutral as we waited in line for the valet and slid my hand under her hair to pull her close.
“You can sleep in my cum,” I offered graciously and then ate the little gasp straight off her tongue.
I had not worried about how Guinevere would act on my arm, despite knowing the event brought the cream of Florentine society out of their villas, palaces, and penthouses in enough finery to feed a third world nation for years.
Still, she surprised me.
As she always seemed able to do.
Though it was obvious she had never walked a red carpet, she was elegance personified on my arm as I led her to the photography points and smiled for the cameras. It was a short carpet with few paparazzi, mostly for local news outlets, but she was still blinking owlishly and adorably by the time we entered the palace.
Her Italian was much better than I had given her credit for, and the week of immersive language classes had only honed it further. When we engaged in conversation with the mayor and his wife, she was able to understand the flow of conversation and respond charmingly, if a bit slowly, in kind.
By the time we moved on from the Moris, they were utterly charmed by the bella donna Americana.
As was I.
The entire central piazza of the palace had been transformed into an extravagant outdoor ballroom, complete with a tiled dance floor overseen by a sixteen-piece orchestra. They had transported some of the more recognizable statues from the galleries into the courtyard, so I had the pleasure of teasing my date about her resemblance to a marble nymph with flowers in her hair. It was a warm evening, the sky gone to ink, with pinpricks of barely visible stars and a full-bellied moon I found Guinevere peering at as if they were a work of art framed in the rectangular silhouette of the buildings.
“It’s beautiful,” she admitted when I caught her, as if it was a secret.
“Do not be embarrassed by your enthusiasm for life,” I told her, dredging up an old quote from Ivern Ball that suited her so well. “‘Knowledge is power, but enthusiasm pulls the switch.’”
“I haven’t heard that before,” she said with a shy smile. “But I love it.”
“You should. It is true in general and for you. It is one of my favorite things about you.”
We had a quiet moment without an audience, tucked behind the statue of the nymph in a pocket of shadow.
“Oh? What else do you like?” she asked coyly, leaning back against a pillar and touching the low neckline of her dress. My mouth watered.
I stepped forward, curving around her to shield her from view as I moved her hair off one shoulder and placed a kiss there.
“It would be more sensible to ask what I do not like about you, cerbiatta,” I murmured against her throat, touching my tongue to her pulse point to feel it pound. “To tell you everything I admire would take too long.”
“Flatterer,” she teased, but clutched me closer and arched into my mouth.
“Ah, Signore Romano, I should have known I would find you in some dark corner, feeding on a woman.”
The Neapolitan dialect made me tense even before the words landed. I turned to face the unwelcome intruder, keeping Guinevere at my back.
Sansone Pucci stood before me with a grim smile.
“Usually, people in dark corners do not like to be disturbed,” I pointed out to him coolly.
The last time Ludo reported to me, Sansone had been in the south, wrapping up a drug seizure off the coast of Calabria.
And suddenly, he was here in my city.
“I find things are always best brought into the light,” he countered with that smug superiority I had sensed in him from afar. “We have not officially met, but I had to introduce myself to the famous Raffaele Romano. Sansone Pucci.”
I inclined my head but said nothing, as he clearly already knew my name and was trying to set into motion a game of cat and mouse. He would come to understand that I was neither. The symbol of the Romano family had always been a wolf, a reference to Romulus, the founding father of Rome. And wolves did not play games with their enemies or their prey.
“You know, I once met your father,” he continued. “I believe we were questioning him about fraud.”
“Which you were never able to prove,” I reminded him curtly. “Do not speak ill of the dead, Pucci. Whatever our differences, he was still my father.”
Sansone peered at me as if trying to read the truth in my implacable veneer. The history of my falling-out with Aldo Romano was legendary in the right circles, those in the underworld and those in high society. I had refused to take over the business as his only son and so had been cast out. From the ages of twenty-one to twenty-nine, I had not set foot in Tuscany because of the man who ruled it.
It was the only reason I had been able to come home after his death and take over as capo dei capi as seamlessly as I had. Everyone knew I had sworn never to follow my father, and when I moved back to Tuscany, I set up my own wealth management firm instead of taking over as CEO of the Romano Group, leaving it in the capable hands of Tonio and Leo.
It seemed my plausible deniability was coming under scrutiny now.
“And who, may I ask, is the lovely lady?” he had the audacity to ask, peering around my shoulder to smile at her.
I forced myself to stay calm even though I wanted to gouge his eyes out for even daring to look at her.
“Guinevere,” I said, pulling her in close at my side. “May I introduce the deputy director of the police, Signore Pucci.”
“Pleasure,” he said in perfect English, stepping forward to take her hand and bring it just short of his mouth in a facsimile of a kiss. “How did a foreigner come to be on the arm of Signore Romano tonight?”
She cocked her head slightly, considering him with none of her usual cheer. I watched as she managed to look down her nose at the much taller man.
“How does any woman end up on the arm of a man? He wins her favor.”
“Ah, and how did he win yours?” He stepped closer with a plastic smile I wanted to break into pieces.
“By being a perfect gentleman,” she replied smoothly, not realizing her unintentional reference to my nickname, Il Gentiluomo.
Sansone’s smile sharpened. “How wonderful for you both. I had heard from mutual acquaintances that you were prepared to be married to Stefania Burette.”
Guinevere did not shift one inch at his insinuation, and the last vestiges of my defenses against her crumbled like old stone.
“I am not,” I replied coldly.
“Obviously,” Guinevere added, turning to wind her arm through mine and beam up at me. “You promised me a dance, darling. Don’t make me wait any longer?”
I bent to press a kiss to her nose, oddly grateful for her staunch support in the face of the mysterious animosity between Sansone and me. The faith she had in me was so misplaced but felt like absolution.
“Certo, piccola,” I agreed. “Excuse us, Signore Pucci. I hope you have a pleasant time in my city.”
He nodded, pushing his hands into his pockets as I took Vera to the dance floor and spun her into my arms. I could feel his eyes on us long after I lost sight of him in the crowd and knew with certainty that somehow we had gotten on his radar.
Porca Madonna.
“You seem very angry,” Guinevere said softly, running her fingertips from my shoulder to my neck in a comforting caress. “Who was that arrogant ass?”
My bark of laughter was so loud, it drew attention from the partygoers around us.
Guinevere smiled in triumph at the sound.
“You are the most surprising girl,” I told her as I led us around the black-and-white floor. “I knew you would animate my life in ways I could hardly fathom, but the reality is much better.”
“For a grump, you can be very romantic.”
“I am Italian,” I reminded her.
She hesitated. “I’m sorry he was so rude about your father.”
“Do not be. He was a pezzo di merda.”
Her dark eyes searched my face, so soft and warm, inviting me to trust her enough to explain. For one heart-stopping moment, I wanted to lay all my awful history at her door and beg her to let me stay.
“May I cut in?”
I swallowed my sigh, wishing the night could have been about enjoyment instead of riddled with irritation.
“No,” I told Stefania without looking at her.
Guinevere stayed in my arms, but her gaze tracked the woman behind me. I danced us farther away.
“She looks like she swallowed a lemon,” she told me.
“That is just the way her face is.”
“Raffa,” she scolded, but she was biting back a smile. “Don’t be rude.”
“Why not? It was rude of her to interrupt our dance.”
“Is she a friend? I assumed so because she seemed comfortable enough to ask for a dance in the first place.”
“She used to be,” I confessed flippantly, though something in my gut clenched as I continued to say, “though lately she has confessed to wanting . . . more. Marriage and the like.”
Guinevere’s lovely face cycled through expressions before landing on something like amused bewilderment. “Can I ask . . . why does she seem to think you want to marry her?”
I enjoyed the way she framed the question because it spoke of her resolve to believe that I had never intended to and never meant to give Stefania that idea. There was no insecurity in her tone or judgment, just that brand of Guinevere Stone curiosity.
“Our families run in the same circles, and my mother has always thought Stefania would make a good wife for a man in . . . my position. She comes from a good family with wealth and connections.” I shrugged.
“And she’s beautiful.”
I shrugged again. “There is beauty in everyone. It does not mean you are attracted to everyone.”
“So you have never . . .” She flushed, and I chuckled warmly, touching her cheek with my knuckles to feel its heat.
“No, I have never wanted to. And if you do not mind, I would prefer to think about sleeping with the donna accattivante in my arms.”
We finished out the dance like that, flirting and laughing as if the deputy chief of the anti-Mafia commission was not watching me like a hawk, and as if Stefania was not eyeing me like a praying mantis.
At some point, I spun her dramatically and reeled her back into my arms, bending her back to place what was meant to be a playful kiss on her mouth. But the moment our lips met, I was lost to the taste of her tinted in sweet white wine and some kind of berry lip gloss.
Everything fell away.
Sansone.
Stefania.
The rising threat against my outfit and the pressures of my position, the responsibility to my family.
Nothing existed under the black-velvet sky except Guinevere and me, safe inside our globe.
“Come with me,” I whispered against her damp mouth when I realized I was dangerously close to indecency.
In answer, she took my hand and let me lead her from the well-lit dance floor back into the shadows of the columns and then out into the Boboli Gardens. The gravel crunched under our feet as I took her up the left path bracketing the planted terraces and fountains into the lantern-lit side garden behind rows of hedges. We walked for another minute until we found a stone bench I could pull her down onto, pressing my mouth to hers before she was even fully seated.
She hummed her pleasure onto my tongue and sank her hands into my hair, nails scratching at my scalp.
“I want to touch you here,” I told her, voice already raw with want, my hand slipping from her throat to span the width of her upper breasts exposed by the low cut of her gown.
“Yes,” she hissed, tipping her head back to give me better access, wanton as a nymph from Roman legends and just as ethereal. “Every night I’ve gone to bed without you, I’ve imagined how you might touch me next.”
I groaned as I brought my face to her chest, kissing along the neck of the dress until goose bumps blossomed on her skin. I couldn’t resist the urge to bite a bruise into the flesh beside her cornicello, and when I was done, I rubbed the pink skin with my thumb.
“Now everyone who doubted will know just how much you are mine.”
“Io sono tua,” she breathed, pushing down the cups of her dress so that her pretty breasts were bathed in moonlight. “Please, Raffa.”
I complied with her silent plea and ducked to lave her nipple, using my fingers to twist the other tight in my grip. Her cry was choked off, hips squirming against the bench as she sought pressure to satisfy the ache growing between her thighs.
“Are you already wet for me?” I asked against the bottom curve of her pale breast, biting into it because I liked the look of her ringed in teeth marks. “The only romance I am willing to give is this moonlit garden. What I want to do to you would make your virgin ears blush.”
Her breath caught before she said, “I want you to tell me. I want to be shocked. I want you to break open this locked box inside me filled with fantasies I don’t know how to voice.”
I lifted her other breast to my mouth and sucked a bruise beside her nipple before giving it the attention she begged me for with wordless moans.
“I want to taste your sweet figa again. Lick you until you are leaking down both thighs and screaming for me to ease the ache in your pussy needing to be filled.” I raised my fingers to her mouth and rubbed my thumb over her bottom lip so it fell open at my touch and then slowly slid one finger, then two and three, over her tongue as I spoke. “I would start with one and then work you open on my fingers to train your untried pussy to take my cock. I think you would start to cry, pretty tears leaking down your face as you begged shamelessly for me to fuck you. Would you cry for me, cerbiatta?”
“Yes,” she gasped around my fingers before sucking them harder into her mouth, rolling her tongue around the tips.
“And I would fill you up, but first, I would fuck this lovely mouth and teach you to take me deep into your throat, so I would show you how to take my cock the way I like. Rough and deep.”
She groaned around my fingers. I took her hand and laid it against the thick ridge of my trapped cock. “Can you imagine taking all this inside you? In your mouth and your throat and your delicious pussy?”
“Yes,” she said again when I removed my fingers, lifting her head from its supine position between her shoulders to reveal blown-out pupils, eyes glazed as if she was high off my dark fantasies and desperate for another hit. “You’d have to teach me. I’ve never done that before.”
“I can do that,” I promised, gripping her chin hard to punch a kiss to her lips before I stood up and took off my jacket.
She watched, panting, breasts wet and limned in silver light as I placed the inside of my blazer on the grass beside the bench.
“On your knees, pretty fawn.”
Our eyes collided like two cars, the sensation crashing through my body, rearranging my molecules until I was someone else entirely than I had been before. I watched as her trembling hand raised to her damp mouth, and I thought for one moment it was fear that moved her.
But then she was almost falling in her haste to drop to the ground on the jacket, arranging her skirt around her knees so that she was not tangled before she looked up at me and slowly licked her red mouth.
Cazzo, she was like something out of a Titian painting, at once innocent and powerfully erotic. For all her lack of expertise, she was eager and excited by the dark side of pleasure.
I stepped close to her, pinching her chin so her face was lifted to mine and I could gauge her expression. “What do you want?”
“You,” she said instantly, tongue dipping out to tap my thumb.
I wrapped her hair in my fist and used it to press her cheek to the swell of my dick behind my trousers. She rubbed against it, then turned her face to mouth the shape of my shaft with her lips.
I groaned and decided she was owed my honesty. “You are the sexiest woman I have ever known.”
Her little moan vibrated through the cloth to my cock.
“Take it out,” I told her, because I wanted to watch the excited flutter of her hands at my fly as she unzipped it and pulled me out through the gap in my boxer briefs so quickly that the shaft slapped across her cheek, smearing precum there.
She did not laugh or recoil. Instead, she tilted her head back and opened her mouth.
“Feed it to me?” she asked quietly, just a hint of nerves.
I fisted the base and painted the center of her tongue with my precum.
“Divino,” she murmured before chasing after me when I moved away. “I want to take more. I’ve thought about drinking straight from your dick since I tasted you at Fattoria Casa Luna.”
I palmed one of her cheeks, hooking a thumb inside her mouth alongside my shaft as I fed more into her hot, wet mouth. Her tongue flicked against the underside of my cock and thumb, lips tightening, sucking as if she would not be satisfied until my entire length was buried inside her.
“That is such a good girl,” I praised her, voice wrecked with the pleasure searing through my hips, up and down my body to curl my fingers and toes. “You look so bella with my cock stretching your lips.”
She moaned, lashes fluttering against her cheeks as she pushed forward to take even more of me. When she gagged, she frowned, pulling off and then replacing her mouth with her hand.
“Can you teach me how to take you deeper?” She licked her swollen mouth. “Into my throat.”
My low spine tingled, balls drawing tight at that sweet voice asking for such filthy pleasures.
“Si, piccola, open your mouth and take a deep breath. When you want to gag, swallow around my cock until the feeling passes.”
She tugged me closer by the shaft and licked, kittenish, at the pearls of seed dripping from the end of me before sinking straight down my length. Pleasure cut through me like a knife to the belly. I folded over slightly, hand tightening in her hair as I helped thrust her along my shaft. The feel of her swallowing around me, the sight of saliva pooling at the edge of her mouth and sliding down her chin, and the way her eyes flicked up to look at me, wet with effort from taking me so deep, had me on the edge faster than ever before.
“Fuck, Guinevere, you are going to make me come too quickly. Yes,” I hissed as she swallowed again and the last of my shaft was wedged down her throat. I pressed a palm to her throat gently just to feel the way I filled her up.
I jerked out to the head, her gasp cool and wet against my skin as she sucked in more air.
“Again,” she demanded, lifting her hands to wrap them around my hips, fingers digging into my ass to thrust me forward.
How was I supposed to survive her?
She took me harder this time, a tear trickling down her cheek as she moaned at the thick stretch in her throat. I held her there for a moment, long enough to say, “With practice, I will fuck your face just like I can fuck your pussy. Fast, hard, your nose bumping against my groin. I will come straight down your throat like that.”
I released her, but she only took a quick breath before diving back down, hungry for me in a way I had never imagined. She continued, sucking wetly, uncaring of the mess I was making of her, just desperate to make me come.
“Please,” she said finally, “I want you to come in my mouth.”
I used my hand in her hair to tilt her head back farther and then leaned down to spit in her waiting mouth. “Hold on, then,” I warned her.
She shivered, clenching her hands around my ass and tugging me forward.
This time I pumped straight to the back of her throat. I set a rhythm she could follow to time her breaths and shallowly fucked her pretty face. One of my thumbs dragged through a tear on her cheek and brought it to my mouth.
“Even your tears taste sweet,” I told her, voice stripped bare as pleasure seared down my spine, threatening to turn it to ash as soon as I gave in to the fiery heat of lust Guinevere was stoking with her mouth. “Going to come. Be a good girl and lick every last drop.”
She hummed in agreement, and it was the last straw.
I pulled out of her throat and rested on her tongue. “Open wide.”
Fisting my cock hard and tight, I grunted as my atoms collapsed in on themselves, an implosion of pleasure that whited out my vision. I opened my eyes to watch cum stripe her tongue before she sealed her lips over the sensitive head of my cock and suckled out every last ounce of seed.
“Madonna santa,” I cursed, loosening my hold on her hair and stroking it instead.
She pressed her cheek to my trouser-covered thigh and planted a dainty kiss on my wet, spent cock.
“I loved that,” she admitted, her voice roughened by the face fucking and all the sweeter for it.
“Clearly, I did as well,” I mused dryly before sinking to my knees in front of her. “Are you a soaked mess beneath these skirts?”
She bit her lip but nodded as she raised her eyes to mine. “Yes.”
“Do you need my help to come?”
“Please.”
I stroked her cheek and lifted her skirt with my other hand until I found the bare skin of her thigh, tracing it up to her sex. She was drenched straight through the silk of her panties, thighs damp with it.
“What a dirty, filthy, beautiful girl you are,” I told her proudly, kissing her. “Now do you want to ride my hand?”
She gripped my wrist to keep my hand against her pussy and rose to her knees, spreading them slightly to give me better access. I slipped two fingers beneath the edge of the silk band and groaned at the slick, hot feel of her cunt against me.
“Così perfetta,” I told her as I lightly pinched her clit, and she gasped sharply, dropping her forehead to my chest in surrender to the pleasure. “How quickly can I make this pretty cunt come for me?”
She panted as I sank two fingers inside her, using the heel of my hand to press against her swollen clit.
“Ride them,” I said in that cold voice I’d grown to know she loved.
Slowly, her hips started dancing, rocking back and forth as she fucked herself on my fingers. After a moment, she whimpered, hands clutching at my hair.
“Not enough?” I crooned. “Do you need more?”
“I want you,” she said, words almost slurred with pleasure.
As much as I would have loved to fuck her in the grass, there was no way I was going to take her virginity in the Boboli Gardens. Instead, I pressed another finger and then another inside her so she could feel the stretch and ache.
That was when she came to life.
She tossed her head back, nipples still lifted out of her dress and pebbled in the cool night air as she rocked her hips against me. Her eyes were closed, face tipped to the moon, and I knew I had never seen anything so beautiful.
“Vieni per me, cerbiatta,” I ordered, bending to fix my teeth to her neck in a sharp bite.
She shuddered against my thrusting fingers, grinding into the heel of my palm as she cried out. Her hand clutched so hard in my shirt she popped a button, but I barely noticed, transfixed by the noises she made as she wrung every last drop of her climax against me.
“Bellissima,” I told her, pressing a soft kiss to her throat before running my nose to her jaw and kissing that too. “How are you feeling?”
She sighed and laughed at once, opening lazy lids to grin tipsily at me. “One of the best moments of my life, I think.”
“Bene, then we agree,” I said, kissing the little moue of shock on her mouth before carefully moving my hand from under her skirt. “Now all I want is you in my bed.”
