I practically vibrated in my seat the entire way to the Chianti region, where Raffa’s business associate Imelda had one of the country’s best wineries. It was impossible to sit still when I felt carbonated with giddiness and anticipation.
Raffa wanted to know me.
Why was that so much more alluring than simply saying he liked me?
Liking seemed so juvenile and inconsequential next to knowing.
One was surface shallow and the other bone deep.
I was tempted to lie supine before him and hand him a scalpel. Dare him to do his worst. Because I had the sense that in allowing someone like Raffa to know me, I would inevitably learn more about myself.
It was probably a good idea to play it cool. Act like I wasn’t about to burst out of my skin with eagerness to really start this thing between us, strike against it—against him—until all that delicious friction lit into flame.
But even though I was trying to be a different version of myself—bolder, braver, fearless—I was still me, so I couldn’t curb my enthusiasm and decided not to try.
Even after a week and a half, Raffa had to know I had an overzealous hunger in the pit of my gut that demanded more now that I’d started to feed it.
“Who were all the people on the terrace today? I thought it would be rude to ask in front of them, but it was strange to have them just walk out like they lived there. Wait.” I paused. “Do they live there? God, am I that unobservant that I just haven’t noticed before now?”
“Calmati, Vera,” he said on a small huff of laughter. “They do not live with me, though they each have rooms if they ever want to spend the night. They work for me. You could say they are my executives.”
I considered the motley crew gathered around the breakfast table. Ludovico was a big, quiet man with a crudely carved face and ears that stuck out too far. I’d found myself liking him right away, though. There was something in his manner that said he was the type of man to trap a spider under a glass and transfer it outside rather than kill it. A form of innate kindness that showed through his dark eyes.
Carmine I did not enjoy after my first impression, even though I thought our differences might have been cultural. It was rude not to introduce himself and then to mock me when I was just a stranger to him.
Martina had told me he was harmless when she’d dropped by my room after the meal to chat, but she had also said that about Renzo, who was the largest man I’d ever seen, quilted in such dense muscle I wondered how many hours a day he spent in the gym.
I could have bought Raffa and Carmine as typical businessmen, but Ludo and Renzo didn’t have that look to them. They had to have physically demanding jobs, and for Raffa, I figured something solitary would be best.
“What is it that you do exactly?” I asked as he drove fast along the country roads with one hand on the wheel and the other braced on the edge of the open window.
The breeze ruffled his slightly wavy hair away from his face, and the sun lit the hair on his corded forearm to blue black. His navy blue linen shirt was unbuttoned to the top of his sternum, revealing a wedge of tanned skin feathered in that same dark hair I wanted to tug between my teeth. My eyes drifted down to his strong thighs beneath the gray trousers and the subtle but honestly mouthwatering ridge of his dick at the apex.
“I can feel you touching every inch of my body with your eyes,” he said, startling me from my survey. His voice was low and rich with sin, something too decadent to indulge in without adverse effects to your health. “Do not be afraid to touch with your hands too.”
I laughed, but it was a little shrill. “You are imagining things in your old age.”
“Says the woman who is so attracted to this old man that she is squeezing her thighs together to quell her ache for me.”
I gasped, but it wasn’t indignant the way I thought it should have been. It was soft, an exclamation like I’d heard actresses make in love scenes on-screen.
“Si, cerbiatta mia, I told you I am attracted to you. I told you I want to know you, and that includes the place between your thighs that is growing wetter as we talk. One day, I will taste how sweet you are down there with my tongue. Would you like that?”
I swallowed, but there was no moisture in my mouth to ease the way, so mostly I choked.
His smile was small, but he switched hands on the wheel and moved one to squeeze my bare thigh comfortingly.
“Have I shocked you?”
“We haven’t even kissed yet,” I reminded him a little primly despite myself. “And you’re talking about kissing me there.”
“Your pussy?” he confirmed with a roguish grin.
I rolled my eyes but repeated, “My pussy, yes.”
“La figa,” he said in Italian.
I echoed him.
His eyes were sparkling as they slid to me before looking back to the road. “Should we spend our drive having a sexy lesson in Italiano?”
I laughed, and my nerves shattered like broken glass. “Yes, that sounds fun.”
“Mmm,” he hummed. “It does. Mi fai eccitare. Potrei guardarti tutto il giorno. You turn me on. I could look at you all day.”
My head thunked back against the headrest, my mouth parting on a sigh.
“Repeat after me, Guinevere,” he demanded, and that cold edge made me hotter than his compliment.
“Mi fai eccitare. Potrei guardarti tutto il giorno.”
“Grazie tante,” he teased, thanking me for my compliment. “Very good.”
I squirmed but didn’t stop his hand as it traced languid designs on the skin of my thigh, moving slowly higher and higher up under the fabric of my dress.
“Scommetto che hai una bella albicocca,” he said, so husky it was almost a growl. “I bet you have a pretty pussy.”
“Albicocca?” I repeated, more than a little breathless. “Apricot?”
“La figa is the most popular, but a pussy can be as sweet as albicocca or fragola, as lovely as a farfalla or passerina.”
Fig, apricot, strawberry. Butterfly or sparrow.
“Everything is so beautiful in Italian. Pussy and cunt sound so much coarser,” I admitted, gripping his wrist not to stop him but to ground myself in the moment as his fingertips brushed the tender skin beside my groin.
“Si, something so sweet and juicy and pretty pink must be spoken of like poetry,” he agreed, but his eyes were dark as they left the road to watch his fingers ruck my skirt up to my hips.
The pale blue of my panties was exposed to the heat of his gaze, and every molecule in my body seemed to buzz with its own electrical current.
We still hadn’t even kissed.
Why did that make this sensual Italian lesson so much more erotic?
“Che bella,” he said, and he didn’t have to translate for me.
What beauty.
I blushed so deeply I worried the color would be tattooed on my skin. There was a squirmy sensation in my gut that was an intoxicating mix of arousal, daring, and lingering shame. A small noise like a whine leaked from my throat as I struggled to voice any of my desires.
“Slide your hips down for me,” he murmured.
I obeyed without thinking, settling deeper into the seat so I could spread my legs wider.
This was the kind of encounter I’d dreamed of late at night in my bed back home in Michigan when the winters seemed as endless as my loneliness. Warm summer air and the heavy weight of a man’s hand on my skin.
I sucked in a deep breath when Raffa brushed his thumb down the center of my fabric-covered groin, pressing into the damp spot at the apex. When he pulled away, I almost protested, but my words died on my tongue when he pressed the tip of his damp thumb into his mouth and sucked it clean.
“Hai un buon sapore come immaginavo,” he said. “You taste as good as I imagined.”
“Like apricots?” I teased, surprised by the confidence I felt, half lying in my seat with my wet underwear exposed and my taste on Raffa’s lips.
“Like sin,” he corrected. “It is addictive.”
There was a brief pause that felt like a prelude to something dangerous. I held my breath.
“Tell me, Vera, have you ever tasted yourself?” he asked finally in a low purr.
“No,” I said on an exhale of shocked laughter.
He groaned then, lowering his hand to adjust the huge ridge in his trousers to lie down one thigh. “You are killing me.”
“How?” I licked my dry lips, wishing we were somewhere he could turn the full weight of his attention on me and my curious, aching yearning.
“Imagining all the things I could teach you. The ways I could corrupt that pure mind of yours. I want to feed you the seeds of a pomegranate from the underworld even knowing you can never go back after tasting them.”
“I prefer to think Persephone chose to stay half the year with Hades,” I said, finding the courage to reach between my thighs to cup my sex. “I think she couldn’t live any longer without knowing what it was like to taste the dark.”
Raffa shot a quick glance to my hand and rumbled low in his chest. “Do you want me to teach you how I like my cock to be sucked? Show you how many times I can make you come on my tongue? You wanted adventure, and I am happy to be your guide.”
“You hate being a guide,” I quipped, even as I rubbed lightly at the growing damp spot on my panties, blushing as the smell of my arousal filled the car.
“I truly cannot imagine anything better than guiding you through this,” he admitted baldly as he abruptly swerved the car, and I realized we had driven into the gravel parking lot at the winery.
Before I could fully remove my hand, Raffa’s large palm was pushing it back against my pussy.
“Seal our deal with your first taste,” he coaxed, splitting our fingers over my mound to dig beneath the edge of my panties.
I gasped, neck going limp as my fingertips dipped into the hot well at my entrance. Raffa pressed his forehead to my temple, his breath hot on my neck, his eyes fixed to our connection between my legs.
“Bellissima,” he muttered.
Beautiful.
I panted as he moved our fingers through my wetness, wondering if he would make me orgasm right there in the car. We were hidden behind some kind of shed and surrounded by linden trees on two sides, so there was privacy, but the threat of exposure made me so hot I burned.
Instead, he pulled our hands away, two fingers glistening with my juices as he raised them to hover between us. He brought his hand to his mouth, painting the wetness along his bottom lip. His eyes seemed to stare straight through me, glowing like banked coals as, slowly, I followed his silent order to echo him and traced my mouth with my essence.
My tongue peeked out to touch the gloss, and I shivered delicately as the flavor bloomed on my taste buds.
“Mmm,” I hummed, but before I could say any more, Raffa’s clean hand was sliding through the back of my hair and tugging hard. My torso twisted toward him, head canting back to alleviate the strain, and my mouth parted on a gasp.
A moment later, he ate that sound and the taste of my figa out of my mouth with his tongue.
I groaned shamelessly at the invasion, hands flying up to curl over his shoulders so I could cling to him as he rocked everything I’d known off its axis. He tasted like me but also like him, dark and male, his scent heady in my nose and the heat of his mouth the epicenter of my universe.
I thought, So this is what it’s like to be kissed.
This is what it’s like to feel lust like a lightning bolt, electricity fizzing through every vein.
Without thinking, I pulled him closer, trying to kiss him even deeper.
His moan was my reward, vibrating from his mouth to mine. In that moment, I thought I would have done anything to earn that sound from him again and again.
In that moment, I had never felt so alive.
When Raffa finally pulled away, forehead pressed to mine, breath wafting across my wet, swollen lips, soothing the stubble burn he’d left on my skin, I found my eyes mortifyingly damp.
“Cerbiatta,” he murmured, releasing my hair to cup the entire back of my skull in one big hand.
It was a question and consolation without making me feel foolish or too young.
I laughed as a single tear dislodged and rolled down my cheek. “I’ve never done that before. I always wanted to. Always dreamed of kissing and . . . more. But I was sick or too sheltered, and the opportunity never came. This, well, it was better than I ever imagined. I’m sorry for crying. It’s silly.”
“Non sciocco,” he corrected firmly as his other thumb caught the tear and brought that to his mouth too. He paused to lick the salt from his skin in a way that was startlingly hot. “I understand wanting something for so long and believing you will never have it.”
“What do you want?” I asked, stripped of my usual shyness by our proximity and the simple but devastating act of sharing the taste of me between our lips.
His eyes shuttered, but when I cupped his cheek in one hand, he answered, “To be the man who deserves that look on your face.”
“What look?” I asked, afraid of the question—and the answer—but not enough to take it back.
“Like I could pull the stars from the sky for you if only you asked me to.”
“And would you?”
His sigh sounded almost resigned as it feathered over my mouth. “Troverei un modo.”
I would find a way.
Fattoria Casa Luna was a stunning sprawl of golden stone buildings arranged around a pretty garden and patio that were elevated over a vista of hills lined with wine grapes. I squinted against the sunlight, raising a hand to cover my eyes as I tried to see where the vines ended three hills and valleys deep from where I stood.
“Incredible,” I breathed, tipping my head back and dropping my hand to soak up the sunlight on my face.
Raffa had shown me the bathroom at the entrance to the main building and then gone off to find Imelda with a promise to meet me on the patio. Washing my hands and staring at myself in the antique mirror without his presence to muffle my senses had been its own kind of enlightenment.
My cheeks were flushed, my hair tousled from his tight grip, and the skin around my swollen mouth was pinked from the roughness of his cheeks as he’d kissed me.
I looked slightly debauched and ridiculously proud of it.
My smile was close lipped and smug, a coy expression I’d seen before on Gemma’s face when she’d returned home from a date with her boyfriend, but never on my own.
God, she would have loved this for me.
Thinking about how she would have crowed in delight and teased me about the mysterious Italian stranger who had swept me off my feet stole my breath for a moment. I rested my hands against the counter and blinked the tears from my eyes.
Who would have known kissing could be so emotional?
But then, I could acknowledge it wasn’t just the kiss.
It was the entire adventure laid before me, not the one I’d so meticulously planned from the comfort of my home in Ann Arbor, but a new future entirely. One elevated by the presence of Raffaele Romano.
He would have appealed to any woman with a pulse, I was sure, with his beauty and wealth, but there was something intangible about him that had appealed to me almost from the start.
A mirror image of the tension I felt inside myself, maybe, between who we were and who we wanted to be.
I didn’t know why Raffa struggled with it or how it manifested itself, but the divide was subtly clear.
He was kind with me, thoughtful and tender, which seemed uncharacteristic given his gruff, exacting manner. Martina had said how he related to me was unusual, and Raffa himself had said I was the exception to every one of his rules.
Maybe that should have been a red flag, but I couldn’t deny it made me feel special. Secure, even. If he had never experienced the kind of chemistry we had together, I could rely on it to feel just as real to him as it did to me.
Still, the idea of embarking on a true holiday romance was so surreal, I giggled to myself in the bathroom. Guinevere Stone, American virgin, licking the taste of herself out of someone else’s mouth.
No one back home would believe it.
Then again, Gemma and my parents had always been my best friends, the ones who knew me best, and it wasn’t like I could have ever told them the secret, kinky fantasies I touched myself to at night. Talk about awkward.
And now I had the perfect opportunity to explore them without embarrassment. Because I didn’t know Raffa that well, not really, but I knew in my bones I could trust him to teach me about pleasure without any judgment or shame.
It wasn’t easy to realize that my parents and I had been so afraid of my death throughout most of my life that I’d let fear wrap me in chains and keep me anchored to the safe banks of banal mundanity.
Didn’t survivors deserve more than just what they could eke out moment to moment? Didn’t they deserve to thrive and rejoice in every single second? Suck the marrow from the bone, juices dripping down the chin, gluttony not a sin but a privilege after the barren, hungry times of survival?
I would always have to mind my health. It was as much a fact of life as taking my next breath, but it did not mean I couldn’t take chances and indulge when opportunities were worthy.
I’d first started to feel this when Gemma died. Healthy, robust Gemma who was beautiful and young and at the beginning of her whole life. How could she be gone between one minute and the next when there was no indication she had ever been ill? The randomness of it had not just shaken my reality, it had cracked it, and from that crack had grown an abyss I was finally able to crawl out of.
And here I was free to live my life for myself as I hadn’t been able to do the last twenty-three years.
What was I going to do?
Before I could think about it too long, I ducked into a stall and pulled off my damp silk thong, one of many that the Marias had picked out for me at the boutique and that I never would have bought for myself. I rolled the material into a ball and put it in my purse, feeling the heat in my cheeks as I thought about slipping it into Raffa’s pocket at some point, the look on his face when he realized I was naked beneath the shift.
I’d seen how he looked at me when I came out in the dress that morning, and I knew he wouldn’t try very hard to resist.
I smiled as I thought about it, opening my palms to get the sun on as much of my skin as I could. The scent of gardenia, freesia, and honeysuckle from the garden was undercut by the woody notes of herbs.
Minutes later, Raffa was still nowhere to be found, so I decided to walk the grounds myself. The patio edged a fragrant garden filled with the faint hum of fat bumblebees hovering between stalks of lavender and white-faced gardenias. I followed the flagstone path through the maze of plants toward the sound of trickling water and found a fountain with a small cupid spitting water from its pursed mouth.
I trailed my fingertips in the cool water for a brief reprieve from the July heat, feeling so at peace it was hard to believe my surroundings were real.
The sound of harsh yelling reminded me they were.
I straightened, hesitating, before following the sound of the angry voice toward some kind of industrial warehouse to the left of the main wine-tasting building. The voice grew clear, shouting in a way that conveyed anger but also a contrary desire to be quiet.
I hovered behind a line of cypress trees separating most of the garden from the behind-the-scenes setting of the vineyard, peeking between the gap.
“Calmati!” Raffa’s voice found me before my eyes found him; he was facing away from me and toward the man who had been yelling. “Che cazzo fai? Do you want the entire staff to hear you, Wyatt?”
The man in question switched to British-accented English, but his posture remained on guard, a finger raised like a weapon at Raffa.
“This is not how we do business, Romano.”
Raffa cocked his head. “This is how we do business in Italia. This is how I expect things to go, capisci? I command and you obey. There is no other option.”
“There is always another option,” Wyatt retorted, but his anger had transformed into something closer to agitation and a healthy dose of fear.
“You do not want another option,” Raffa murmured so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him.
I gasped when he uncoiled like a snake, striking out to grab Wyatt by his shirtfront to push him up against the stone wall. If I had stumbled upon them just then, I might have thought they were lovers for how closely they stood, but I knew, after Galasso, that closeness could be used for intimidation too.
I couldn’t hear what he said then, catching only the low timbre of his voice like a bass note to the cicadas’ song as they nested above me.
It should have been alarming to see him so cold, so absolute in his totalitarianism. He was obviously not a businessman afraid to get his hands dirty by confronting his misbehaving staff. My father would have forbidden me to see him anymore after a scene like this, always wary of men’s anger.
But it was yet another thing I had no true experience with that I found curiously arousing. The cold snap of his voice like a whip. The power of his body unleashing quick and lethal.
It spoke of a masculinity and rare power that I hadn’t seen in any of my university classmates back home. A kind of virility, like he could take care of himself and me if he was called on to do so.
It made me feel safe and just slightly afraid of what that voice could make me do if that tone was leveled in my direction.
“Guinevere.”
My head snapped to my left, where Raffa was standing at the entrance to the path with his arms crossed—muscles coiled like rope beneath his skin, visible under the thin knit of his shirt—staring at me like I was a naughty child.
“Were you eavesdropping, cerbiatta?” he asked me.
I pursed my lips. “Is it eavesdropping if there is yelling? I could hardly not listen.”
“Faccia tosta,” he said with a click of his tongue. “Come here.”
“What does that mean?”
“‘Cheeky.’ Now, come here.”
I paused a moment, only because it was part of the game I was coming to understand we both liked to play. It made me feel bold even when I acquiesced to him.
I walked on my toes until I was a foot away from him, grinning slyly. “Are your ears still ringing, old man? You need me closer to hear what I have to say?”
“I need you closer,” he said with a mock snarl, lashing out the way he had done to the Brit, but only to reel me in with an arm around my waist so I was pressed belly to belly with him. “So I can kiss you.”
“If I don’t kiss you back, will you be angry with me like you were with that man?” I tested, not because I was afraid of him but because I wasn’t.
I knew what his answer would be.
He would have dropped me off at a hospital or a police station after hitting me with his car if there hadn’t been something about me that spoke to him in a different language than he was used to.
Raffa sensed my playfulness, eyes flashing as they caught the sunlight before dipping down so he could tip my chin and bite at it. “Angry? No. You would have to do much worse to win my temper.”
I made a noise in my throat that sounded to both of us like disappointment.
Understanding flickered in his expression as he collected my hands and pulled them behind my back, collaring them in one of his so that my back was arched. My balance was entirely dependent on him anchoring my front and providing a counterweight at my wrists. It was erotic, a makeshift bondage.
My lids felt heavy, and my heart thrummed too quick in my chest, heating my blood to a low simmer.
“You do not want my rage, piccola, but you want something like it?” he asked low, speaking the words directly into my ear before nipping my lobe with his teeth. “Do not worry. I will teach you the words in any language for what makes your blood hum, d’accordo?”
“How can you know the words I need when I can’t even speak them?” I asked, bitterness on my tongue. My naivete felt more constricting than his hand around my wrists.
“I will know,” he promised, running the bridge of his nose down my chin and along my jaw until his mouth hovered over mine. “As I know now that you want me to kiss you the way I might bite into a plum. All tongue and teeth. Devouring.”
Instead of replying with words, I leveraged his hold on my hands to tip my face forward to claim his lips for myself. His chuckle tickled my mouth a moment before he slanted his head and did as he promised.
Devoured.
None of the gentle exploration from the Bugatti. Only an attack of ownership. Tongue behind my teeth, plundering, seeking new corners yet undiscovered.
I surrendered myself to the kiss, to his hold, and felt like I existed only in the frame of his body, pinned against his mouth. There was a freedom in it that soared through me along with pleasure.
When he’d finally had his fill, he broke away to look down into my face, studying me to catalog the effect he’d had on me.
“Wow,” I said, a little shell shocked.
I was rewarded with a full smile, completely unguarded, almost as if I’d surprised him into an honest expression.
“Che bello,” he agreed. “Now, as much as I wish I could kiss you in this garden for the rest of the day, I think you mentioned wanting to see how a vineyard works?”
I laughed, and it came from my belly. “I did.”
His smile had narrowed, softened, but it was still there, and when he pulled me toward the main building again, he did it holding my hand.
