by Bethany-Kris
His brown eyes lifted to meet hers unabashed, his grin still firmly in place. “You, Cara. Just you.”
She didn’t know what game this man was playing, but he was damn good at it.
“What are you doing here, Gian?”
“You owe me a coffee. It also happens to be dinnertime, so I thought you might like food, too.”
Cara came a little closer to the back of his Lexus. “And you knew where I lived, how?”
“Constantino is chatty when he drinks,” Gian admitted. “I tend to use that to my advantage at times.”
“My cousin?”
“Surprised he knows things about you?”
“A little,” Cara replied. “We’re not really close.”
“You don’t have to be,” Gian said, not elaborating further. “He also mentioned you might have your weekends free, which is why your uncle often calls on you, if he needs an extra hand at the bar like he did the other night.”
Cara eyed him curiously. “So, you’ve been asking about me?”
“Oui. Is that a problem?”
“Maybe.”
“Funny, bella, you don’t sound like it’s a problem.”
Cara barely held back her smile.
Damn him.
“Is your weekend free?” Gian asked quieter.
“My whole weekend?” Cara shrugged. “That’s a hell of a lot more than coffee or dinner, Gian.”
“It is, but shit, go big or go home, Cara. I’m interested in you—very interested, love. I’m not about to hide my intentions in that regard. It won’t get me what I want, if I do. So if your weekend is free, and you might like a bit more than dinner with me, you should get your pretty ass inside my car as soon as you possibly can, so we can get out of here.”
Cara sucked in a sharp breath, stunned and aroused at the same time. With only a few words, he’d provoked her into a reaction, and this time, he hadn’t even needed to touch her to do it. He demanded, she reacted.
Damn him, indeed.
“And what would this weekend include?” Cara asked.
Gian waved a hand, smiling. “I’ve come into some real estate in Ottawa, and I greatly need a break from my life. I’ll get to leave this city for a bit—breathe outside of this familiar hell. It’s not been a fun couple of weeks. I’d like to see the real estate, and enjoy myself while I do it.”
Cara wet her lips. “With me.”
He nodded, that piercing gaze of his pinning her in place. “With you, Cara.”
Well, then …
“I have to grab a bag,” she said.
Gian gestured at her building. “I’ll be here when you get out.”
“This was not at all what I expected when you said real estate,” Cara admitted, taking in the old oak floors and outdated—yet beautiful—pieces of furniture in the two-level penthouse. There was nothing modern about the decoration of the penthouse, and even the light fixtures threw back to yesteryears, when Cara hadn’t even been alive. It was beautiful, to be sure, but old. “It’s like we jumped back in time about fifty years.”
Gian hummed under his breath, running his finger along the curved wooden arm of a chaise. Not a speck of dust was anywhere to be seen, yet the place looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years. “As far as I know, that was about the time he bought it.”
“He?”
“My grandfather.”
“Oh,” Cara said softly.
“Mr. Guzzi!”
Cara damn near jumped out of her skin at the new voice, though Gian barely moved a muscle except to smile at the newcomer. An older gentleman, and a slightly younger woman, came walking down a spiral staircase. The woman stayed behind the man, her uniform suggesting she was a maid of sorts, while the gentleman’s suit said something entirely different.
“We’ve been looking forward to seeing you, and taking you on a tour,” the man said, coming to stop in front of Gian with his hand extended.
Gian shook politely. “Yes, well, the tour won’t be needed, Derek, but merci.”
“But—”
“I think Cara and I can handle the exploring on our own for the weekend.” Gian gave her a wink over his shoulder. “Right, mon ange?”
“Sure, we can.”
She didn’t think he had any exploring in mind, to be honest.
“If you’re sure,” Derek started to say.
“Perfectly sure.”
“Penelope comes in to clean and dust Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” Derek explained. “She is done for the day, and all the beds have been stripped and changed.”
Something odd took over Gian’s features. Cara didn’t recognize it.
He cleared his throat, glancing upward at the ceiling. “And which room did he prefer? Or, which one did they use, so I can avoid that?”
“Well, Corrado hasn’t been here in more than a decade, Gian. And those items are long gone.”
Gian didn’t appear to care. “Which one?”
“The only one without a balcony,” Derek replied quickly. “Louise didn’t like heights.”
“Great. I have your phone number if we need anything, so …”
Derek and the maid seemed to catch on to Gian’s unspoken words quickly enough, and made themselves scarce. Cara only heard the quiet click of the front door closing before she turned back to Gian.
He had walked forward, further into the penthouse, toward a row of windows that still had wooden frames, and could be opened from the inside. He crossed his arms, staring out the windows at the old buildings across the way.
“Your grandfather hasn’t been here in ten years, but kept a maid on a three-day-a-week schedule?” Cara asked, confused.
“And Derek is on call, too, as he’s the building’s … well, like a consigliere, of sorts. This is one of the only suites in this building that hasn’t been renovated or updated in some way over the years. They would greatly like me to keep it that way, as it increases the value of the building as a whole, to say the original owner’s penthouse is in mint condition from when it was built fifty years ago.”
“But you don’t want to,” Cara assumed.
She hadn’t realized it was more than the penthouse that he owned.
“I didn’t want this place,” Gian muttered heavily. Sighing, he turned to face her again. “Would you mind exploring on your own for a bit? I have a call to make, and I’ll order us some food, too.”
“Sure,” Cara said.
She could tell something else was on his mind.
Gian was good at hiding it, but she saw it.
Whatever it was.
Cara figured it wasn’t her place to push. She hadn’t come with him for the weekend to pry into his personal life. She had come because, like him, a break from life was just what she needed.
And who the hell said she couldn’t have fun while she did it?
“Is this your grandmother?” Cara held out a black and white glamor shot of a beautiful woman, as Gian walked into the bedroom without a balcony.
“No, that isn’t Aurora. And my grandmother died two years ago. Heart attack.”
Cara’s brow furrowed, as she took in the dozen and one other framed photos on the old armoire. Most held the woman, but a few had children, and some, an older gentleman that looked a hell of a lot like Gian, if he were in his forties or fifties.
“Then who is it? Oh, Louise, right?”
Gian stared at Cara, not saying anything.
“What?”
It took her far too long to realize what he wasn’t saying. A woman named Louise had lived here, and she was not his grandmother. A woman who, guessing by the photos and the statements made about the bedroom, had been involved in a romantic relationship with Corrado Guzzi for years.
The photos of the children caught her attention again.
Decades, actually.
“Oh,” Cara said quietly, carefully putting the photo back. “Well, then.”
Gian shrugged one shoulder, but didn’t move further into the room to join her. �
�Louise died a decade ago, about the time my grandfather stopped coming for his weekend visits. Apparently, he didn’t want much to do with the place when she wasn’t here, but he also didn’t want to sell it.”
Cara glanced back at the old photos of the children. “What about their kids?”
“Louise had kids—they weren’t my grandfather’s.”
“Huh.”
“You sound … bothered,” Gian said.
Cara’s brow furrowed. “Weren’t you bothered that he had a whole other life, with another woman, in a different city, that wasn’t his wife?”
“It was a secret that was not really a secret in our family. I was told—like everyone else in my family—that it was not a topic we were to discuss, for obvious reasons. I didn’t feel much about it, I suppose it wasn’t my place to. That was, until the deed was handed over to me. Now, I have to consider too much.”
She understood that.
It couldn’t be pleasant.
“Let’s get out of this room, then,” she suggested.
Gian nodded, and stepped back into the doorway, gesturing for her to follow. “Food is here, by the way.”
Cara walked on past, but nearly stopped as she felt his hand find her lower back. That all too familiar shiver crawled over her skin at his touch. “And what comes after the food, Gian?”
She felt his smirk grow as he pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. “Any other bedroom but that one, Cara.”
Cara crawled onto the foot of the bed, moving up Gian’s naked side in nothing but one of his dress shirts. The man woke up at the ass-crack of dawn, and it was disturbing because Cara liked to sleep.
She couldn’t sleep when Gian wasn’t, though.
He wouldn’t let her.
Gian had tossed the beige sheets across his lower midsection and groin, but that still left the rest of his body free for Cara to admire. It was quite a sight, especially in the morning with light coming in through the opened windows. For every defined cut of muscle on his body, Cara’s attention was caught and spun. He was lean like a runner, yet built enough like a fighter. It was easy to tell over his suits that he was fit, but it was when he was naked that Cara couldn’t stop staring.
A beautiful man.
Cara laid along Gian’s side, though lower than he was, so that her top half ended at his waist. He peered over the book he was reading, those brown eyes of his raking over her form and the shirt she wore.
“Shame you can’t go out like that all the time,” he said under his breath.
“I could say the same.”
“Yes, and then where would all those unsuspecting women be, huh? Falling all over themselves, I imagine. It would be hazardous for me to do that to the world.”
“Arrogant ass.”
“Complex,” he corrected with a grin.
Then, he went back to his book.
His free hand came down to tangle in her hair as he continued reading, his fingers stroking through the strands carefully. He didn’t tug or pull, not like he did when he was fucking her, but rather, stroked her hair gently as if to relax her.
And it did.
Before Cara had realized what was happening, her face rested in Gian’s palm, and his thumb stroked her cheekbone.
It was intimate.
But not the kind of intimate like the night before, when he fucked her until she couldn’t breathe or see properly.
It was sweet.
But not like his pet names, not like his French or Italian nothings in her ear.
Cara was pretty sure this was not how hookups were supposed to go, and she certainly shouldn’t be considering feelings for Gian, but he made it difficult not to. This was only supposed to be a weekend away—a break, nothing more. And yet, it felt strangely domestic. Something familiar and comforting, with someone she didn’t know all that well.
She decided to get her mind off of that nonsense.
“Are you going to read all morning?” she asked.
“It’s good for the brain, Cara.”
“So is food. Or coffee. Television. A shower. Sex.”
Gian’s right eyebrow lifted and his lips curved salaciously. “Those are all good things, too.”
“Not good for the brain?”
“Some of them,” he said.
Before she could think better of it, Cara snatched his book away and tossed it to the floor. As it landed with a thump on the hardwood, Gian’s narrowed gaze turned on her. That one look threatened fun and bad and sinful, all at once. Cara simply smiled back in the face of his unspoken threat.
“Oops,” she whispered.
“That was not nice. I was at a good part.”
Cara shrugged. “Oh, well.”
“That was terribly bratty, too.”
“Yes, but—”
Gian lurched toward her before Cara could even get her words out properly. She didn’t even have the chance to try and get away from his hands grabbing hard to her waist and pulling her higher up the bed. Her laughter bounced off the walls as his fingers danced over her skin, tickling with killer precision and making her sides ache.
Somehow, though she wasn’t quite sure how, Cara managed to get up on her knees, and then stand. Gian followed right behind her, still holding tight and refusing to let her go. She grabbed for a pillow, but he knocked it back down, and she fell with it.
Gian went with her.
That was how Cara found herself pinned under a grinning Gian and how she knew her plan to at least get him out of the bed before noon was screwed.
But she was probably going to like it.
“Word to the wise,” he murmured an inch away from her lips.
“What’s that?”
“Compliance will get you everywhere with me, but brattiness will get you something, too. You like the one, so you’ll probably like this as well.”
Then, his fingers pressed harder, sliding lower down her sides, and his body followed the same path. Sliding down her body, Gian pushed the dress shirt she wore higher, his lips coming down to kiss against her heated skin every so often. And his tongue … it lapped at her flesh, taking small tastes of her body before darting back into that wicked fucking mouth of his. Her legs widened for him, and she couldn’t even find it in herself to be ashamed that she hadn’t pulled on a pair of panties after showering that morning.
“Now, be a good girl,” Gian said as he hovered over her pubic bone, “and let me eat in peace, Cara. On your knees, please.”
She blinked. “What?”
Gian only tipped his chin up, and that was it. He didn’t repeat himself; he didn’t like to, she had learned.
Cara’s brain finally caught up to the rest of her body and she scrambled to get on all fours like he wanted. She had thought watching him between her thighs would be a nice sight first thing in the morning, but he apparently had other plans.
If there was a torturous, sinful hell, Gian’s mouth was it.
It was his tongue lapping against her sex as he spread her ass cheeks wide and grabbed hard enough to leave his fingerprints behind. It was the way he groaned at the first taste of her pussy, so deep and rough that it traveled over her spine before it even reached her ears. It was the curving flicks of his tongue that beat against the underside of her clit over and over again until her legs shook, and she was pushing back into his mouth to get more.
And then he was pulling away, those fucking chuckles of his filling her senses with his satisfaction and her growing orgasm that was now lost.
“The taste of you could kill me, Cara. I’d eat you, morning, noon, and night, and I wouldn’t even think about anything else. It would kill me.”
She let out a shaky breath, unable to say anything.
She needed a second to think again.
“Do you remember what I told you?” he asked a second before his palm swatted gently against her wet sex. His fingers slid along her clenching opening a second before another soft slap landed against her ass. The sound echoed in the bedroom, making Cara suck in
a sharp breath. His fingers—three of them—slid into her pussy, stretching her open and making her back arch from the sudden intrusion.
“About this—your cunt and me, love. What did I say?”
Cara didn’t even have to think about it.
Even when she thought they might not see each other again—and certainly not for sex—she still heard those words of his.
“It’s yours, when we’re together,” she mumbled against her arm.
Gian’s pleased hum answered her back before he said, “Exactly that, Cara.”
She felt him move on the bed, reaching for something. Cara looked, only to see him pull his cell phone from the bedside table. Gian’s eyes turned back on her with a wicked gleam.
“Your pussy is so pink and wet, especially when you want to come. I want you to see what it looks like when you’re bratty and greedy, Cara. Let me.”
“You’ll delete it—”
“Not a chance,” he interrupted fast, “but no one else will ever see it.”
Just the cadence his tone took on told Cara he was telling the truth. She nodded and his hand slipped over her body with the softest touch again—something she was learning was a sign of his approval, his happiness. He was rough in bed, not that she minded, and the softness only came when he wanted to gift her something back.
Cara heard the phone’s camera ding with a familiar shutter-like sound. She looked over her shoulder, only to see Gian’s attention was on her body again, and his fingers were pressing deep into her hot sex. Every single nerve ending she had seemed to be attached to her pussy as his fingers slid in and out with a slow assuredness that drove her fucking mad.
“I want to come,” Cara mumbled.
Her body ached for it.
Her mind screamed for it.
Gian only smirked, his gaze never once leaving his work. She felt his thumb drive upward, spreading her sex open before sliding over her clit with small circles.
“Gian, let me come.”
He didn’t.
Not right away.
In fact, he pulled away from her again, only long enough to find a condom from a pack he’d tossed aside the night before. Never once did that damn phone of his leave his hand, but Cara found that she didn’t give a shit. She wanted one thing from him right then.