“They knew?”
“I told them I was going to marry you. I was just waiting for you to get to be a decent age. I couldn’t very well ask you to marry me when you were underage.”
“I wasn’t underage.”
“Eighteen was underage to me.”
“I felt like a million years old.”
He put his arm around her shoulders. He knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes he felt the same way. He’d often looked at her when she’d been trying to fit in with the other schoolgirls and he’d known it would never happen. Her childhood had been ripped away, just as his had been.
“How could I not be in love with you, Nicoletta? And why would I ever allow my shadow to tangle with yours so fast? I’ll admit it was a little shocking even to me, the way they bound together, merging so quickly, but I didn’t do anything to stop them. I didn’t want to. I knew immediately you were the one and I was going to have you.” He sent her a quick grin. “Once Stefano and the others realized our shadows were so fully merged, they got behind us very quickly.”
“You’re kind of devious, aren’t you?”
“You’re just now beginning to notice that about me? Absolutely I am, make certain you remember that. And I’m bossy, but in a good way.”
“Is there a good way to be bossy?”
“My way is,” he assured.
They walked together, matching steps on the narrow pathway until his exasperation got the better of him. He stepped in front of her, effectively halting her, and framed her face with both hands, forcing her to look up at him. “Woman, I just declared I’m madly in love with you, and I get nothing. No reaction whatsoever from you.”
A slow smile spread across her face until her dark eyes lit up. His stomach did a slow roll and his cock reacted with a hard jerk.
“I’m a slow processor.”
“My ass you’re a slow processor. You’re deliberately trying to make me crazy.”
“And succeeding. I really hate that you investigated me.”
“My family did that. And now it’s our family, technically.”
Before she could argue with him, he bent his head and took her mouth. He loved that mouth of hers. The pouty lower lip that had always dared him to bite it. He didn’t. He kissed the hell out of her. He started slow. Gentle. Coaxing. She opened her mouth and let him in, and they both caught fire.
Flames licked over his skin and heat rushed through his veins. He shifted his hold on her, sliding one hand behind her head to hold her in place, his arm a bar around her, locking her body to his. She melted into him, going boneless, her smaller, softer body intensely feminine. He felt every curve, her breasts tight against his lower chest.
A single sound escaped her throat, a moan, sexy and low, one that reverberated through his body and went straight to his cock, carried on that wave of rising heat. The flames leapt higher. Warning bells went off in his head. “Dio, Dio, amore mio, we have to stop.” He whispered it against her lips.
“I know. I can’t.”
He couldn’t, either, but he had to. She wasn’t ready. She thought she was, but she wasn’t. He wasn’t risking losing her because he hadn’t waited. He hadn’t been careful enough. Kissing was okay. Stripping her naked in the forest and taking her like a man starved was not. He heard himself groan as he found her lower lip, that beautiful pouty lip he dreamt about, caught it between his teeth and bit down gently, somewhere between punishment and a sensual enticement.
Nicoletta gasped, and he licked at the sting and then kissed his way down her throat before holding her against him so tightly with both arms he couldn’t tell if it was her heart pounding or his. He nuzzled the top of her head.
“Dio, bella, we’re going to go up in flames if we keep this up.”
“I was all for it.”
Her voice was muffled against his chest, but he felt her breath with every word, warm and tempting, her lips like a sinful temptation against the thin material of his shirt. She wrapped her arms around his waist, nuzzling his chest.
“You’re not helping me.”
“I know. I’m sorry, and you’re being so good, Taviano. I do appreciate it, too. Well, I do and I don’t. When you kiss me, I think I could really have wild, amazing sex with you. I want to. I really do.”
She lifted her head and looked up at him, her dark eyes meeting his. She didn’t try to hide the mixture of love and desire. She looked a perfect blend of sin and innocence. Lust and trepidation mixed together in one tempting package.
“We’ll get there, but when it’s right.”
“How, Taviano? I’m so scared I’ll never be able to get there. When you’re kissing me, I can’t think straight. I’m not afraid. I just want you. But when I stop to think about the rest of it …” She trailed off, shaking her head.
“Have a little faith, piccola. I have no doubt we’re going to have amazing sex. Don’t be in such a hurry.”
Her hand slid down his chest to stroke over the material stretched so tightly over his aching cock. “I do have certain skills, Taviano. I’m really good. I made certain I was really good. I can at least take care of this for you, so you don’t have to walk around hurting all the time.”
The temptation to let her was strong. Her fingers felt like magic, and his cock didn’t just ache. Frankly, it was painful. There was something in her voice—in her expression. And he’d been there himself. “Why did you make certain you were really good?”
He felt her instant withdrawal. Her body stiffened just that little bit and separated from his by an inch or so. Her mind, so closely connected to his, slipped away. Their shadows, always tangled, always merged, began to shift, as if they might try to uncurl those tight knots.
He caught her chin. “Nicoletta, we tell the truth to each other. That’s how I know how to keep you safe and to guide us through any sexual missteps. There are bound to be many. I don’t want problems we can avoid, so that means communication. You think I didn’t have to learn what oral sex was?”
“Then you probably know that if you could get them to use your mouth, they often couldn’t use other parts of your body, although in my case there were three of them, so sometimes that didn’t work so well anyway,” she said.
He caught the sheen of tears before she blinked them away. “Yeah, piccola, I learned that trick, but there were two of them, so it didn’t always work for me, either. I think we’ll wait until we’re mutually satisfying each other, not using oral sex out of fear.”
“Do you think that’s why I was offering?”
“I think you’re very frightened, Nicoletta, of not pleasing me. Of not being able to have sex the way you think I might want to have it.”
She ducked her head. All around them the birds sang, calling out to one another, but she was no longer hearing the soothing symphony. She was screaming inside. He could hear it in his own mind. That was how close they were, even when she’d tried to separate them.
“You’re very experienced, Taviano. I’ve seen the magazines. You’ve had so many partners. So many women. I’ve had those three monsters and Benito Valdez, who, quite frankly, was as big a monster as all three of the others combined, and I hated every second I was with them. I despised sex. Nothing about it was good. Nothing. Not one single thing.”
He rubbed at her lips with the pad of his thumb. Her skin was so incredibly soft, but it was the woman and everything about her that melted the ice in him, that hard place inside him he had thought impossible to ever get past to find the real man.
“That wasn’t sex, Nicoletta. That was rape. That was brutal animals trying to hurt you, to prove they had power over you. They didn’t. They never could. What it wasn’t, was sex. Sex between two people who love each other should be beautiful. It should be slow, staring into each other’s eyes, so intimate you know you belong together for eternity. It should be fun. It should be slam-against-the-wall, can’t wait to fuck. It should be anything you want it to be because you’re so in love you need to give each other so much
pleasure you can’t stand it. But always, always, Nicoletta, whatever two people in love do, it’s consensual.”
He brushed a kiss on her soft, tempting lips because he couldn’t stop himself. “If you get scared at any point and you want to slow down and take a breath, you say so and we slow down. You want to stop, you say so, then we stop. We try something new and it scares you, you say so and we stop and discuss whether you want to keep going or not. You don’t like something, we stop. End of story. Anytime you say no, it’s no. That’s sex with the one you’re in love with. That’s sex with me. That’s why it’s so important to always communicate honestly with me about what you’re feeling, and I promise I’ll do the same.”
She stared up at him for a few more moments and then she nodded, her impossibly long lashes fluttering in that way that always moved him.
“That’s why I love you so much, Taviano. You manage to make me feel so important to you. No matter what. You make everything all right.”
“Everything is all right as long as we’re together. We’re stronger together, Nicoletta. You always have to remember that. Eloisa might try to take us down. Others might. They don’t matter. It’s always going to be you and me.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Let’s go back to that beautiful home you managed to find, although I can’t believe you really can see stars. No one can see stars anymore.”
“We can.” He poured confidence into his voice, allowing her to change the subject. They needed to switch to something much lighter. “We’re very far out.”
“The city is too lit up. I think you have to be in the middle of the lake in order to see them. I looked it up once. I asked Lucia and Amo about going to an observatory, and even there, it’s not a really good shot at seeing them.”
“It is here. The artist who built the house chose the location far enough away, across the lake and deliberately with seeing the stars in mind. He was an astronomer at heart, which is why most of the art pieces in the house or built into the ceilings and walls all have to do with the universe and galaxies.”
They managed to walk side by side, with her tucked beneath his shoulder for most of the way, until they neared the house, and then he took the lead. She tucked her hand into his back pocket. She’d done that once or twice before, and Taviano liked it. Eloisa would lose her mind if she ever saw Nicoletta do something like that.
He knew that his relationship with Nicoletta would be very different from his brothers’ relationships with their spouses. He might be dominant—the Ferraros were born that way, and being riders only brought out that trait more—but he needed a warrior woman, a partner. He had known he wanted a woman who would work beside him. He hadn’t thought that until he met Nicoletta—until she opened her eyes on the plane heading back to Chicago and he looked into all that rage and confusion. That fight. Those eyes held the same emotions his held every time he looked in the mirror.
He opened the kitchen door and stepped back to allow her into the house first. The dishes were still on the table right where he’d left them when he’d gone after her. Eloisa was gone. Thankfully, Henry had taken her away in the car, so Taviano didn’t have to worry about her riding the shadows with an injury. She no longer rode the shadows to bring justice to those who deserved it. She had taken the role of a greeter, but she still used the shadows to move around when she wanted to secretly get from one place to another fast.
Nicoletta immediately cleared the table and helped him clean the kitchen. “I would have thought you would have an entire staff working for you.”
“They clean,” he admitted. “But not my dishes. I’m one person. When I’m here, I like to be alone. I cook, and I do my own dishes. I have a couple of people who will come in after, and a regular cleaning crew while I’m gone, but otherwise, I just want to be left alone.”
“I like that,” Nicoletta said.
“Good.” He shot her a grin. “Because when we’re at the stage where you’re comfortable having sex, I’m fucking you in every room, on every table, over every couch, on the rug in front of every fireplace and on the roof as well. We don’t want to be stumbling over staff while we’re doing that.”
Color swept up her neck and into her face. She arched an eyebrow at him. “All those places? Really?”
“And the bed. We have a lot of beds to break in. There’s a swing chair out on the porch as well. And a porch railing.”
She burst out laughing, just as he’d hoped she would. “You have sex on the brain.”
“I’ve come here a lot in the last three years, tesoro. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about the two of us.” It took self-control not to drop his hand to his cock and show her just what went on when he was fantasizing. “Did you? About me?”
She nodded, the blush starting all over again. “Yes. All the time. Especially in the bathtub. Once, you almost caught me. You came into my bedroom just as I was finishing up.”
“Finishing up?” he echoed. His heart accelerated. He remembered that night so vividly. He had come into her bedroom through the window. He’d heard the splashes of water in the tub. Moans. So soft. She sounded frustrated. Near tears. He’d stood just outside the door, one hand on the doorknob, knowing how inappropriate it would be, how wrong of him, but it was clear she was sexually frustrated and in need. He wanted to be the one to send her over the edge. To help her get where she needed to go. Instead, he’d done the right thing and backed off.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t. I think I’m so afraid of feeling anything because it was all so wrong. Everything was so wrong.”
He hated the defeat in her voice.
“Nothing is wrong now. Everything we do will be right,” he promised. “We’ll try a few things to see if you like them. Nothing scary.”
She laughed unexpectedly. “It’s all going to be scary.”
“Isn’t that half the fun? I’m not scary, so it’s just what we try. You can relax and only worry about whether or not it’s too good.”
She snapped a dish towel at him. “How can something be too good?”
He grinned at her. “Ask me that question after the family leaves.”
The smile faded from her face. “What?”
“You heard me. I’ve decided I’m going to start with just laying you down on the bed, spreading you out and devouring you. Eating you like candy. I bet you taste like honey and lavender. You always smell like that.”
The blush was back. “Taviano.” There was cautious excitement in her voice.
“Nicoletta.” There was teasing firmness in his.
“I’m not going to be able to concentrate on whatever Stefano says, you know that, right? I’ll be thinking about you trying to do that.”
His eyebrows shot up as he handed her the last cup. “Trying? Amore mio, have a little faith. I have spent more than a few years thinking about how you’re going to taste. I will savor every drop and make certain you enjoy every moment. There’s not going to be any worries about that, but you may find it might be too much, in which case I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath before I start again.” He gave her another wicked grin, caught up the towel and hung it on the rack to dry in the sun and took her hand.
“You’re really enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”
He was. There was no question about it. She was in his home. Finally. Nicoletta. His Nicoletta. His ring was on her finger. The ring his cousin had made specifically for the right woman, and it fit perfectly, much like Cinderella with her glass slipper. She might have an army of gangbangers coming after her, but she had an entire family of riders swarming to protect her, and he would bet on them every time.
“Didn’t you have second thoughts?”
“Of course I did,” he admitted. “I’m a man. I was a bachelor. Women threw themselves at me. The thought of marriage, being with one woman for the rest of my life, was a very different prospect. That was fleeting, I’ll admit. And only when I thought about an actual relationship. It isn’t like I ha
d a good example with the parents. But then I kept going to your room every evening and talking to you. Listening to you. Laughing with you or holding you when you were crying and knowing how strong you were to survive what you did.”
She shook her head as she settled into the chair in front of the fireplace. “Both you and Stefano act as if I saved myself. I was going to kill myself. That was my only way out. They were going to hand me over to Benito, you know that. You came in when they were desperately trying to save themselves. They knew if they didn’t give me to him, he would kill them. If I was dead, he would kill them. That’s the kind of man Benito is. I wasn’t brave right then. I was a coward. I couldn’t face Benito and what I knew he had in store for me.”
“I thought you were very brave. You saw us kill your step-uncles. You might not have known how we got there, or even how we killed them, but they were dead, and you knew we were the ones responsible. I took your weapon from you, and I asked you if you wanted to come with us. You said yes. That was brave, Nicoletta. You said yes and we’d just killed them.”
“I looked at you and knew you were better men.”
“When you woke up on the plane, you knew we’d stripped you naked. You were wearing my shirt. You didn’t scream, and you didn’t fight me. You just looked at me and then to the door, and you went back to sleep. That took courage.”
“You drugged me.”
“You remember being in the tunnel. You weren’t that drugged.”
She kicked off her shoes and drew her feet onto the chair, a small smile on her face. “That’s true. I do vaguely remember. That’s why the feeling of being in the shadows was somewhat familiar to me. It was looking into your eyes, Taviano. I just trusted you. I did. I can’t tell you why, but I did.”
He poured them both a chilled glass of water before sinking into the chair beside hers. The glasses were placed on the small figure eight table between the two wide-cushioned chairs. The detail in the little table was exquisite. It was another one of the artist’s creations that he’d left behind with his house.
Shadow Flight (The Shadow Series) Page 19