“You come here a lot.”
“Yes.” He poured a perfect two fingers into each glass, one with ice and one without. “It is one of the reasons that we are able to have a friendship. Cosima was my friend before I even met Elena.”
An arrow of hatred painted with the name of my eldest sister found its home in the center of my heart. I cemented it there with guilt and shame and felt it throb.
“You know, I would say that I can’t see you and Cosima being friends but,” I laughed lightly, “she is infectious, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
He handed me the glass with ice and watched me intently as I lifted it to my lips and touched the burning liquid to my tongue. I watched his eyes but he was either unaffected or being very careful.
“How did you meet her?” Talking about Cosima seemed as good a topic as any. In fact, it seemed to be one of the only topics I could even begin to feel comfortable talking about with Sinclair.
He stepped back to lean against the counter across from the island, giving me a full view of his beautiful suit clad physique.
“Willa signed her.” I recognized his adopted mother’s name and noted that he didn’t call her something affectionate like mom. “When she was nineteen. I was in Italy with Willa when she discovered her, standing in the rain wearing a long black dress. You couldn’t tell where her hair ended and the dress began. She looked like something from Dante’s Inferno.”
He shook his head and stared into his glass as if divining a memory. I waited for him to continue but he remained silent. Cosima never spoke about her time away from home and honestly, I think the rest of us were too afraid to press her into confessing. What exactly did an eighteen-year-old girl have to do to pull her family out of destitution?
I shivered, pulling Sinclair from his reverie. His lips compressed into a flat line. “She was too young to have such sad eyes. I didn’t want her living with my parents – she had obviously already been through a lot – so I offered to host her here in New York.”
“Wow,” I blinked a few times as I tried to process the picture of my vivacious sister inhabiting the same space as the fiercely private and enigmatic Frenchman.
A tiny smile twitched his lips. “It was an interesting experience to say the least. It was just for a short time; within the year, she had enough money to bring over Elena and Mama. Sebastian arrived from Los Angeles soon after.”
And you met her.
What would have happened if I had stayed in Italy? If I had moved to New York with my family and Sinclair had met both Elena and I at the same time?
The hypothetical made my teeth ache.
“You know,” I said, to distract myself from that destructive line of thought, “I don’t know very much about what happened to my family during the last five years. Cosima and Sebastian never talk about it and, as you know, I am not very close with Elena.” I sighed and took a long sip of the burning whiskey. “We all used to be so close.”
Sinclair crossed his arms and inclined his head, waiting for me to go on. I was surprised by his readiness to talk about my family when they were the cause of the mile wide distance between us, but I was even more surprised by my relief at having someone to talk to who would understand.
“Have you been to Napoli?” He hesitated but shook his head. “Well, I can understand why not. Tourists go for the pizza and the history but they never leave as enchanted as they were with Florence or Rome, Venice or Umbria. Napoli is a deeply dirty place, especially if you are poor.”
Sinclair nodded to convey that he was still listening before turning around to grab a few things from the fridge and cupboards. I watched him assemble the ingredients for crepes with a slight smile.
“You need to eat,” he explained, without facing me.
On cue, my alcohol weighted stomach sloshed and turned over nauseously. “Okay.”
“Continue.”
I watched the ice in my glass swirl and tried to collect my thoughts.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about Seamus? He was an English professor at the university but by the time the twins were born, he had basically been forced out due to his gambling and drinking problem. He loved Italy, every single thing about it and it had been his goal growing up as an Irish Catholic in Boston to move to the country.” My laugh was forced. “He was ridiculed by his family about it and when he finally made the move, they basically disowned them. I don’t even know their names.”
“Would you like to?”
His question surprised me into answering honestly. “Yes, but only because I’d like to know how Seamus turned out the way he did. What made him decide to bury his family in debt to the mafia and disappear without a trace.”
Sinclair nodded and I paused for a minute to watch the surprisingly erotic sight of his strong wrist whisking the crepe batter.
“He disappeared after Cosima moved away. Sebastian moved to America a few months after that. We were almost destitute and so lonely.” I could remember the dull vibration of too much silence in our small Neapolitan home and the collapsed look to Mama’s handsome face, how her smile dragged and her soft hands trembled.
“It would be understandable if you resented them.” He competently swirled the runny batter evenly over the surface of the pan while his eyes remained bolted to mine.
“I don’t resent the twins, I never have and I never could. They did everything to get us out of there, things that I don’t know and probably never should.” I hesitated, unsure if I should tell him the truth.
He flipped the completed crepe onto a waiting plate, moving with machine-like efficiency. His silence was a gift. I knew he wouldn’t judge me because when it came down to the two of us, Sinclair was my musician, skillfully plucking and strumming until I produced just the right tune. I may make the sound, but how could he blame me when he had orchestrated it?
“I resent Elena and Mama sometimes.”
Flip, slip, and the sizzle as butter landed in the pan.
“Mama for staying with Seamus for so long, for loving him when she should have left him. And Elena… We stopped being sisters when the twins left.”
I wanted to tell him about Christopher, about what had happened between the three of us, how Elena had never forgiven me. But it wasn’t really my story to tell, at least not to Elena’s present partner, whatever he may have meant to me.
Sinclair sprinkled brown sugar over a perfectly cooked crepe, folded it and squeezed a sliced lemon easily in his fist over the top. He placed the plate in front of me but snagged my wrist before I could pick up the fork. With nimble fingers, he plucked the elastic off my wrist and moved behind me to gently gather my messy, still slightly damp hair between his hands. I shivered when cool fingers dragged over my heavy pulse. When my hair was secure in a ponytail, he still lingered and the only sound in the entire apartment was my heavy breathing. My head spun and I realized that I was still pretty intoxicated.
“Eat, Giselle.”
I sighed but did as he told me, watching from the corner of my eye as he cleaned up the kitchen and ate his own rolled crepe standing up.
“How did you become interested in art? It doesn’t seem like your childhood was conducive to frivolity or creativity.”
“No, but I did it anyways. I used sticks and dirt, made rock formations and even got my hand on a canister of spray paint. We only had standard grade lead pencils and printer paper, sometimes something a little nicer if Seamus had done well at the tables. Cosima sent me my first paint set for my nineteenth birthday, this incredibly beautiful box of Sennelier oil paints. It was one of the only things I took with me to L’École des Beaux-Arts.”
“That makes me unspeakably sad,” he said simply.
I shrugged because it didn’t matter to me anymore, I wouldn’t let it. “It affected me a lot. I didn’t know who I was or what I was allowed to do when opportunities eventually came my way. I felt unworthy, I think.”
“You know better now.”
“I do,” I agreed.
“Whatever else happened in Mexico, good or bad, you helped me lock into place.”
“That makes me unspeakably happy,” he murmured, as if my words weighed heavily in his chest and compressed his lungs.
His phone began to ring but I wasn’t startled or surprised. It only seemed right that our intimacy would be interrupted. I turned away before he could answer it and made my way to the bathroom.
“Elena,” I heard him murmur before I was fully out of earshot.
I braced myself against the sink basin on wobbly arms and scowled at the mess of a redhead in the mirror. After so many years staring at my reflection and seeing only the ways in which I didn’t look like my gorgeous siblings, I was happy to find my own beauty lurking beneath the smudged mascara and sticky hair. It was impossible to view myself as ugly, as average, when a man like Sinclair found me so attractive.
I peeled off my clothes and turned the shower on to scalding hot. The pounding spray further sobered me and I focused on the individual pricks of water against my skin instead of the gorgeous dilemma waiting for me somewhere in the apartment. After scrubbing myself from head to toe in lavender scented product, I stepped from the shower and into the steamy room.
Wiped clean, I felt raw and unprepared to face Sinclair. I desperately wanted to go to him as I was, naked and cooling like an un-iced cake. I wanted him to paint me in his sugary kisses and color me pink with desire.
Standing in the middle of the bathroom, my hand found its way over my breast and down to my sex. I moved my hand through the downy curls and hissed as I found my clit. I braced one hand on the sink and stared at the slowly clearing mirror as I played with myself.
A reel of memories from our Mexican affair played in my mind; flashes of myself spread open and shockingly wet, the taste of his arousal on my tongue, the sharp string of a slap on the thin skin of my ass.
I was slick and throbbing, my breath fogging up the mirror again. I stretched two fingers past my entrance and moaned slightly, taking my lip between my teeth, biting it like Sinclair would do if he were kissing me, demanding me to come for him. My fingers were too small, too gentle on my skin and I ached for the precision of his touch, the painful pinch and sexual pull of his hands on my body. I groaned again, loudly.
“Elle?”
His voice exploded against my skin, showering me with hot shards of desire. My fingers worked faster.
“Elle?” He was closer, just outside the slightly open door to the washroom. “Is everything okay?”
My eyes drooped with the heaviness of my arousal but I forced myself to keep them open and on the door in the mirror. I was rewarded with the sight of him coming into the room, the steam swirling around his legs and kissing his skin with dew. I shuddered violently and pinched my clit hard between my fingers. I was so close.
He stood there, shocked, taking in the view of my pink sex peeking out from under my slightly bent bottom and the hand running over it eagerly. I saw his throat swell and bob as he swallowed hard.
I whimpered.
His burning eyes shot to mine in the mirror and the fierce desire in them almost brought me to my knees.
“Stop.” His voice lashed out across the room and hit me like a whip.
My hand increased its frenzied movements. I was too close to stop now.
“I said,” he repeated in that glacial, exacting voice that never failed to make me wet, “stop.”
My hand trembled as I took it away and placed it on the sink. I panted as I stared at him in the mirror, waiting for him to direct me.
His lips were pursed into a flat line and his fists curled before he put them in his pockets. “Go to bed, Giselle.”
My heart dropped to the wood floor with an audible splat as he turned and left. The steam had disappeared through the open door and the cold apartment air grated goose bumps into my skin. I shivered and pulled a towel from the rack to wrap around my body.
Whatever hope I might have harbored that he would be waiting for me in my bedroom was crushed when I slunk into the dark room and found it cold and empty. Tears of humiliation stung my eyes and made my nose tickle.
I ditched the towel and lay on the duvet, letting the cold air bring my lava filled body back down from its near eruption.
I was an idiot to be caught touching myself with Sinclair in the apartment. Whatever opportunity I may have had to be friends with him had obviously gone out the door with my inappropriate behavior. What had I been expecting? Did I really think he would suddenly succumb to nefarious desire and drag me into the bedroom like a Neanderthal and have his wicked way with me? This wasn’t a romance novel and Sinclair was certainly no caveman.
My eyes shot open at the clack of ice hitting ice in a glass.
Sinclair stood framed in the door and he maintained eye contact with me as he made his way to the high backed chair across from my bed. He sat down, planted one foot a top the opposite knee and took a sip of his whiskey.
I blinked.
He looked entirely comfortable sitting across from me, like a spectator at a movie or, more likely, like a man waiting for the show at a strip club.
“By all means,” his voice was thicker than the steam from the bathroom, warmer than the cold air assaulting my bare skin, “continue.”
My breath streamed out through my slack mouth. Could I do this? Should I do this? Touch myself in front of the man who was dating my sister?
But you have done this, the villainous voice inside me reminded, you’ve done this with Sinclair many, many times before. And besides, you want to.
Still, I hesitated, my mind whirring louder than my latent desire.
“Don’t make me tell you again.” Sinclair’s voice wrapped firm fingers around my flailing thoughts and carefully bound them, gagged them. “Touch that pretty pussy for me, Giselle. I want to see you come.”
A feathery moan escaped me and my hand found my still damp sex without hesitation. I watched his stern face as I twirled one finger around my clit, not quite touching it, before moving down to my entrance to do the same thing. His jaw ticked and I knew that teasing myself was teasing him even more. I feathered both hands over my inner thighs, tensing at the resulting tingle at my core and sighed deeply.
“Spread your legs wider for me.”
I pushed them further with my palms and ran my fingers over my sex to open myself for him.
“Good girl,” he crooned. “Do you remember the night I spanked you? Your ass was a beautiful shade of pink and you begged me to take you, to ease the throbbing in your sweet little pussy.”
His words sprinted like a brush fire across my skin, lighting the tiny hairs all over my body until I was scorched and completely bare. My eyes fell closed at the intensity.
“Open those eyes, siren. I want to watch my voice make you cum.”
I shuddered and pried my eyes open. His blue gaze still blazed but his mouth was softened by a small smile that warmed my heart.
“Sinclair,” I breathed restlessly, searching for the last component to trigger my release.
He stood up, drained his glass and made his way to my bedside. Placing his cold glass over my bare navel, I shivered at its contrast to my feverish skin and held my breath as he leaned over me, bracing himself on one hand beside my left cheek.
“This is the last time, ma petite voleuse.” He spoke just above my lips, the words slipping into my mouth on his warm breath. “So make it a good one.”
I opened my mouth wider, maybe to protest or to beg, but his lips captured mine in a sweet open mouth kiss. Two fingers trailed down my cheek and rested against my fluttering pulse.
“Come for me,” he ordered softly as he pulled away.
And I did, in an explosion of sensation so deep that every muscle in my body contracted hard, so hard that I thought I was seizing. A scream ripped from my throat and my legs scissored, trapping my hand between my thighs.
When I finally came down enough to open my eyes and release my hand, he was gone. The only sign of him was
the empty tumbler on the bedside table and the feel of his control and desire still lingering in my spent muscles. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the tears come before I was even aware I was crying.
I’d wanted some kind of closure, fantasized about a sexual ‘farewell’ and now that I’d had one, wrung from his voice and my hand, I felt despair deeper than any I had known before. Sinclair may have been in my life, a friend now, at least, but knowing I would never have his heart had never been so clear to me.
Chapter Seven.
“Really?”
I laughed loudly but the lunch hour traffic on the busy terrace of the restaurant drowned out my lack of class. “Yes, really.”
“I don’t think I understand this.” Mama’s beautiful almond shaped eyes squinted at me, a habit she had when English confounded her. “Si vuole dipingere le persone aver fatto sesso?”
Cosima too was squinting, a thinner, younger look-alike. “No, Mama, it’s Giselle.”
I frowned at my family as they all nodded in agreement. They must be wrong they thought, because sweet innocent Giselle would never do anything morally ambiguous and definitely not something so crude.
“I’m serious.” I took a deep breath and slid my damp palms nervously over the soft jersey fabric of my dress. “I want to do a series depicting private sexual moments, a study of individual sexuality.”
Elena blinked at me owlishly before laughing. I took a second to notice how light it was, tinkling like glass wind chimes. I almost winced at the comparison to my own brassy chuckle from a few minutes ago.
“You can’t be serious? Who would even want to pose for you like that?”
I cleared my throat because this was part of the pitch that I really needed to nail. “I was hoping you would, for starters.”
The second of shocked silence made me fidget. I reached out for my wine glass, almost tipped it over in my haste and slipped my sweating palm back within the other.
“I can’t believe you are asking your own family to pose nude for you.” Elena’s pretty feature scrunched up in horror.
The shame I constantly felt in her presence threatened to overwhelm me but I swallowed back the bile and forced myself to breath.
The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2) Page 7