When Heroes Fall

by Giana Darling

  He was simply and extraordinarily exquisite.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes from him if I tried.

  When he hissed, looking down as he pulled those thick fingers up his shaft again and a bead of precum pooled like a pearl on the head of his cock, I couldn’t quite swallow my gasp.

  His eyes shot to the door the next instant, his torso jacking up, hands falling from his groin.

  I meant to back away, to look into his eyes at the very least.

  But his new position had put his erection predominantly on display, and my eyes were pulled there inexorably.

  Maddona santa, he was perfectly proportioned, his cock a thick, long length of muscle covered in dusky golden skin at the base, the head as swollen and deeply purple as an Italian plum. It jumped, spitting precum as I studied it.

  My mouth actually watered.

  Dazed, confused, horribly aroused, my eyes shot back up to Dante’s.

  I didn’t know what I would find, how he would react, but somehow the awareness that burned in those coal dark eyes wasn’t what I expected.

  Slowly, knowingly, he leaned back in his chair and spread those lightly furred thighs wide again.

  I swallowed thickly, captured in his sights like a deer before a wolf.

  When he wrapped a palm around his swollen shaft again, we both moaned, mine a light breath of sound and his a resounding growl. My gaze moved along his length in time with his tight grip, watching as he squeezed the flesh tightly, almost violently each time he passed over the crown. All those tense muscles clenched and twitched as pleasure worked through him, as it escaped in a hiss through his clenched teeth.

  He worked faster, unfathomably harder, fucking into his fist with long, brutal strokes.

  Distantly, I was aware of my own arousal, wet seeping into the seat of my silk shorts, crawling down the inside of my right thigh. But nothing mattered at that moment, in that vibrating, softly yellow illuminated space between us but Dante’s pleasure.

  It was impossible not to wonder what that heavy cock would feel like in my own smaller hand and finer fingers. What the liquid leaking steadily from his crown might taste like, salty or musky or sweet. If I could make him shake and groan the way he was watching me watch him fuck himself. If I could fit even half of that wide shaft inside my fairly untrained mouth.

  Such dirty, salacious thoughts, the kind I never allowed myself to think, all triggered unalterably by the sight of that big, beautiful beast of a man beating his shaft in time with my panting breaths.

  I didn’t think anything could have pulled me from that moment, from the seismic sexual awakening beginning in my gut as I derived more pleasure from simply watching a man than I ever had from sleeping with one. Not someone walking in on my voyeurism, not the call of my phone or the blare of a fire alarm.

  I was rooted to the spot by Dante’s shadowed black gaze hooked through the belly of my desires and the sight of his sex glazed with oil churning through his heavy fist.

  When his breath went harsh, chest pumping like billows, his back hunching into a slight curve as if everything in him contracted around his swelling cock, I actually held my breath, waiting for the inevitable conclusion to rock us both.

  I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth when his neck strained, his tempo went erratic, and he called out, “Elena!” a second before he climaxed.

  His cock thrust one last time through that tight grip, cum shooting across his boxed abs, sliding down the gutters cut between each one, up onto his chest, splattering against that silver cross nested in the hair there. He came almost endlessly, so much of it on his chest, belly, and thighs, even dripping off his fingers as he relinquished the hold on his softening organ. The sight of all that seed was deeply erotic, literally mouth-watering. I couldn’t believe my own reaction to it, thinking for the first time in my life that I could understand fetishism if there was such a one for that.

  For the sight of Dante, big-boned and heavily muscled gone limp with pleasure in that chair covered in his own spend.

  I swallowed thickly, light-headed and off balance. At that moment, I wasn’t even sure who I was because the Elena I’d known would never have stood in the door watching the private display of a man’s pleasure as if it was hers to watch and hers to own.

  I startled when Dante began to right himself, breathing deeply in recovery as he used a hand towel to clean up most of the spunk. Even that invigorated me, a separate pulse beating like a ceremonial drum between my thighs.

  When he stood up, I almost fled like a deer caught in the garden, but there was an order in his expression that held me in his thrall as he moved closer. Only when he reached the door, less than a foot between his naked body and my clothed one, only the angle of the open two-inch-thick door obscuring his softening cock from my sight, did he stop stalking me.

  Then, eyes still puncturing straight through mine into the dark, calamitous heart of me, he brushed one hand down his chest, his thumb dipping into a cooling streak of cum he’d missed while cleaning up.

  My heart beat so hard my ribs ached from the impact as he slowly raised it to my lips and smeared just the tiniest deposit on my mouth, a smudge like lip gloss. Unconsciously, my lips parted at the press, but he was already retreating his hand back through the door, pushing it slowly but firmly closed.

  “Sogni d’oro,” he murmured just before closing the door in my face with a slight, secret smile. “Have sweet dreams of me, Elena.”

  The moment I was alone in the dark hall, my tongue peeked out of my mouth to tap at the salt slick on my lips. The flavor of saline and musk exploded on my taste buds, more delicious for the intimacy of having some of Dante in my mouth than it was for the true taste.

  I wandered back to bed on wobbly legs like a drunk, slamming into tables, tripping on the stairs back up to my room. I was high off the fumes of our encounter, off the lingering oceanic taste of him on the back of my tongue.

  My skin was tight and hot. Even the gray silk camisole and short set too much for my inflamed flesh. For the first time ever, I stripped down naked and slid into bed, almost shivering with the acute yearning that burned through me.

  I wanted him.

  I squeezed my eyes shut as if the sight of him wasn’t branded on the inside of my lids, spray-painted on the walls of my skull like crude graffiti.

  I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything, even my own sexual release, and wasn’t that a revelation in itself.

  Tomorrow, I was going in for a surgery that would hopefully change my life forever, bring the kind of lustful fervor working under my skin to a gorgeous boiling point.

  I had been incandescently happy about the surgery since Monica told me it was possible, but now, in the wake of the most intense and positive sexual experience of my life, I was almost breathlessly excited.

  What would Dante be able to do with those exacting hands on me?

  If anyone could take my broken and newly healed body in his hands and make it sing, it would be the mafioso I shouldn’t, couldn’t have. The only man I’d ever wanted with this level of physical zeal and the only man I truly could not let myself want.

  ELENA

  Thursday morning dawned grim and gray with the staccato ping of rain chiming on the windows outside. I enjoyed the pathetic fallacy of the weather as I got ready for surgery. In the wake of last night’s outlandishly out-of-character spectatorship, I found myself as grouchy as Jacopo and bloated with a lonely melancholy.

  I hadn’t told anyone in my family I was having surgery done except for Cosima, and even then, I hadn’t given her the date.

  It wasn’t that I was embarrassed per se, but admitting I had reproductive issues, let alone anorgasmia, was vulnerable, and I didn’t want to have to explain it to anyone more than I had to. I didn’t even tell Mama because I hadn’t told her I was temporarily living with Dante.

  So, that morning I fasted and dressed to catch a cab to Monica’s private clinic. A flock of anxious and excited birds flapped in my b
elly at the thought that I could be fixed in twenty-four hours.

  I was almost out the door when Dante called out for me from the kitchen.

  Everything in me wanted to avoid him and the embarrassment of being called out for my voyeurism the night before, but I knew we had to interact eventually, seeing as how I was his lawyer and his enforced roommate.

  So, I sucked in a deep breath, told myself to stop acting like a shame-faced schoolgirl, and went into the living room.

  “A late start for you today,” he noted from the island where he sat on a stool drinking espresso and reading Il Corriere, a popular Italian newspaper.

  It amazed me that he could sit there looking so cool and unaffected when I’d seen him at his most vulnerable last night, naked and splashed like a Pollock painting with his own cum. But then, wasn’t that part of his appeal? Dante felt no shame, he did not hide, and he did not suffer fools. If I wanted to be embarrassed, I could, but that wouldn’t affect his perception of what he undoubtedly felt was a natural activity.

  That I could admire him somehow, respect him even more than I had before the incident, was as outrageous as it was somehow right.

  From the beginning, Dante had caught sight of my red hair and turned to me like a bull, set on destroying whatever barricades lay between us in his quest to get to me. It still chilled me to wonder what he might want to do when and if he finally succeeded, but that chill was only a cool breeze compared to the firestorm of lust that swept through me lately whenever we were in the same space.

  I hesitated, smoothing my hand nervously down my cashmere turtleneck. “I have that appointment I told you about.”

  His brow knotted, and I hated how handsome he was, how much I’d missed looking at his broad, beautiful face while I’d been avoiding him the last week. He was wearing a black turtleneck too, his thickly woven and snug over all those rippling muscles, heightening the fathomless black of his eyes and hair so that he looked nothing short of sinfully sinister sitting there.

  I was thrown immediately back to watching him naked and aroused in his office. Those muscles bared to my eyes as they tensed and jumped in time with the sensations he pulled from his cock.

  A shiver rippled through me.

  Dante saw it and seemed to think about commenting on it before his frown descended again. Instead, he shocked me by offering, “Let me drive you.”

  “No,” I almost snapped, moving back toward the entry room. That was the last thing I needed, this incredibly virile man knowing I couldn’t even come like a normal woman. “No, I’ll grab a cab. There’s no need to go out of your way.”

  “It’s surgery, no? Shouldn’t someone pick you up when you’re through?”

  “I asked a friend to bring me back,” I explained.

  “He knows you’re staying here?”

  “I trust him.” And I did. Beau would never do anything to harm me, and I could count the people I trusted on one hand, so that was saying something.

  “You need me, you call me, si?” Dante demanded, still scowling. “I don’t like this. You should tell me what it is you are having done so I can be prepared to care for you.”

  A hard bark of laughter erupted from me, my mortification from last night obliterated by the dark edge of my humor and prideful solitude. “I don’t need looking after, and I can hardly picture you as a nursemaid. Don’t worry about me, Dante. I’ll be fine. I always am. Now, I have to rush, but have a nice day.”

  I glided out of the room before he could protest, catching his muffled, “Only she would wear heels to surgery,” then a shouted, “In boca al lupa!” before I got in the elevator.

  Good luck. Literally translated as “into the wolf’s mouth.”

  Exactly where I currently felt myself, clasped between Dante’s unshakeable teeth, unable and gradually more and more unwilling to get free.

  It took me a moment to decide if I was grateful or irritated that he hadn’t pushed me about watching him masturbate, but I eventually settled on grateful. I had more important things to focus on, even if my mind slipped back to those scandalous images like a hard grip on wet soap. As the cab crawled through morning traffic toward my destination, my nerves began to corrode any other thought in my head.

  I was a nervous wreck by the time we pulled up to the curb, my palms sweating profusely as I paid the fare and entered Monica’s building. By the time I got to her floor, my forehead was cold with anxious perspiration, and when Monica came out to greet me, she frowned.

  “Nervous?” she asked gently, taking my hand to lead me to the private waiting room. “There is no reason to be, Elena. I’ve done these procedures hundreds of times. After all, I’m the best in the city.”

  I laughed weakly as she meant me to, following her into the room and sitting in the deep suede chair waiting for me. “I don’t mean to doubt you. I’m not nervous about the surgery, really. Just what it means for afterward.”

  “Ah,” she noted, nodding sagely as she collected my chart. “I understand that. Do you have an appointment to talk to Dr. Marsden following your recovery?”

  I nodded even though I didn’t think my therapist was equipped to help me deal with decades of sexual trauma and scarring.

  “You’re strong and brave, Elena. I see very good and passionate things in your future,” she said with a wide smile. “I’ll have the nurse come in and explain things to you. Please change into this gown and robe. I’ll see you in the OR.”

  Brave.

  The word echoed in my head, a reminder of Dante’s benediction for me to be brave with him.

  Coraggio.

  I smiled tightly at my doctor and my friend as she left and tried to breathe deeply.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about Dante and his indecent proposition.

  If this operation worked, I would be able to experience pleasure like I had never had before, not even with Daniel, who I knew logically had been a good and generous lover.

  If Dante could light my icy flesh on fire with just the touch of his lips to my pulse point, how would he make me feel with those lips on other parts of my body?

  I thought about it all through the check in with the nurse and then as I followed her down the hallway to the operating room.

  I came to the inevitable conclusion that Dante would be a gregarious lover, throwing himself into my pleasure the way he seemed to throw himself with singular intensity into everything he did, but that didn’t mitigate the risks.

  The fact that I could lose my job.

  Though just living with him could do that, the devil on my shoulder whispered. So shouldn’t I make the risk worthwhile and get something more out of it?

  No, it was the other threat, the one I hadn’t been able to ignore that night in Dante’s office pressed to the shelf of books by his hand on my throat and his big body at my front.

  The threat to my heart.

  After the tragedy of Christopher and Daniel, I didn’t have anything more in me to give. I’d felt so much all my life I’d resolved to feel nothing at all. For years, I’d kept my heart black, my lips red, and my personality ice cold.

  I didn’t need anyone to be fulfilled, and I didn’t trust anyone to try.

  So, it was ridiculous to consider changing any of that for a man like Dante.

  A man on trial for murder who could spend the next twenty-five years to life behind bars if I didn’t do my job to the full extent of my capabilities.

  I couldn’t trust a mafioso with my life or my happiness.

  To do so was suicide.

  So why did I secretly yearn to, and why did that yearning feel like a crime I was committing against myself?

  “When you wake up, Elena, you’ll be a new woman,” Monica promised as the anesthesiologist held the mask to my mouth and told me to breathe deeply.

  I wanted to argue with her, but the gas was already pulling me under.

  I wanted to tell her I was happy with the woman I was, and I was terrified of becoming anyone else.

  But the
n I passed out, and when I woke up, my first thought was of a mafioso with eyes like the velvet black New York sky.

  DANTE

  I was in a meeting with three of my captains when Marco appeared at the door to my office and tipped his chin.

  Elena had returned.

  The urge to go to her immediately was surprisingly powerful, but I tamped it down with the iron will I’d been born with as a Brit, then cultivated as a capo.

  She would need space to get settled, and I’d already had Bambi clean her sheets, put a box of tissues, a bottle of water, and some saltine crackers by her bedside just in case. She’d be fine until I finished business.

  “It worked,” Gaetan was saying with a massive grin. “Heard through the grapevine that Moore and Kelly went at it over Elena staying with you. Apparently, the figlio di puttana has some kinda heart ’cause he straight-up refused to do anything that could hurt his precious daughter.”

  “You gonna hurt her, he steps outta line?” Joe asked, leaning forward somewhat eagerly.

  Whoever said women were terrible gossips clearly had never met an Italian man.

  Whatever plans I had for Elena were decidedly more about pleasure than pain, but Joe Lodi didn’t need to know that.

  Just as Elena didn’t need to know I’d forced her to move in, in part, so that her arsehole of a father would back off our operation. It was a risky bet, given I’d doubted the man had a heart, even in regards to his daughters, given he’d sold Cosima into slavery to pay off his gambling debts to the Italian Camorra, but it was worth a shot.

  I loved it when those paid off.

  I arched a brow at Joe, watching as he deflated slightly under my cold regard. “No, Joe, I’m not going to beat a woman who is a guest in my house just because her father is a pezzo di Merda. I don’t trust those Irish bastardi, so we stay vigilant, but now we’ve got something on them, so I’m hoping we can focus on the di Carlo problem.”

  “Mason Matlock’s been moved to a safe place like you asked,” Enzo promised. “He’ll stay there under surveillance until you say so.”