Hold You Against Me (Stripped 4)

“The water. It had a sleeping pill. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.”

I blink at him, fully awake now. And shocked. Shocked that he would think I was asking about the water, about the damn drugs, when he’s alive. After all these years, alive.

It’s not enough to hear him. I can’t believe my ears. I have to see him. I have to feel him. I’m across the floor of the limo before my limbs have even registered the movement, my hands reaching for him before I can think twice. I’m on my knees in front of him, because somehow sitting on the seat beside him feels presumptuous—but I don’t mind. I look like a supplicant. I feel like one. He’s some kind of altar, and I’m praying that he’s real.

The hard calves beneath my palms feel real enough. Warm. Strong. Muscles flex where my fingers stroke. I can’t identify him through legs alone. I didn’t even touch Giovanni here before, never had the courage for that.

I’m braver now—and more desperate to know the truth. I slide my palms up his thighs. A slight hitch in his breathing tells me I’m not the only one affected. My hands fall to his hands where they rest on the smooth leather. There’s ink there, black and harsh, that wasn’t there before.

I run my fingertips over the fine linen of his shirt on either side, up to the open collar, a shadowed V above the white fabric. Coarse hair and rough skin. Rigid bones and tender flesh. The bristle of a jaw that hasn’t seen a razor in more than a day.

It could be anyone, I tell myself. Any tall, muscled man in a finely tailored suit.

Except I wouldn’t touch any man like this.

I have to lean forward to reach more of him, my hips slipping between his legs. It’s an intimate position. Too intimate for strangers. The pads of my fingers brush over his lips, his breath warming me.

I’ve stared at these lips for enough hours to know the exact place they dip in the middle, the smooth expanse of them at the edge. The rough hair is new, as is the scar bisecting his top lip. I run my fingers over that place, back and forth, as if I can somehow smooth it out, wish away the hurt.

His nose is the same proud shape—a Costas nose, passed down from father to son, inevitably broken more than once by a life of violence. I try to smooth that away too, clay beneath my hands.

He isn’t clay, though. He’s living, breathing, and letting me explore.

His eyes fall closed when I reach them, eyelashes tickling my fingertips. My hands are trembling now, shaking as I trace the curve of his lashes, then higher, his brows. There’s another scar here, something jagged and hard that just missed his eye. So much pain.

It’s his hair that breaks me, the way one lock falls over his face no matter how much he pushes it back. My heart clenches. I finger the silky-smooth strands, wondering how something so soft can exist on a man so hardened.

“How is this possible?” I breathe. “How are you alive?”

“The same way you are, I imagine. I survived.”

It wasn’t the same, because I had my sister to protect me. He had no one. A sob escapes me. “Gio, let me see you.”

I pull his neck to bring him forward, out of the shadows, but I might as well pry the seats away from the car. I can’t move him at all if he doesn’t want to go. “Let me see you,” I beg softly.

A slight shake of his head. “Soon enough, bella. I want to look at you like this.”

He must have looked at me plenty while I slept on the opposite bench. And it occurs to me he’s been watching me for some time—in my loft and outside the club. He was the one who took those orange slices. He’s the one who hit Shane.

“Like what?” I ask, almost a whisper.

“With that hope in your eyes, like you know me.”

“I do know you, Gio.” Sometimes I felt like he was the only person in the whole world I really knew. Not my father and definitely not my mother. Even my sister had an otherworldly grace, a fairy watching over me more than flesh and blood. But Giovanni held my hand, whispered confessions in the dark. He was my first kiss.

He shakes his head slowly. “You don’t know who I am now.”

The gravity in his voice gives me pause. I was overcome by the realization that he’s alive, the pure joy of it. Part of me understood what he’s done, what it means. If he grew up in that world, he’s become what he was meant to be—a foot soldier for the mafia. I don’t know who took over for my father, but they would have a vested interest in taking me. For leverage? A blood debt? Whatever it is will be violent and awful, and Giovanni is helping him do it.

Maybe I should condemn him for that. The severe expression on his face tells me he expects that. Except I know the penalty for disobeying an order. Death. And not a quick one. How can I blame him for surviving? I can’t, I won’t, not when I’m overjoyed to see it. Whatever

he’s had to do to survive, whatever he’s endured, I’m grateful because it means he’s alive.

“We don’t have to talk about that now,” I say, and I mean it. There will be plenty of time later for fear, for bloodshed. Plenty of time to find out who’s orchestrating this. “Tell me how you are. Tell me how you survived. God, Giovanni, tell me the weather report if you want. I just have to hear your voice.”

There are tears shimmering in my eyes, so I can’t see him clearly, but he swallows hard, leaning forward. He isn’t as unaffected as he wants me to believe.

“Clara.” His voice is rough. “I’m not the boy I was.”