My heart aches. I want to cry for him.
Wordlessly, he takes his hands from his face, his beautiful, tortured, perfect face, and reaches for me. With one sharp tug, he yanks me onto his lap.
“It’s fucking brutal,” I tell him, my voice surprisingly strong and loud in the barren room. They should warm this place. This isn’t a room for the dead but for the living.
“What is?” he asks, his gaze tortured and broken. My frigid heart melts a bit more.
I shake my head. “All of it.”
The lies, deception, and manipulation. Violence, threats, and bullying. Anger and sadness and death. Every bit of it’s depraved, and he knows it. You forfeit a childhood and peace for security and wealth, yes, but it’s a choice most of us would rather not make. I’m not sure if anyone outside mob life would ever really, truly understand how he’s been raised, what it does to you.
But I do.
“Yeah,” is all he says, shaking his head. When I meet his gaze, his serious, stern eyes that flicker with the hint of warmth, he reaches his hands to my waist and yanks me even closer to him, his grip painful and hard.
I gasp when he arranges me so that my legs straddle either side of him. My shoes slip off my feet and click on the concrete floor.
I know he can’t control much of this… but he can control me.
I know before his mouth touches mine that he’s going to kiss me.
If I let him.
My heartbeat throbs when his hands slide up either side of my face, framing me. “It is fucking brutal,” he echoes, his eyes on mine cold and angry, but the warmth in his hands belies his frigid gaze. “All of it’s fucking brutal.” His hands press harder, tighter, before he wrenches my mouth to his.
He doesn’t even try to tame the ferocity in his lips as he takes what he wants.
This isn’t a kiss but an ultimatum. His tongue plunders my mouth, invading me, as his grip on my face tightens to nearly painful.
I gasp in a breath, and breathe his in. My own hands reach for him and land on his shoulders, then snake around his neck as if to save myself from falling.
Every breath melds with his. My gasps are swallowed whole. I’m consumed in fire as if burned by a dragon’s flame. And still, he kisses me, claims me.
I lick his tongue and knead his shoulders, craving the sensual touch of skin to skin. A thread of desire weaves its way between us. His responsive moan only encourages me to do more.
I want to touch his skin. I want to feel his naked flesh. I want so much more than this.
I’ve forgotten where I am or why we’re here. Still kissing him, I reach for the top button of his shirt and fumble to unbutton it. I’m still broken, still scarred from what I’ve been through, but I don’t want to think about that, not now. I don’t want to be defined by my past or my pain.
I want to live in the here and now. This, after all, is the only reality I can control. We control.
His hands travel down my face to my waist, and my heart flips in response. He grants me access.
Now I can touch him.
I slide my fingers under his collar, while he threads his hands under my ass and scoots me closer to him. When his buttons fall open, I eagerly scratch my fingers along the column of his neck. The feel of his hot muscle and sinew is all male, so potent it’s exhilarating.
He’s all mine.
My pulse throbs between my legs.
He bites my lips and licks my tongue. I slowly begin to melt on his lap. I feel his hardened length beneath me, as my hands knead his shoulders. I reach the flat of my hand to his neck and skate my hand down his T-shirt to where his naked chest is dotted with dark, coarse hair.
I whimper when he pulls his mouth off mine.
“Not here,” he grates, his voice hoarse. “Jesus Christ, woman.”
I drop my head to his shoulder and don’t bother to hide my disappointment.
He’s right. We’re in a goddamn morgue.
We don’t need to talk. I don’t need to clarify. I know.
He may be brutal and cold, but Ottavio Rossi knows who I am. He knows every thread that’s knit me together. He knows what I fear and what I hope for, not because he’s known me for long, but because the two of us were forged by the same fire.
Tuscany always brought out the romantic in me.
We’re both panting and hot, and a little disheveled, like two lovers caught in the beam of an officer’s flashlight in the back of a parked car.
“You started it,” I breathe.
“Fucking hell, I didn’t,” he says in an almost boyish tone that’s at once endearing and a bit unnerving. “You were the one that undid my buttons and touched me.”