When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I pursed my lips and arched one of mine. “About a bad man.”

“Oh.” He folded his paper in his lap and leaned forward with a wolfish grin. “Do share with the class.”

I snorted. “Not likely.”

“Va bene. Then I will tell you about mine,” he offered, leaning back to cross those thick arms over his chest.

I pulled my stare from the bulging muscle only to land on that square jaw still ink-stained with stubble from the day before. Unbidden, I imagined what it might feel like under my tongue.

“That’s unnecessary.” My starched delivery was ruined by my breathiness.

Those eyes, twin galaxies, glittered. “I think it’s very necessary.”

He reached into the fruit bowl set between us and selected a red pomegranate. I watched avidly as he gripped it between his two mighty hands and easily cracked it in half with his thumbs. He smoothed a finger down the inside of the fruit almost sensuously, then brought a kernel of the bright fruit to his mouth. It summoned the memory of him trailing those fingers through his own cum and painting the liquid on my lips.

He hummed as he swallowed it.

I reached for my water glass and drank heavily.

“I dreamed that I was with a beautiful woman,” he began, still holding the fruit and feeding himself intermittently. There was red juice on his lips I wanted badly to lick off. “She was naked but nervous. I gentled her, stroking down all that creamy skin with just the tips of my fingers, the edge of my rough knuckles until I made her tremble.”

I blinked, so absorbed in the rolling cadence of his voice that I completely forgot myself.

“She didn’t want to get on her knees for me when I asked…” He pulled a few seeds of pomegranate onto his fingers and then inclined forward slowly to raise them in offering to me as he said, “So, I got on my knees for her. And when I put my mouth on her pussy, do you know what she tasted like, Elena?”

I didn’t answer because I was too busy telling myself not to take those thick fingers into my mouth with the proffered fruit.

He read my hesitation, and his eyes went from liquid ink to intractable obsidian. A moment later, he pressed the fruit to my closed mouth, painting my lips with the tart juice. When I opened my mouth, to protest surely, he slipped the seeds onto my tongue.

“Like pomegranates and red wine,” he finished, returning to a comfortable lounge in his own chair where he proceeded to suck the tips of his fingers clean.

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table.

“Will you hit me if I say yes?”

His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and nodded somberly. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I like it rough.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I said, giving in to my laughter but sobering slightly when I caught the look he was giving me. “What? Do I still have pomegranate juice on my mouth?”

“I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.

I swallowed the mass of emotion that rose in my throat. “Don’t say I should do it more often.”

“No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather possessive of the sound.”

I blinked at him as more of me unraveled, rolling across the space between us as if I wanted him to take the unspooled length of me and reassemble it in his hands.

It was hard not to wonder what the Elena Dante saw could be like if I let her out of the shadows.

I cleared my throat, dabbing my lips with my napkin as I stood up to leave. “I have an appointment on Staten Island at nine.”

He stood too, dropping the pomegranate to his plate and wiping his hands before he came around the stone table to corner me against the door. One hand went to my hip and the other braced on the door beside my head as he crowded me. The sheer size of him shouldn’t have excited me as it did, but all the things I had once found horribly savage now seemed to light me up like kerosene-soaked tinder.

“One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”

A shiver rattled my shoulders against the glass door. I was reaching some kind of boiling point, my blood gone to magma beneath my skin, and I was desperate for something to finally rip the cap off my control and send me bursting free. I wanted him to kiss me now against all of my better judgment, but I wasn’t ready to ask for it. He had to be the one to take it so I could blame him later when my cooler head reigned.