Shadow Storm (Shadow Riders 6)

Her lashes swept down. “Great sex?”

His fingers traced her lips. She had the best mouth and she knew how to use it. She’d asked him to teach her how to give him a blow job, and they’d spent so many wonderful hours at the lake house practicing. She had taken their lessons very seriously and knew exactly how to please him in so many ways. She’d added a few little tricks of her own here and there.

“I do love the sex, but no, I didn’t mean that,” Val said. “You make me feel as if I’m a human being. A good man. You make me remember how to laugh. How to feel emotion. Real emotion. I like to just look at you. Sometimes, when you’re asleep, I stay awake and watch you breathe. When you’re away from me, I want a camera on you so I can see you’re still there and I know you’re alive and well. Breathing.”

He wasn’t explaining very well. He could see the confusion in her little frown.

“Val, you are a good man. You don’t need me to know that.”

He shook his head. “You saw what I did to Parisi. I didn’t feel a fucking thing. He was a traitor to my family. He was my father’s best friend. Did you know that? Best man at his wedding. Sat at our table for dinners. We sat at his. He was my father’s advisor. He was the one who told the assassins how to find the safe rooms in the house to get in. How to use the passageways. Miceli didn’t know. Parisi did. He led the killers straight to my father. A good man cannot do what I did and feel nothing, Emmanuelle.”

His thumb continued to slide back and forth across her lips. His woman. Soft as hell, even inside she was soft, yet she wasn’t. Her body was firm. Fit. The body of a warrior. Muscles ran under all that soft skin. She’d admitted she was an assassin. She killed. She had trained from the time she was a child. She didn’t have a killer’s eyes, not the way Stefano or her other brothers did.

Valentino caught her chin and tipped her head back so she was forced to meet his eyes. He stared down at her, looking for the killer in her. She didn’t look away. She met his penetrating stare calmly. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t find that killer, yet she killed. Emme was extraordinary.

“Let’s shower again, Princess, and rest for a little while before we have to face the world.” Maybe if he took enough showers, he could wash some of the filth off of him.

“You have the rest of the story to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you.” He would. He wasn’t going to lose her because he had already ensured she couldn’t leave him. One way or the other, they were both trapped. Damned. He wasn’t a good man, and if she hadn’t heeded his warnings before, she would after he told her the rest of the story. He held out his hand to her.

Emmanuelle put her hand in his and allowed him to pull her up. Val pulled her into him. He needed the closeness with her. His elusive woman. She was so peculiar, always thinking he didn’t love her as much as she loved him, yet she was the one ready to run. He was fully committed to her. He always had been, almost from the moment he’d spotted her sitting across the room from him, even before their shadows had connected. Those eyes of hers.

He wrapped his arm around her and fit her under his shoulder, wincing a little because his wounds hurt like hell. He probably shouldn’t have been expending so much energy, but his dick was making all kinds of demands, and it had gone without for a long, long time. He owed it.

Emmanuelle burst out laughing and brushed her fingers over his semihard cock. “I think that connection you were talking about in your mind really is working. I caught a little bit of that. Owing your cock? Really? Maybe you said it out loud?”

“Two years was a long time to just masturbate to my memories and pictures of you, Princess. It isn’t like I let the monster have any real action. And I was investigating Miceli’s ring by that time, which took me to strip clubs. Too many to count.”

He was leaving out the part that he had to check on his family’s strip clubs or that some clubs included some darker fantasies. Had his body reacted? Hell yeah. Had he wanted another woman to get him off? To touch him? Not for one second. The thought was abhorrent. He knew those ropes wrapping around her shadow had done that to him. He hoped they’d done the same thing to her—imprisoned her shadow, but both of their bodies. He knew Emmanuelle hadn’t considered that consequence for him yet.