Katherine lifted her head to peer at me with questions. “What do you mean?”
It wasn’t common knowledge, as the Buchanans liked to keep their business private, but sharing this information with Katherine would go a long way toward showing her that I wanted to be different.
“A handful of years ago, someone gained access to one of the Malvagio dungeons and nearly killed a woman named Lana Winters. Lana’s sister, Emma, came to Malvagio with the intent of exposing the club but ended up a victim of the same person who’d assaulted her sister. Vince tried to save the club by helping Emma, and they ended up falling in love.”
“That’s some love story,” Katherine said wryly. “And by help...you mean...”
“Oh, Vince totally kidnapped her to keep her from going to the police, but he made sure she had the best care while she recovered.”
“He kidnapped her?”
The story was not your typical meet-cute, but nothing the Buchanans did was ever by the book. I’d learned to just go with it. “But they fell in love eventually,” I reminded Katherine, adding when she gasped in feminine outrage, “And the incident left an impact on the Buchanan brothers. So they wanted to make sure that even though Malvagio might look like Sodom and Gomorrah at its finest, at the end of the day all proceeds go to help various nonprofit organizations, which are routed through the Buchanan trust, so as not to embarrass anyone.”
Katherine lost some of her ire. “I guess that’s admirable. What kind of donations are we talking about?”
I laughed. “Let’s just say it’s more than enough to keep the nonprofits comfortable and doing their good work.”
“I guess that’s one way to keep the balance,” she supposed, pausing to straddle me. Katherine regarded me with an arched brow, her hair tumbling around her shoulders. “And how many women have you fucked in this place, Luca?”
It was a loaded question. “You know there’s a law about self-incrimination,” I teased, reaching up to tweak her rose-hued nipple. “Surely you aren’t asking me to divulge information that might make me look like an asshole when things were going so nicely between us.”
“Withholding information doesn’t make the truth any less of what it is,” she said.
I anchored my hands at her waist, loving the feel of her hips beneath my fingertips. “Are you sure you want me to answer?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know. I have no illusions that you’ve been celibate all these years, Luca. For that matter, I haven’t been, either.”
My fingers tightened. Her smile told me she knew exactly what she was doing.
I surged against her, impatient to claim her again, no matter how many men she’d been with. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
“I don’t know the number. I never kept track. But I will tell you this,” I said, rolling her to her back, rising above her. “You’re the only one that matters.”
Sealing my mouth to hers, I silenced any further questions about past lovers. I didn’t want to know about hers, and I certainly didn’t want to share about mine.
I’d been with scores of women across the globe, from wild to mild, but I’d never found a woman who ignited everything inside me the way Katherine did.
In some ways Dante was right—my brother had always maintained that Katherine was not a good fit as my wife. She would never be malleable or dutiful, content to be arm candy, happy to serve my every need. Thank God.
I wanted exactly what Katherine was—the exact opposite of whomever Dante and my father thought I should marry.
I kissed her hard and deep, the thoughts in my head crowding the lust in my heart. I didn’t want to think about strategy, even though I should.
In truth, if I had never hurt her, she wouldn’t have grown.
I know, I was a bastard for saying it, but it was no less true.
If I’d never broken her heart, she wouldn’t have been forced to be the woman she was now, the woman capable of standing beside me. The one who would fight with and fight for me—but I couldn’t say this to her without sounding like the arrogant ass she already believed I was.
Private epiphanies were best felt by the heart, not forced down your throat.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” I whispered, my lips blazing a trail down her silky skin, returning to her soft mouth. I drank in her breath as she groaned, our bodies pressed against each other.
“Luca,” she moaned as I dragged my mouth down to her molten core. I could taste her over and over and still delight in the discovery of her flavor on my tongue. She sucked in a tight breath as I suckled that tiny, swollen pleasure nub, loving how her hands twisted and pulled at the bedding, her thighs shaking and trembling as I pushed her harder toward her climax.
I lost myself in her shuddering cries, drinking in her pleasure as she shattered beneath my tongue. Before she could recover, I flipped her onto her belly, taking a brief moment to admire the perfection of her ass, then went to reach for a condom, but before my fingers reached the bowl, I hesitated.
It was wrong, but a part of me knew that if I got Katherine pregnant, I’d never lose her. A baby might be the only foolproof way to get her to marry me.
But even as the ruthless Donato creed—Win at All Costs—urged me to simply drive myself unprotected into her womb, I couldn’t do it.
Doing so would betray her trust in the worst way, and we’d never recover. If I was going to win her heart, I had to show her that I would never sacrifice her wants and needs for my own.
Not even if it meant losing so she could win.
I grabbed a condom and slid it over my erect cock before feeding my shaft to her hot, wet southern mouth. Her folds swallowed my cock, and I lost myself in the exquisite torture of being inside the woman who was my entire world.
If I were lucky, someday Katherine would give me fine sons, strong, smart and capable. She would grace me with incredible daughters who would keep me on my toes and make me wish for the opportunity to be the man that my little girls would believe I was.
I would not be like my father. I would be kind and loving and adoring to my children.
But that wasn’t tonight.
Her hot sheath closed around my cock, a tight, wondrous fit. We were made for each other. I lost myself in the pleasure of knowing that she, in this moment, was completely mine. In this bubble of sheer perfection, hiding within Malvagio’s walls, I lost myself in everything that was incredible about this woman. The smell of her musk on the air was sweeter than French vanilla.
I would fuck her raw and give her such incredible bone-melting pleasure that all she could think of was when she would get her next fix. By the end of this week, I would have her so cock-drunk that she would not know where I stopped and she began.
I came quickly with violent spasms, spending completely inside her. Relief that I hadn’t made a terrible choice in a weak moment made me cling to her all the more. I’d come so close to fucking everything up before I’d had a chance to show her that I was worthy of being her husband.
Thank you, God, for knocking some sense into me, I thought with a grateful heart.
But I wouldn’t lie—the thought of Katherine carrying my child was the most incredibly mind-blowing concept. How ironic that I’d spent my adult sexual history doing everything that I could to prevent an accidental pregnancy, but now I wanted nothing more than Katherine swelling with my child.
I was jumping the gun. I hadn’t won her heart yet. I couldn’t start registering in the baby department at Neiman Marcus.
At our core we were still animals. Turned on by scent, aroused by the visual cues of a soft pussy and beautifu
l tits. Katherine was physically perfect in every way. And I didn’t mean that in some generic, plastic Barbie sort of way.
I loved that her hips had grown faster than her body could handle. Those tiny silvery lines that she deemed imperfections were absolutely beautiful to me.
And when she swelled with my child, I would lovingly bathe her with any oil or cream or anything she desired just so I could worship her body.
Instead of going through the motions of my mother’s silly courtship rituals, I should’ve been doing exactly what I was doing right now. Loving the shit out of her. Fucking her so hard and so often that all she could think of was me.
Instead, because of my arrogance, I’d half-heartedly followed a stupid plan set up by my parents with the belief that Katherine would come around eventually.
I’d known this woman nearly her entire life, but maybe I’d never truly known her at all. If anyone was having an epiphany, it was me. I was thunderstruck. And all of this happened in the flash of a blinding orgasm, when everything came together in a giant cataclysm of emotion, physical response and striking clarity.
I couldn’t even gasp her name, but I was screaming it in my head. Never in my life had I lost myself like this. It was scary and heady at the same time, but there was something so visceral about the way we came together.
Katherine would have to come to grips with the fact that I would chase her to the ends of the earth and take every opportunity to seduce her into loving me again if need be.
Katherine was hardwired for me, even if she didn’t know it yet.
I collapsed and rolled to my back, gasping hard. Neither of us spoke. The faint sound of music from the upper floor was the only sound. The air was dense with the energy we had created together. I knew she could feel it, too. I slowly turned to regard her, waiting.
Something had changed between us. Something deep.
Did she feel it, too? Of course she did. Was that fear I saw in her eyes? No. It was something else, maybe something she wasn’t ready to put a name to or define. I caressed her jaw in silent understanding. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted her to know. But it was too soon. Too soon for her to recognize that she and I were meant to be together. And so I simply waited.