When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth when his neck strained, his tempo went erratic, and he called out, “Elena!” a second before he climaxed.

His cock thrust one last time through that tight grip, cum shooting across his boxed abs, sliding down the gutters cut between each one, up onto his chest, splattering against that silver cross nested in the hair there. He came almost endlessly, so much of it on his chest, belly, and thighs, even dripping off his fingers as he relinquished the hold on his softening organ. The sight of all that seed was deeply erotic, literally mouth-watering. I couldn’t believe my own reaction to it, thinking for the first time in my life that I could understand fetishism if there was such a one for that.

For the sight of Dante, big-boned and heavily muscled gone limp with pleasure in that chair covered in his own spend.

I swallowed thickly, light-headed and off balance. At that moment, I wasn’t even sure who I was because the Elena I’d known would never have stood in the door watching the private display of a man’s pleasure as if it was hers to watch and hers to own.

I startled when Dante began to right himself, breathing deeply in recovery as he used a hand towel to clean up most of the spunk. Even that invigorated me, a separate pulse beating like a ceremonial drum between my thighs.

When he stood up, I almost fled like a deer caught in the garden, but there was an order in his expression that held me in his thrall as he moved closer. Only when he reached the door, less than a foot between his naked body and my clothed one, only the angle of the open two-inch-thick door obscuring his softening cock from my sight, did he stop stalking me.

Then, eyes still puncturing straight through mine into the dark, calamitous heart of me, he brushed one hand down his chest, his thumb dipping into a cooling streak of cum he’d missed while cleaning up.

My heart beat so hard my ribs ached from the impact as he slowly raised it to my lips and smeared just the tiniest deposit on my mouth, a smudge like lip gloss. Unconsciously, my lips parted at the press, but he was already retreating his hand back through the door, pushing it slowly but firmly closed.

“Sogni d’oro,” he murmured just before closing the door in my face with a slight, secret smile. “Have sweet dreams of me, Elena.”

The moment I was alone in the dark hall, my tongue peeked out of my mouth to tap at the salt slick on my lips. The flavor of saline and musk exploded on my taste buds, more delicious for the intimacy of having some of Dante in my mouth than it was for the true taste.

I wandered back to bed on wobbly legs like a drunk, slamming into tables, tripping on the stairs back up to my room. I was high off the fumes of our encounter, off the lingering oceanic taste of him on the back of my tongue.

My skin was tight and hot. Even the gray silk camisole and short set too much for my inflamed flesh. For the first time ever, I stripped down naked and slid into bed, almost shivering with the acute yearning that burned through me.

I wanted him.

I squeezed my eyes shut as if the sight of him wasn’t branded on the inside of my lids, spray-painted on the walls of my skull like crude graffiti.

I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything, even my own sexual release, and wasn’t that a revelation in itself.

Tomorrow, I was going in for a surgery that would hopefully change my life forever, bring the kind of lustful fervor working under my skin to a gorgeous boiling point.

I had been incandescently happy about the surgery since Monica told me it was possible, but now, in the wake of the most intense and positive sexual experience of my life, I was almost breathlessly excited.

What would Dante be able to do with those exacting hands on me?

If anyone could take my broken and newly healed body in his hands and make it sing, it would be the mafioso I shouldn’t, couldn’t have. The only man I’d ever wanted with this level of physical zeal and the only man I truly could not let myself want.

ELENA

Thursday morning dawned grim and gray with the staccato ping of rain chiming on the windows outside. I enjoyed the pathetic fallacy of the weather as I got ready for surgery. In the wake of last night’s outlandishly out-of-character spectatorship, I found myself as grouchy as Jacopo and bloated with a lonely melancholy.

I hadn’t told anyone in my family I was having surgery done except for Cosima, and even then, I hadn’t given her the date.