“Daniel isn’t relevant right now.”
“He isn’t?” I feigned surprise. “The man you lived with for four years. The one you thought you’d marry and adopt a child with. The same one that you couldn’t get over until you met me?”
“You are such an arrogantbastardo,” she snapped, whirling around to face me with color high in her cheeks. “You think you just magically made everything better?”
“No,” I retorted, pushing off the frame, shutting the door with one hand before stalking across the small room toward her. “Not everything. We still have to work on some things…” I backed her into the sink until she was bent backward over the porcelain, her chest heaving with the strain of her irritation and burgeoning desire. I palmed the skin above her breasts and slid my rough palm up until it collared her neck. The kick of her mad pulse against my thumb made my cock jerk in my pants. “I still have to teach you everything there is to know about pleasing me. With your hands, with your red mouth, your sweet cunt, and your little arse.”
“M-my arse?” she parroted, her eyes as wide as silver dollars.
I laughed huskily as I gathered her hands in one of my own and pinned them behind her back so she was forced to arch against me. “Si, lottatice, your tight little arse. Has anyone ever taken you there?”
“Absolutely not,” she snapped, the flush in her cheeks deepening and spreading down her neck and chest.
I followed the path with my lips and tongue, lapping up the heat of her skin. “I think you’ll like having me there. Do you know why?”
Her breath was a harsh rasp in my ear as I used my free hand to ruck up her skirt. I palmed her silk-covered pussy without foreplay. A fierce shudder rocked through her, a shocked exhale blowing in my hair as I pressed a kiss to her thrumming pulse.
She liked it when I was less than civilized and didn’t give her a chance to use that big, beautiful brain to overthink every nuance and expectation.
She wasn’t ready to admit she liked it, but soon, she would be.
Soon, I’d have her hot and wet, pliant as warm wax in my hands. She would tell me in detail, in the language of her people she’d once loathed, how much she wanted me inside her, against her, owning her.
For now, I was happy to do that work myself.
“You love it when I worship your body,” I breathed against her ear as I cupped her sex and ground the heel of my hand gently into her clit. “When I use everything I am and everything I have to make you come spectacularly for me. Did you know,cuore mia, there is nothing more beautiful to me than the sight of you breaking apart with pleasure?”
Her only response was a throaty little purr as I sucked on the hickey I’d left on her neck earlier.
“No woman before you matters to me. They areinsignificante. They are dust,” I growled as I released her hands and turned her to face the mirror once more.
Together, we studied my effect on her body—the heavy-lidded eyes, the parted lips, the flush that glistened beneath her pale gold skin. I reached around her body to cup her throat in my palm. It was a collar as much as any leather or diamonds could be, one of my own flesh and blood that was infinitely more intimate.
“Just as any man before me for you was nothing,” I continued, my eyes pinned on her in the mirror. Her face was swathed in the dim light from the Moreno glass fixture above the frame while mine was cast entirely in shadow. “I’ve told you, Elena, whatever you and I are made of, it is the same. No one exists for me but you. No one makes you come alive but me.”
“Yes,” she admitted, reaching back to cup my erection through my pants. She squeezed hard, her nails pinpricks of pain around my shaft. “No one for you but me.”
“Si, Elena, mai più,” I agreed gruffly as I used my free hand to wrench her skirt up over her pert arse.
Never again.
Never again would I want a woman the way I wanted her.
She possessed me like a scientist with some great unanswerable question. I knew no matter the length of our lives together, I would never know Elena Lombardi in all her iterations. She would continue to surprise me, impress me, and test me. For a man who had been bored by the human condition for years, it was the greatest gift I could have ever possessed, so of course, it made sense that it should possess me in return.
Elena’s hand deftly undid the zipper of my trousers, bypassing the belt entirely. I hissed as she carefully fished inside the open material to grab my cock.
I pushed her hand away, threading my steel length through the gap with minimal pain. As soon as it was free, Elena’s long fingers wrapped around the shaft and pulled.
“You need me inside you, don’t you,lottatrice?” I coaxed darkly, pushing her slightly over the basin so she was forced to grab its edges in both hands to brace herself.
I wrapped my own fist around my cock, pulled her panties down those slim thighs to expose the gleaming pink of her slit, and ran the hot head of my dick up and down that silken pass.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, long nails clacking on the sink as she tightened her grip.
“You speak in Italian when I play with you,” I ordered her in a soft, flexible tone so she wouldn’t rebel.
There was a brief hesitation.