Page 1 of The Moon & His Tides
1
SEBASTIAN
She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
I knew a lot of beautiful women. Not only because I was Italian and my country was a great producer of three things––carbs, cars, and gorgeous people––but because my mother and three sisters were, biased or not, the most beautiful women I’d ever met.
Until I saw her.
I shouldn’t have been able to discern the curve of her delicate features in the murky light that illuminated the car from the passing streetlights, but she sat behind my seat, wearing a shade of white that picked up the light like a beacon and made her shine like an angel.
She looked like one.
My hands clenched reflexively on the steering wheel as I thought about peeling her slim form out of the fancy silk dress she wore. I knew she’d be slight and pale all over, pure like freshly fallen snow.
I wanted to mark all that fine, classy skin with my workingman’s hands, debase those delicate ears with foreign-accented filth as I described to her all the ways I was going to make her come for me.
She was beautiful, but she looked like a woman who hadn’t had a good orgasm in a long time. Of course, some women showed the promise of beauty, finely shaped and gorgeous like an ornate vase but filled, alas, with nothing.
I didn’t believe this beauty was that.
No.
Not when her wide pale eyes, fixed on a mark outside the moving vehicle, slid just a hair toward me whenever she thought I was preoccupied with the road. When her breath puffed softly from her moistened, parted lips, and her small hands––hands I wanted tofill up––curled and uncurled restlessly in her lap.
And that was only the first time I drove her.
The second was midday two days later, and the light was bright but grey under London’s habitual low ceiling of clouds. My palms sweat inside the supple leather driving gloves the luxury car service provided all their drivers with, but I affected a casual pose of legs braced and arms crossed loosely while I waited for her outside Harrods.
She was wearing white again, this time a neat little suit under an undone coat that would have been demure to the point of dowdiness but for the fact that she paired the low-cut blazer with a sheer white camisole as thin and clingy as condensation against the slight swell of her breasts.
My mouth went dry, but I managed to take the heavy shopping bags from her and open the door to the Rolls Royce smoothly.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Meyers,” I’d said because it was the policy at Luxury Regent Car Service to do so.
I had a dossier provided by the company with all of her details.
Savannah Meyers, wife of Adam Meyers, the very famous British actor. Preference for classical music, heated interiors even on warm days, bottled Evian, and unsalted Marcona almonds.
So she was married.
It didn’t matter. She was so out of my league it felt blasphemous just standing too close to her. Even then, I wasn’t the sort of man who thought marriage was sacrosanct, at least not to most.
My father had cheated on my mother every day of my life. If not with other women, certainly with booze, cards, and shady backroom deals with Made Men.
But Savannah was married to Adam Meyers, a man I’d admired from afar since I was fourteen and fluent enough in English to watch every movie I could get my hands on. He was my idol, and hiswife, his gorgeous wife, was in a car with me. There was something disturbingly sexy about that, about knowing his hands had been on her. I imagined I could see the marks they’d made on her skin like a highlighter, emphasizing all her feminine curves to lewd heights.
I got a whiff of her scent when I opened the door for her. Lilac or something sweetly floral, something clean and classy that probably cost hundreds of pounds because it came in an upmarket bottle.
My dick hardened.
I watched her as I pulled out into the street and began the journey to her home in Chelsea. Her eyes were once again fixed out the window, but her lips, painted a deep raspberry that I wanted to trace with my tongue, were tipped up at the corners in an enigmatic smile. One hand played at the low edge of her flimsy camisole, thumbing the lace border between her fingers.
A growl worked low in my throat as I thought about taking that lace in my teeth and tearing it in two. My animal brainwondered what kind of sound she would make as I exposed her, and it settled on a soft gasp, the noise of a damsel in distress.
Only I wouldn’t save her.
I’d ruin her.
