Page 24 of My Dark Fairy Tale
I swallowed thickly. “Predators usually hunt their prey.”
“Si, but I do not intend to kill you,cerbiatta.” His finger traced the strap down to the sweetheart neckline and tracked daringly over the edge of my breast exposed above the fabric. I watched up close as his eyes went from amber to bronze, dark with hunger. “I only intend toeatyou.”
I tried to swallow and almost choked at the dryness of my throat. “Are you hitting on me?” I asked, just to be sure, because this entire trip was dreamlike in a way I couldn’t shake, for good or ill.
A tiny smile cut into one edge of his mouth. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Allora si,” he said, curling his hand around my throat, using his thumb to tip my chin up. “Ci sto provando.”
Then yes, he said, I am.
Before I could truly process that, he was moving closer for a kiss. I pursed my lips slightly, eager to test the texture of his mouth against my own. But to my slight shame and disappointment, those lips only tipped into a grin and then pressed first to one cheek and then the other.
How could the simple brush of his mouth against my skin liquefy my spine?
When he stepped away with low-lidded eyes and a smug smile, I was as breathless as if he’d kissed the air right out of my lungs.
Chapter Six
Raffa
Shopping was not an aphrodisiac.
Nor was visiting the police station and the American consulate, where I pulled strings to get Guinevere seen to immediately while I waited outside, working from my phone.
Yet by the end of our errands, my blood felt like it had been boiling on low heat for hours.
Impulse control had always been one of my greatest assets. I was not besieged by lust, avarice, gluttony, or envy like so many other capos andsoldatiwhose hunger was never sated. Being a criminal was not something I would have chosen for myself, but now that I was firmly entrenched on the wrong side of the law, I found I relished the mental challenge of it. How to bend the rules into angles that worked for me without breaking them completely. How to rule the underworld of the north without drawing attention from the wrong people ascapo dei capi. It was about checks and balances, problems reduced to easy mathematical equations I could solve with simple logic.
I had been top of my class at Oxford in math and economics and gone on to work on Lombard Street, in the heart of London’s financial district, for years before I was called by duty and honor to come home.
Emotion and hedonism did not factor into my life.
Blasphemy for an Italian, but it was one of the reasons I’d always been drawn to Britain and to finance.
My father had made excuses all my life for his behavior.
I am a man. I have needs.
She was so beautiful, I had to have her.
Yes, the palazzo was too expensive, but we need to show others we are rich and powerful.
He dared to speak to me like that, so I was forced to cut out his tongue.
Pathetic, I had always thought, to be so ruled by his baser instincts.
Yet I found myself oddly incapable of refraining from touching Guinevere when she emerged from the changing room wearing my favorite color just because I’d asked her to. There was an ethereal quality about her beauty, something in the large, luminous eyes and the small, full red mouth, the sharp chin and all that thick dark hair swinging in waves to her waist. She was delicate, almost dreamy, but also elfin, and everyone knew never to underestimate the dangerous appeal of the fey. In that dress the color of freshly oxidized blood, Guinevere would have looked as perfect in a Tuscan field of poppies, twirling like she was doing under Maria Lucia’s arm, as she would have spinning to slip a blade neatly between the ribs of some hapless victim.
The duality of the fantasy—of her—wrote itself into my bones. Soft and sharp, naive and witty, untried but strong.
For the first time in a very long time, I gave in to my reckless impulses and undid the bow at her shoulder just to watch that dress dip dangerously low over one pale breast. I thought of biting that white skin until it was the same color as the fabric, until that sweet mound was ringed in teeth marks.
I could have too. Her desire was obvious in the stain of her cheeks and the hitch of her breath. She wanted me, and she wasn’t afraid of it. Her chest pushed slightly into my hand, and when I bent to kiss each of her suede-soft cheeks, I caught the pucker of her mouth ready to meet my own, and I was charmed by it.
What I could teach her, I thought, and was almost scared of my own desire to do so. To take her in hand and show her how to please me exactly as I wished. To introduce her to pleasures her sweet, shielded brain had never even thought to dream of.
