Page 33 of My Dark Fairy Tale
I’d never been so turned on in my life.
The way he touched me, as if he had a right to but was still a little wary, coaxing and respectful simultaneously. I realized that I didn’t have to try to be atavistic with him or charming; our flirtation was as sharp edged and pretty as a medieval blade, but it was still flirtation, and with Raffa it came easy.
Too easy, even.
The music swelled to a crescendo, and Raffa pulled me into a quick rhythm, the steady rattle of a tambourine snakelike, a dangerous temptation woven through the staccato song. Raffa moved me faster, twirling me under his arm, tugging me this way and that so seamlessly and forcefully it felt as if I was flowing like a river between rocks. When the music came to a crashing halt, Raffa tugged me hard toward him, and Iallowed impulse to push my hands into his shoulders as he gripped my hips and lifted me into the air. A giddy, breathless laugh escaped me as he spun me in the air, and I let my arms rise like sails, wishing foolishly that I could float there forever.
Applause exploded into the quivering silence left by the song, some diners calling out “Bravi!” and “Ben fatto!”
But everything was muted in the rushing of blood in my ears as Raffa slowly, inch by excruciating inch, lowered my body to the floor, pressing it intimately against his own. I was damp and panting, but so was he, and it intensified the smell of him. That rich, oak-and-smoke scent I dragged into my heaving lungs like a drug. My mind seemed to swim, high off him the way I’d never been off anything before.
I wasn’t prepared for a man like him.
Raffa stared down into my face, skin glistening, and I realized when his brows lifted in surprise that I had spoken aloud.
“È appropriato,” he murmured. “Because I have no context for a girl like you, and therefore, it seems, I have no defenses against you.”
“You don’t need to defend against me. I am just acerbiatta, remember?” I taunted, but the self-mockery hit too close to home.
Just a fawn, common, foolish, untried.
“Ah, but even a fawn is a wild animal and dangerous when provoked,” he reminded me, using two fingers to push a lock of sweaty hair away from my forehead. “So I had best not provoke you.”
Too late,I thought.
I am provoked.
You have awakened the beast inside me that was always hungry for more, eating at my bones when I wouldn’t feed it anything of value.
And now it had found something—someone—to sink its teeth into, and I was worried what kind of woman I could become if I gave in to that ever-gnawing need to devour.
Not just Raffa, bones and all, but life itself.
It was as I was contemplating this that I noticed the spot of red on his white shirt collar. At first, I thought it was lipstick, and femininerage scoured through me, scorched earth in its wake. I didn’t pause to consider the vehemence of my jealousy because the next second it occurred to me it wasblood.
“You have blood on your shirt,” I said.
And Raffa?
He smiled that movie-star villain’s grin that curled the sides of his mouth and bared his sharp teeth in a way that felt like a threat.
“I had red meat for dinner,” he explained casually, but there was something buried in his tone that dared me to dig deep and excavate the secrets hidden there like bones. “I like it still bleeding.”
“Practically still beating,” I joked, but his face was solemn when he pulled me toward my abandoned table with my hand tucked into the crook of his arm.
“No,” he said. “Very, very dead.”
Chapter Eight
Raffa
“Haven’t seen you let go like that in a while, boss,” Ludo mentioned the next morning as I was sitting on the terrace, eating the breakfast Servio had laid out for me.
It was early, the sun still a pale, unsaturated yellow leaking through the streets of Florence, highlighting the locals who populated San Niccolò and guarded it zealously from the tourists across the Arno. I watched a teenage couple press into each other in an empty doorway, kissing like fools and dressed in disarray as if they were both making their way home after a night of shared debauchery.
I had not even kissed her, yet I felt the way I did the morning after a night of particularly feral fucking. Energized and exhausted all at once. I had not slept more than a handful of hours after we returned home from the restaurant. Murder and dancing with a shockingly erotic slip of a girl were a potent cocktail that left me buzzing inside my skin, as if it were too tight to contain my insides.
I lay awake for hours, imagining all the ways I wanted to have Guinevere Stone and all the reasons I shouldn’t.
