Page 83 of My Dark Fairy Tale
I only spent time with Renzo when Raffa was around because the two were constantly locked in the study together, working on whatever they’d been dealing with at the firm. But it meant a lot to me when hethanked me for my help because I thought he wasn’t the kind of man to give praise easily.
I did not miss my lonely apartment across the river. It had seemed like a symbol of my independence, but it took even more strength of character to live in a house of foreign strangers than it did to live on my own in a little bubble.
But it was frustrating, too, because for the last five days, Raffa had been run off his feet with work.
In fact, he’d left Florence entirely for two nights on a work trip to Switzerland and returned home in the middle of the night on the third. I tried to stay awake for him, but Martina and I had gone to Volterra to see the Etruscan ruins that day, and I was exhausted from the walking, fresh air, and early start.
Which meant I had been living with Raffa for five days and I was still, technically or not, a virgin.
And it was driving me crazy.
Fortunately, I had my period during that hectic stretch. It was over now, and I would be spending the entire day with Raffa.
So I decided to start it off on the right foot by joining him in the shower. The tiles were cold and hard beneath my knees, but the feeling of his heavy shaft stretching my lips more than made up for it. When he came, he fisted one hand in my hair and jerked himself off on my face before hoisting me to my feet and getting me off with his fingers.
“Tonight,” he promised before sucking a bruise into my throat. “I will finally teach you how to take every inch of my cock in this snug little pussy.”
With a smug grin, he left me panting against the wall of the shower to finish dressing for our day in the ocean.
I was just stepping out of the shower myself when my phone rang. My mind was still trying to reanimate after my orgasm, so I answered it without thinking, assuming it was one of my friends from language school.
“Guinevere.” My dad’s voice crackled through the microphone like a lightning bolt. “I called six times.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was sleeping and then in the shower.” I put the phone on speaker so I could wrap myself in a huge terry cloth robe I’d found in one of the guest bathrooms and then started to moisturize my face. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” he said darkly. “Everything isnotokay because it appears my daughter has been lying to me about where she is.”
My pot of moisturizer fell into the sink with a clatter, my hand hanging numbly in the air.
“Guinevere?” he snapped.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to salvage the situation, but my scrambling brain could find no lie to cover my first one.
“Are you in France?” he demanded point blank.
I chewed my lip. Raffa appeared in the reflection of the mirror, standing at the entrance to his palatial bathroom with a frown fixed to his brow.
Something about the sight of him, that expression of concern and the fact that he had obviously come in a silent show of solidarity, gave me the courage I needed to be honest.
“No,” I said, but my voice quavered. “I am not.”
I’d never known before that a silence could be deadly, but this felt like a religious shunning or a banishment. This felt like the end of a relationship I’d never thoughtcouldend.
“Where are you?” he asked quietly, his own words trembling with the brutal force of his anger.
“Florence,” I whispered back, my eyes pinned to Raffa as he strode forward with purpose and then gently,sogently, pulled me back against his front, wrapping his arms around my belly. “I’m in Florence, Italy.”
A beat of silence like the deepening quiet before you know a storm is about to hit.
“What the hell are you doing there?” he roared, the words echoing through the stone-walled bathroom. “Youpromisedme you would notgo. What the fuck were you thinking? Did the promise you made to me mean so little? Did you think I was asking you to stay away out of sport? This was fucking important to me, Guinevere.”
His anger wrapped a hand around my throat and squeezed until my eyes burned and my head throbbed. The only thing keeping me from crumbling under the weight of his censure was Raffa, stalwart and strong at my back.
“Of course it was important. You and Mom are the most important people in my life.”
Dad scoffed. “You clearly have no respect or love for us if you could lie to us forweeksabout your life. What the hell are you doing there? Why would you disobey us like this, Guinevere? I would expect it from Gemma, but you ...” He trailed off as he realized how he had spoken of my sister, as if she was still here, as if it was okay to speak ill of the dead.
“I lied because I needed to come here,” I tried to explain, voice plaintive, nails digging unconsciously into Raffa’s forearms at my belly. “It was hardly even a lie because I’ve been honest my whole life about loving this country. I felt ... I feltcalledto come here, Dad, and if you want to bring Gemma into this, she’s the one who encouraged me to come even though you told me not to.”
