Page 53 of The Cost of Corruption

One last thrust and everything inside me shattered.

My pussy clenched tight around his shaft, pulsing and trembling as he filled every inch of me. I gasped for breath, crying out as pleasure rushed through my veins.

“Fuck, yes,” Matteo growled above me, his voice heavy as his body stiffened.

I was so certain he was about to join me, to be swept out into the same abyss of ecstasy and lose himself inside me.

But instead, at the last second, he jerked his hips back, sliding out of my body and leaving me empty as he spilled himself on the tablecloth beneath us.

When the worst of the shivers subsided, and my breathing settled, I risked looking him in the eye one more time.

“What happened,” I asked. “Why did you...”

“Pull out?” he asked, finishing the question for me.

I nodded.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have the words to describe what happened. Not even a bonafide saint could have hung around my cousins for more than five minutes and not come away with the vocabulary of a dockside streetwalker. The problem was the dull ache that had taken root in the center of my chest when he’d backed away.

I felt like I’d given my whole self to him, and inside me, there was a deep primitive need to feel him reciprocate in kind.

“You know why,” he said, helping me down off the table and zipping up his pants. “There can be consequences to unprotected sex, and I won’t risk it. Not with you.”

Suddenly, that dull ache turned into a piercing pain.

Did he really think so little of me?

“You think I’d trap you with a child?”

“Not at all.” He shook his head and ran his hands down the length of my dress, taking the time and care to smooth out the wrinkles. “I’m not the kind of man who can be trapped. But a baby would take all your choices away.”

My gaze drifted down to the floor as I slowly nodded. He was right.

Pregnancy would rip away what few choices I still had. I wouldn’t be able to take my final vows. I wouldn’t be able to return to my family.

The truth was, if that happened, I didn’t know what I’d do.

I’d let lust and desire get the best of me…again. I’d let my animal impulses guide my actions, and if it wasn’t for Matteo’s good sense, I could have found myself in a whole lot of trouble.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m grateful one of us was thinking clearly.”

His bark of laughter echoed off the walls.

“I wasn’t trying to be a gentleman by coming all over Andrea’s tablecloth.” He crooked a finger under my chin and forced my face up until I looked him in the eye. “I was being selfish.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want you to stay at the end of these two weeks because I knocked you up, Chastity,” he said. “I want you to stay because you can’t stand the thought of life without me.”

Chapter Fourteen

MATTEO

Gabriel was waiting outside my bedroom door when I got up the next morning.

I didn’t know how long he’d been there, and I wasn’t about to ask either. If that was how he wanted to spend his morning——leaning against the wall, arms and ankles crossed like he was waiting on the bus instead of for his younger brother to finally roll out of bed—that was his business.

My business, on the other hand, was no doubt piled up on my desk at La Sera since I’d spent last night buried between Chastity’s thighs instead of worrying about the club.

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