Page 119 of Phantom Mine

“You can’t know that until you get tested.”

“I can.”

“Not—”

“I haven’t fucked anyone since I kissed you the night ofCarnivale,” he announces. “I haven’tkissedanyone either for that matter.”

It’s my turn to be silent, the words having suddenly disappeared from my throat.

“I just told you I’d like to die with the taste of you on my lips,” Matteo says. “I didn’t know when I’d have it again, so I wasn’t going to let anyone erase it.” He nuzzles my neck and finds my ear with a throaty murmur, “I waited for you.”

“I’m supposed to believe you’ve been celibate this whole time?” I ask, shaking my head. “I’m at the club with you almost every night, I see the endless line of girls that throw themselves at you.”

“And do I seem at all interested in them?”

“No,” I admit.

Aurora has had to hide the bar knives to stop me from using them. A week ago, she walked past me and plucked one right out of my fingers just as I was about to fling it across the room at an airheaded blonde who was doing everything short of stripping naked to try and get Matteo’s attention.

“You think I waited for you every Saturday night, and when you didn’t show up, that I took another girl home and fucked her?” The visual alone pisses me off so much, I look away. Matteo hooks a hand around my throat and forces my gaze backto his. “No,cara. I didn’t want anyone else except you.” He grins down at me with his signature playboy smile, one which he’s apparently been keeping exclusively for me these past two years. “Let me prove it to you again.”

This time, he flips me on my stomach, ties my hands to his headboard and fucks me from behind until I’m on the verge of calling “Cherry!”. It’s not sweet like before, it’s possessive and rough, with him slapping my ass and pulling my hair, and me screaming his name until we both come.

When I slump against the mattress, his cum is dry on my breasts and fresh on my ass. Matteo goes into the bathroom and comes back out with a warm towel. He cleans me diligently, telling me how beautiful I am the entire time, even though I’m so exhausted I’m already half asleep.

And yet, on the inside I’m on fire. The exhilaration in my blood, the shortness of my breath, the thrashing of my pulse in my veins, the sheer fuckinghighof being with him races through me. I realize I’m not sure how I’m supposed to live without it even as I realize that very soon I’m going to have to.

“We should end this now,” I whisper, too much of a coward to open my eyes and see his reaction. “Before it gets too complicated.”

Before it becomes unsurvivable.

Matteo picks me up and straightens me out on the bed so my head is lying on the pillow. He slides under the sheets next to me, molds his body to mine, brushes my hair behind my shoulder, and buries his face in the crook of my neck. When he’s settled, he simply answers, “No.”

Turns out this isn’t a fight I want to win, so I let him wrap his arm around my middle and drag me intimately into his body. His other hand curls loosely around my throat.

I miss the intimacy of being held. Of being comforted. Of someone else carrying the burden and the weight of it all for a bit, so the second his hands come around me, I fall asleep.

When I wake up a couple of hours later, he’s completely wrapped around me, clinging to me in a way that makes me question if he’s grown extra limbs overnight. He smothers me with his body, possessive even in sleep. I have to disentangle myself from the jumble of his limbs.

A discontented groan leaves him as I stand. He rolls onto his stomach, his arm extending to search for me, but he doesn’t wake. The early morning dawn light breaks over the horizon as I tread across his bedroom on tiptoes, quietly grabbing my clothes from the chair in the corner where Matteo left them to dry.

Not spending the night has always been a self-protective measure for my heart, but it’s getting harder and harder to leave. This time, I can’t resist a look back at him before I do.

He’s splayed on his stomach, the sheets bunched low on his waist, the tie he used on my wrists last night still hanging loosely from the headboard. One arm is stretched to the side of him, fingers extended towards where I got up and out of bed. The other is tucked beneath his pillow. His broad back is defined and muscled, mouth-wateringly attractive even down to the scarring his brother inflicted on him. It rises and falls evenly with every breath he takes.

Matteo mutters something, but it’s too soft for me to pick up from the doorway.

I walk back over to him, instantly mesmerized by the way his long, dark lashes fan over his cheek. By the marks the pillows have left on his face, those tiny imperfections doing nothing to diminish just how handsome he is.

I’m about to leave when his lips move again, whispering something still too low for me to make out completely. I get closer, bending so my face is level with his, and I wait.

Maybe I imagined it.

Then he breathes in, a deep, rumbling inhale. And when he exhales an equally heavy breath, I hear it again. Softly murmured as if on a prayer, his lips come together and whisper, “Valentina.”

I straighten abruptly like I've been shoved backwards, my heart squeezing violently in my chest.

“Valentina,” he repeats. The hint of a smile ghosts across his lips.

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