Page 41 of A Winter in New York

“In a different life, that would be embarrassing,” I mutter afterward.

“In this one, it was crazy hot,” he says, flipping me flat beneath him and kissing me slow and hard. “And we’re only just getting started.”

I kind of lose it when his T-shirt comes off, there’s just so much smooth skin and bunched muscle, and the shock of his body against mine makes me need to skip to the good bit and get naked. I reach between us for his buttons and pop them one by one, and he stares down into my eyes and bites his lip.

“I might be a little rusty at this,” he says.

“Trust me, you’re not rusty,” I say. “Get your jeans off.”

He lifts away from me enough to shed his clothes, and then he unzips my jeans and sits back to pull them off too. He leaves my black lace panties on, and I cover my face with both hands when he moves them aside with gentle fingers and lowers his head.

I know it’s greedy to have two orgasms before he’s even had one, but he splays one hand on the inside of my thigh and takes his sweet time, and he says my name like a quiet prayer and tells me there’s no rush, and then there’s a sudden almighty rush in me. He knows it and holds me there, his other hand flat on my stomach, and in all of my days I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything so bone-wrackingly, violently sexy again.

He slides up my body, his knee between mine, and I wrap my leg around his thigh.

“I told myself to take it slow tonight,” he says.

“You can do that next time,” I say, rocking my hips. “Condom?”

He nods with a smile and reaches into his nightstand, settling the matter.

I watch his face as he pulls me back to him, see him trying not to lose control too soon. “Let go, Gio,” I breathe, my hand on his jaw. “It’s okay, you can let go.”

And he does. He lets go, sinks into me and we wrap around each other, holding, gasping, slow and then not slow. His breath quickens and he murmurs what sound like urgent Italian curse words, and I feel as if I’m tangled in my torrid lover’s bed on a long, hot night in Rome. It’s sultry and intimate, and then the judder of his body is so carnal that I clutch him against me, hard. We’re tenderwith each other afterward. The drift of his mouth over my closed eyes, the smooth of my hand over his hair. We stay like that for some time, recovering, and I find myself inexplicably close to tears from the sheer animal beauty of it all.

“Not rusty,” I say.

“Slower next time,” he says.

“As long as there’s a next time.”

He raises his head enough to look at the bedside clock. “Give me an hour.”

I laugh into his shoulder. “Three orgasms. I think you earned some sleep.”

“I set that bar too high,” he says.

“And all that Italian stuff,” I say with a sigh. “So hot.”

I feel rather than hear his laugh.

“What was it you said to me?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.”

“It was magic to my ears. Shall we do this every Monday?”

“You mean like a sex date? Are you propositioning me?”

I nod. “We can do all of the things we normally do every morning so no one else knows, and then on Monday nights—boom.” I make fireworks in the air with my hands. “You whisper unspeakably filthy things to me in Italian and I have three orgasms.”

“I don’t know if I can keep my hands off you all week,” he says. “You’ve woken something in me I thought was long dead and now it’s all I can think about.”

I pause, because something about the cadence of his words wasn’t quite natural. “Are you role-playingMoonstruck?”

“Yes,” he says, turning on his side to face me, smoothing my hair back from my face.

“It was very convincing.” I roll on to my back. “This doesn’t even feel like my life.”

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