Page 46 of My Dark Ever After
“Raffa,” I breathed, staring at his hand as if it was aviperapeeking its triangular head through the vines. “Don’t say things like that to me.”
“No,” he said, voice strong and even, the cold flat of a blade at my throat. “I will tell you every day exactly what you bring to life in the previously barren fields of my heart, so you know how excruciating it was to be without you for two months. How excruciating it will be for me if you choose to run away scared from the truth of me and this life. I will survive, of course, because only in Dante’s works do the heroes have the luxury of wallowing in their tragedies, but I will not thrive. I did not a single day before you came, and I will not a single day after you leave.”
“Are you trying to guilt-trip me?” I demanded, clinging to the negative by the ends of my fingertips so I did not plummet headlong into the blinding brightness of unconditional love I had occupied before I knew better. “Because that’s not fair.”
“L’amore domina senza regole,” he said, stepping closer so that suddenly he was looming over me, so much taller and wider, a mountain of a man who would not be moved. “Love rules without rules, and so do I. There is no room forfairwhen I am trying to convince you to stay here with me forever and bela cacciatrice mia.”
“Not your little fawn?” I asked before I could stop myself, transfixed by the way he was staring at me as if nothing existed for him but me.
This time, his small smile was wry with self-deprecation. He reached up to pinch my chin gently, a quick caress I hadn’t realized was one of his idiosyncrasies with me, one I missed.
“No, Guinevere,” he said. “If you stay here with me, you will have to be more than acerbiattacaught alone and innocent in the middle of the road. You will have to be a huntress. So that the next time some man comes for you, you will not hesitate to put him in the ground where he belongs. So that, after, you will not lock yourself in the bathroom unless it is to drag me in there with you to fuck you hard and long in celebration of your own sexy-as-hell gumption.”
My mouth was dry, but heat pooled between my thighs at the thought. Raffa pinning me against the travertine tiles, pressing my face to the cool stone with one hand while a foot kicked apart my feet roughly to make room for his narrow hips and hard cock. His teeth at my neck almost painful, biting a claim into my flesh that would linger for days.
“I can see what it does to you.” His whisper curled like smoke around me, insidious, inside my lungs before I could think to stop breathing. “The thought of being powerful, of taking charge. You came to Italy to find yourself and your independence. I know you were not looking for the darkness you found, but I think, perhaps, it found you for a reason, and I am starting to believe you could be glorious, my Vera, as Regina Inferna at my side.”
His mouth was so close to mine, and I wasn’t sure when that had happened. The scent of him, like the forest floor shrouded in fresh dew, consumed me, and his mouth, framed in inky black stubble, the color of the inside of a seashell, was all I could see.
There was nothing in me but the urge to kiss him. I rolled to my tiptoes in the rain boots so that I hovered closer, swaying into that beckoning mouth. His smile was a slow, long curl, like a ribbon under scissor blades.
“Next time you kiss me,” he murmured, “you will be sure of what you want. So sure, you will be the one to fuckme, to push me against the nearest surface and take your pleasure from me however you want. You will use me to get off and cry my name to the sky because you know there is no God for us but each other and no heaven but the kingdom down under we could reign over together.”
He dipped just slightly to tongue at the center of my bottom lip. My tongue chased after him, but he pulled away from me between one blink and the next, cold air suddenly rushing in against my chest. When I blinked again, he was gone through the open door, whistling with his hands in his pockets as he started to walk down the hill into the vines.
Chapter Eleven
Raffa
La vendemmiawas a sacred time for winemakers in Italy, and an even more sacred one for the Romano family. Though my father had been a hard man, the weeks of the harvest had brought with them a different side of him. He spent every night at home with the family, flirting with his wife, joking with Uncle Tonio, Leo, and me, and throwing crumbs of affection to his daughters. It was the best version of him, one that lasted a few fleeting weeks. So it was no surprise that we all lovedla vendemmiamore than Christmas at Villa Romano.
It was a time of celebration and peace.
I stayed those few weeks at the villa, along with my most trusted friends andsoldati, bonding over the rigor of picking grapes and carting plastic crates stuffed with purple bunches into the backs of trucks to transport up the hills to the main production facility a few acres away from the family home.
Though in all those years, I had never brought a woman with me to the grape harvest. I had never thought to.
It was time spent with family, something intimate and holy someone had to earn the right to be initiated into.
Of course, Guinevere had earned that right.
The links in the chains binding the Camorra together were forged in blood, and she had let enough of hers to be considered a made woman for life.
Despite the fact that she did not want to be here, both here in Italy and here with my family, in the Camorra, or in my vicinity, I could clearly see that a part of her belonged on this Latin soil. It was evident when I watched her at work with our community in the endless sea of green vines, dark head bent intently on her task as her mobile mouth moved around sound and smiles as she chatted happily in shockingly good Italian to the men and women around her.
Even Uncle Tonio, quiet and reserved, smiled at her through the gaps in vine leaves as she raced Carmine to collect the most bunches on a single trunk.
She had soil smeared on her forehead from pushing her heavy hair out of her face with her work gloves, and sweat glistened on her small nose, but she looked like some kind of model from aVoguespread on the idyllic beauty of Tuscany. Stacci had lent her a drab brown apron to cover the bottom of her dress, but even that suited her, emphasizing the richness of her wavy hair and laughing dark eyes.
If I had not already been in over my head in love with her, seeing her work and laugh among the vines with my people would have done it.
“You are drooling,” Carlotta informed me, jostling me from my study of Guinevere with a shoulder bumping into mine. “Close your mouth, Raffuccio.”
“Do not call me that,” I said automatically, because I had been doing so since I was eight years old and none of my sisters had ever stopped.
“I see why you catch flies when you look at her,” Stacci murmured from my other side, looking at Guinevere through two rows of sloping vines as she petted Aio, whose tail was thwapping hard into her side. “There is something about her that is ...incandescente.”
“Like a shooting star,” I murmured before I could curb the impulse. “Streaking across my life for only a brief time.”
