Page 58 of Enemies in Ruin

No more.

It’s time for a new memory. A new beginning.

The wind breaks against us, bitter and fierce. It buffets my hair against the back of my skull, blowing it forward into my face, where Luca holds my jaw and rains fierce kisses against my mouth. Impatient with its interference, he grabs it in a fist and yanks it back, baring my neck to his open-mouthed assault.

The only things between us at this moment are fabric and skin, breath and shadows. There are no more secrets reminding us of things we’d rather forget. No more lies reminding us to keep our distance.

Luca pulls his lips from my throat, holding my gaze while his nimble fingers drop to the buttons of my shirt. He unfastens them swiftly without breaking eye contact and spreads the two halves of my shirt apart, then brings his hands in to palm my lace-covered breasts in a rough squeeze. “I don’t care what’s gone on before or what’s happening now…you’re mine, and I’m yours, Carina. You always have been, even when we were on opposite sides of the country. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

I nod and cover his hand with my own, the last of my anger slipping away and softening into a blend of regret and acceptance. I think I finally do understand. He let me go—abandoned me—to California years ago because he was mired in guilt and an inability to move forward. He was given an impossible choice.

Fight for me and risk losing me, anyway, when I learned of his part in Francis’s death.

Let me go and lose me in a different, kinder way.

And the hell of it is…I’m not at all sure he wouldn’t have lost me for good if he had told me back then about the Pits. I was a different person then—younger, and even more headstrong than I am now. I don’t think I would have tried to understand his part in things, and if I couldn’t have done that…well, forgiveness wouldn’t have been possible.

I lean my forehead against his and seek his mouth, tasting salt when my lips find his. “We’ll figure all that out tomorrow. Make love to me, Luca.”

I look past him to where Baccio is snoozing quietly on the rug inside. It’s just us, a new day. A new start.

The demand galvanizes him. He pushes the shirt from my shoulders, and it slips down my arms to land on the concrete pad of the balcony. My bra follows, my nipples pebbling to hard points under his hungry gaze and the cold wind. I lower my arms to my sides and let him look his fill. Every time we’ve come together before now, it’s been hurried and violent in its passion.

Tonight we’ll go slow.

We made love on this balcony a lifetime ago when we were just kids. It feels full circle to baptize it anew with the rawness of our feeling for each other.

“You’re so damn beautiful.”

My chest tightens, emotion rising to sit thick at my sternum. My eyes steady on Luca, I lift my hands to release the button on my pants and push them and my panties down over my hips, toeing my shoes off when I reach them and kicking my legs free of everything.

“Your turn.” I stand back and watch as he strips swiftly and without comment, divesting himself of the sweatpants and T-shirt he had been wearing and tossing them aside.

Then all haste abandons him. He grips his cock almost lazily, running his palm from root to tip in a carnal gesture that makes my mouth go dry.

He has such a pretty cock. Long, rising almost to his navel, and thick, with a slight curve that feels incredible snugged up inside my pussy. A thick vein travels its length, and without thinking, I reach out to run my finger along it.

Luca grunts and drops to his knees before me. He fastens his mouth to my breast, circles the nipple with his tongue, and suckles hard, sending a shot of pleasure straight from breast to pussy.

His hand works my other breast, squeezing and tormenting my nipple until my knees are weak, his opposite arm sliding behind and beneath them to prop me up against the low wall that borders the balcony.

“Oh, God—” I moan loudly, then bite my palm. For some reason, I don’t want to make noise—the men just inside, maybe.

Luca looks up and pulls my hand away with a smirk, then grabs my other hand and places both of them on the wall on either side of me. “You’d better fucking scream,” he says.

His head dips lower until his lips cover my clit. His tongue circles and tugs at the tiny bundle of nerves, then moves lower to lick and thrust in a mimicry of sex. Widening my stance, I move my hands from the wall, reaching to grab his head and pulling him in tighter against me. He responds by spreading my folds wider with his fingers to give him greater access and eating at me hungrily, eagerly.

I whimper and thrust forward frantically against his tongue and lips. He chuckles, the vibration rippling through me. “You want it, baby?”

“I’m so close—” I am, but I don’t have exactly what I need to send me over the edge. I’m reaching with each rock of my hips. I want that orgasm desperately, but it’s just out of reach. It’s like everything else I’ve chased since I arrived in New York—every answer, every secret, every shred of resolution.

On a theoretical level, I know what the problem is. I’m too aware of the humanity all around me—his men just beyond the glass doors of the patio. The cars crawling on the street beneath us. The windows of other high rises all around us, in all likelihood concealing watching eyes.

It’s more than that, though.

My hips keep moving helplessly against his face as I chase completion; my hands keep gripping his hair like I hold onto the darkness and fire that lives within us both.

When we leave here, if nothing else, we’ll have each other. After the barrenness of the past five years, that’s…everything.

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