Sometimes she thought the aching might actually kill her, here in this house before she had the chance to leave it, and that notion made her want to sob out loud.
Other times, she hoped it would.
Benedetto shifted his weight so that he held himself up on one crooked elbow. He let his hand drift from her abdomen to her secret, greedy flesh.
“Put your hands above your head,” he told her, and she knew it was an order. A command she should have ignored while she still could, but her arms were already moving of their own accord. Lifting over her head so that her back arched and her breasts pressed wantonly against the bodice of the old dress she wore.
She knew he liked that. She knew a lot of the things he liked, by now. He liked her hair free and unconfined, tangled about wherever he lay her. He liked to get his fingers in it so he could guide her head where he wanted it. Particularly when he kissed her, tongue and teeth and a sheer mastery that made her shiver.
“Tell me what you know of men, Angelina,” he said now, stroking the bright need between her legs, though he had already had her sweating, shaking, crying out his name.
This time, when her hips began to move, he found her opening. And he began to work one of those blunt, surprisingly tough fingers into her depths of her body.
She felt the stretching. The ache in her intensified.
Her nipples were delirious points, and every time she breathed, the way her breasts jarred against the fabric of her bra made her want to jerk away. Or move closer.
“I have never spent much time with men,” she managed to pant out. “I had a piano tutor, a boy from the village, but I learned all he had to teach me long ago.”
“Did you play for him as you play for me?” Benedetto asked, his voice something like a croon—but much, much darker. “Did you open your legs like this? Did you let him slip between your thighs and taste your heat?”
And even as he asked those questions, he added a second finger to the first. He began to stroke his way deep inside her, and the sensation made it impossible to think. Impossible to do anything but lift her hips to meet him, then try to get away, or both at once.
His hand found a rhythm, but her hips took convincing.
“N-No…” She wasn’t sure what, precisely, she was saying no to. His fingers plunged, withdrew. Then again. And again. A driving, relentless taking. “No one has ever touched me.”
“Not even you?” he asked. “Late at night, tucked up beneath your covers in this tomb of a house? Do you not reach down, slip your fingers into all this molten greed, and make yourself shudder into life?”
Angelina was bright red already. But the flash of heat that he kindled within her swept over her until she was making a keening, high-pitched cry. Her hips finally found their rhythm, thrusting against him wildly as her head fell back.
And she thrashed there, not sure how anyone could survive these little deaths, much less the bigger one that waited for her.
Not sure anyone should.
“Look at me,” Benedetto ordered her.
She realized she didn’t know how much time had passed. How long she had shaken like that, open and exposed. It took her a long while to crack open her eyes. She struggled to sit up because he was sitting too, regarding her in his typically sinful and wicked way.
Angelina couldn’t tell if it was shame or desire that worked inside of her, then.
Especially when he held her gaze, lifted the fingers he’d had inside her, and slowly licked them clean.
She heard herself gasping for breath as if she was running. If she was running to escape him, the way she knew she should. She could crash through the windows into the gardens that her parents had let go to seed, and were now manicured and pruned. She could race into the summer night, leaving all this behind her.
She could save herself and let her family do as they would.
But she only gazed back at him, breathing too heavily, and did not move an inch to extricate from this man who held her tight in his grip—though he was not touching her at all.
“I want you desperate, always,” he told her, his voice that same, serious command. “I want you wet and needy, Angelina. When I look at you, I want to know that while you look like an angel, here, where you are naked and only ever mine, you are nothing but heat and hunger.”
“Do you mean…?”
“I mean you should touch yourself. Taste yourself, if you wish. I insist. As long as you are always ready for me.”
She understood what he meant by ready in a different way, now. Because it was one thing to read about sex. To read about that strange, inevitable joining. She understood the mechanics, but was not until now, so close to her wedding night, that she understood that it would be far more than merely mechanical.
Benedetto’s head tilted slightly to one side. “Do you understand me?”
“I do,” she said, and his smile was dark.
“Then I do not think, little one, that you need to worry overmuch about murder.”
That was the last time she’d seen him.
She pushed herself upright in her bed this morning, her head as fuzzy as if she’d helped herself to the liquor in the drawing room when she didn’t dare. Not when she had Benedetto to contend with and needed all her wits about her.
And it shocked her, as she looked around her room, that there was a lump in her throat as she accepted the reality that this room would no longer be hers by the time the sun set.
Her bedchamber had already undergone renovations, like so much of the house had in the past month. It already looked like
