She let out a sound that could have been a sob. A moan.
But he knew when she’d found her own heat, because she made a sound that was as full of relief as it was greed.
It made his sex pulse.
And he drove too fast down the coastal road he knew by heart. Then he sped up as he hit the treacherous drive that stretched out into the water that rose higher and higher by the moment as the tide came in and began to swallow it whole.
“Come,” he ordered her.
She rocked her hips, making mindless, glorious little sounds. He could hear the greediness of her flesh, and a quick glance beside him found her with her head thrown back and her hands buried between her legs. The summer afternoon light streamed into the sports car, bouncing off the water and making her so bright, she nearly burned.
So beautiful, it cut at him.
So perfectly innocent, it should have shamed him, but it didn’t. Not when he wanted her this much.
If he hadn’t been a monster already, this would have made him one, he was sure of it.
Benedetto heard her breath catch. Her head rocked back, and he was sure that he could feel her heat as if it was his hands on her, clutched deep in her molten core. That hot rush of sweet, wet fire as she took herself over the edge.
She shook and she sobbed, and he drove faster. There was light and water and his seventh bride, coming on command. And when her sobs had settled into a harsh panting, he reached over. He took one of her hands, and sucked her fingers into his mouth because that heat was all for him. It was his.
She was his, and no matter if that damned them both, he didn’t have it in him to stop this madness. He couldn’t.
“Open your eyes, Angelina,” he told her then, another soft order. “We are here.”
That was how he drove her into Castello Nero, the ancestral home of his cursed and terrible clan. Flushed and wanton, wet and greedy, the taste of her in his mouth and that wild, ravaged look on her face.
Welcome home, little one, Benedetto thought darkly.
And then he delivered them both into their doom.
CHAPTER SIX
ANGELINA BARELY HAD the presence of mind to shove her skirts back down, letting the yards and yards of soft white fabric flow back into place. To preserve whatever was left of her modesty.
Though she almost laughed at the thought of modesty after…that. After the past month, after this drive—what was left for him to take?
But, of course, she knew the answer to that.
And imagining what she had to lose here in this place made it difficult to breathe.
The castle keep rose on all sides, the stone gleaming in the summer afternoon light. The sunshine made it seem magical instead of malevolent, and she tried her best to cling to that impression.
But her body felt like his, not hers. Even her breath seemed to saw in and out of her in an alien rhythm.
His, she thought again. Not hers.
Benedetto swung out of the car but Angelina stayed where she was. The drive from the airfield had been a blur of heat, need, and the endless explosion that was still reverberating through her bones, her flesh. Still, she could picture the car eating up the narrow road that flirted with the edge of the incoming tide on what was little more than a raised sandbar. Some of the waves had already been tipping over the edge of the bar to sneak across the road as Benedetto had floored his engine. It was only a matter of time before water covered the causeway completely.
And all the molten heat in the world, all of which was surely pooled between her legs even now, couldn’t keep her from recognizing the salient point here in a very different way than she had when she was merely thinking about Castello Nero instead of experiencing it herself.
Which was that once the tide rose, she would be stuck here on the island that was his castle.
Stranded here, in fact.
“How long is it between tides?” she had asked at the family dinner table one night while Benedetto was there, oozing superiority and brooding masculinity from where he lounged there at the foot of the table, his hot gaze on her.
Because she might have already betrayed herself where this man was concerned, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t read up on him.
“Six hours,” Dorothea had said stoutly.
“Or a lifetime,” Benedetto had replied, sounding darkly entertained.
She could feel her heart race again, the way it had when she’d been back in the relative safety of her father’s house. But it was much different here, surrounded by the stone walls and ramparts. Now that this was where she was expected to stay. High tide or low.
Come what may.
The door beside her opened, and he was there. Her forbiddingly beautiful husband, who was looking down at her with his mouth slightly curved in one corner and that knowing look in his too-dark eyes.
And his hand was no less rough or insinuating when he helped her from the sports car. No matter where he touched her, it seemed, she shuddered.
“Welcome home, wife,” he said.
The ancient castle loomed behind him, a gleaming stone facade that seemed to throb with portent and foreboding. It had been built to be a fortress. But to Angelina’s mind, that only meant it could make a good prison.
The summer sky was deceptively bright up above. The castle’s many towers and turrets would surely have punctured any clouds that happened by. Her heart still beat at her, a rushing, rhythm—
But in the next moment, Angelina understood that what she was hearing was the sea. The lap of tide against the rocks and the stone walls.
She didn’t know if that odd giddiness she felt then was terror or relief.
When she looked back at her husband, that same devil
