‘Gian!’ She was shocked at the delicious roughness of him, at the sounds of him, at her own reaction to him, for she was coming as quickly as that.
Suddenly she was pulsing as he devoured her and then she was falling where she lay, but with him atop her.
‘We need condoms...’ she said frantically, for she had cursed herself after the last time.
‘There’s been no one since.’
Those words made her too weak for reason.
He was holding her naked as she tumbled through space, and for all the terrible decisions she had made in her lifetime, this, Ariana knew, was not one of them.
He kissed her mouth and her face, the shells of her ears, and the tender skin of her neck as he took her.
He devoured her and rained kisses and words on her that should not be said to someone you were not prepared to love the next day.
‘You make me crazy,’ he told her.
And that made her heart sing.
He told her how he had wanted her all night, how he had wanted her for weeks, in fact, all this as he moved within her and stared right into her eyes. The prolonged intensity astounded her, the focus, the climb, the ache of want and the desire to give. Her hips moved involuntarily with his and they were wild for each other, rolling and tumbling across the bed. He took in her flushed features and brushed the damp hair back from her face as he drove into her and gazed at her.
Help, Ariana thought, for she had never seen Gian so tender before.
There was passion and there was desire, but there was something else too.
He was also aware of it, this slip into a deeper caring, this moment, when he rolled her onto her back again, and one lesson in tenderness moved to the next.
He was up on his forearms, his body sliding over hers, each intimate stroke of him winding her tighter and tighter. His pace built and built and she wrapped her legs around his hips and simply clung on as he took her to wherever he chose.
He took her to bliss, pounding her senses, making her more his with each thrust.
For Gian it was a dangerous space. He knew that as he looked down at her, her black hair splayed on his pillow, her body tight around his. He would regret this later, Gian knew, but at that moment he didn’t care.
Especially as he swelled that delicious final time and filled her. Completely.
And this time it was Gian shouting out her name.
He dragged her into an orgasm so deep and intense that for a moment she existed there with him.
It was dizzying...too much...never enough, and she was crying as it was fading.
And he kissed her back to consciousness.
‘I loved my ice cream,’ she told him, and then stopped, because there was another thing that Ariana knew she loved too.
Don’t say it, she told herself as he turned off the lights with a single bedside switch and Ariana curled into him, loving the feel of being utterly spent yet curiously awake in her lover’s arms.
Ariana usually hated the dark and the night, but not this night. The thud-thud-thud of his heart and the sound of Gian collecting his breath brought Ariana a sense of contentment in the soft thrum of her body as she came down from the high he had taken her to.
‘Why are there no paintings or sketches of Violetta?’
‘There are a couple but they need to be restored.’
‘And why are there no photos of you?’ Ariana asked a question that could only be asked in the dark, in that black hole where gravity did not apply, where words floated and drifted in nonsensical patterns, before logic applied.
‘There are,’ he said. ‘There’s one in the gallery, taken during the royal visit to La Fiordelise—in the entrance hall.’
‘You mean the Employee of the Month photo?’ Ariana said, mocking his formal business photo. For some reason her words made them both laugh.
But then the laughter faded.
‘Why are there no photos with your parents?’
‘I was not a part of their plans.’
‘What were their plans?’
‘To party,’ Gian said. ‘And a late baby nearly put paid to that.’
‘But it didn’t?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘They carried right on.’
‘With a baby?’
‘Without,’ Gian said. ‘A lot of nannies, a lot of time in Luctano... It’s better this way, though. It taught me independence, so by the time they were gone, there was nothing to miss. They were never a necessary part of my life, or I of theirs.’
She could not imagine it.
Sure, her father had pulled back, but that had been in her twenties, and her mother still called her every day.
And even though she and Stefano were not as close now as they once had been, she would die if he pulled away so completely.
Even Dante, always remote and distant, was still a vital part of her world.
To have no one.
To miss no one.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t believe you don’t miss them.’
‘Truth?’ Gian said, still floating in that void where there were no sides and no barriers hemming you in. ‘I have missed them from the day I was born.’
‘Gian?’ She lifted her head when he fell silent.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said, but she wanted to ask him how they were supposed to be with each other in the cold light of day.
‘What?’ he asked her, when her head stayed up and her eyes remained focused on him.
Self-preservation struck—or was it sanity?—and Ariana, even with little experience in the bedroom, knew that pushing the issue with Gian would be something she would live to regret.
‘I’m cold,’ she said, though she had never felt safer or warmer.
Ariana knew when, and how, to lie.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GIAN WOKE TO DISORDER.
Not just the knot of limbs and the scent of sex, for that he was used to, but the exposure of thoughts and
