Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 87704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
His breath stirs against my hair, warm and uneven. “I’ve taken lives without a second thought. Moved mountains for my family. Built an empire with blood and fire. But it’s been empty, I’ve been empty, until now.”
I swallow hard, my heart slamming against my ribs. “Luca…”
He lifts my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze. His eyes are scorching, filled with raw, terrifyingly real emotions that steal my breath.
“I don’t just want to protect you, Aemelia. I want to destroy every fear that’s ever haunted you; bury your past so deep that it never dares to touch you again.”
A shiver rolls through me—not of fear, but of the kind of devotion that doesn’t end in happily ever afters but in blood oaths and sacrifices.
His thumb strokes along my cheek, reverent and possessive. “Tell me you understand.”
I nod, my lips parting, but no words come out. I don’t need to say it.
He sees it in my eyes.
His confessions make me whimper. Beneath my thigh, his cock stirs thick and hard, and my body primes in response before my mind can catch up. Heat unfurls inside me, slow and insidious, a craving I have no business feeling. I trace the lines at the corners of his eyes, the rough stubble at his jaw flecked with silver along his jaw, the deep scar that cuts into his flesh—marks of a man who’s lived, survived, conquered, so much a part of him that I can’t imagine his handsome face before time and violence had marked him. He closes his eyes against the gentleness in my fingers as if tenderness is harder for him to accept than a knife in the gut.
When it becomes too much for him, he grasps my wrists, encircling them with one vicious hand, his grip like an iron shackle around my bones.
“I shouldn’t want you,” he says, his voice gravelly. “You understand that, don’t you?”
His fingers tighten, not enough to hurt, but enough to make me feel small, powerless. My pulse pounds. Not in fear. Never in fear with Luca.
“I look at you, and I see a woman who turns my body and mind into an inferno. Your beauty, your strength, your fire, it consumes me. But then I remember carrying you in my arms when you were nothing but a little girl with too big eyes and tiny hands. And now...” He exhales sharply. “Now, all I want is to do what my brothers did—to bury myself in you until I’ve marked every inch of you, inside and out. To claim you. To own you.”
His voice turns hoarse, and something like regret flickers behind his blue fire. “But I’m the Boss of this family. And—”
His voice seems to die at the end, turning into nothing but breath.
“And you should resist?” I finish for him.
His jaw clenches. “I should know better. A thirty-eight-year-old man, losing his fucking head over a twenty-year-old girl.”
“Woman,” I correct.
His nostrils flare. His grip on my wrists tightens. “At the wedding, Antonio said that my dick doesn’t have to feel guilty for wanting you.” He lets out a low, humorless chuckle. “Even then…”
“You wanted me?”
“Yes. Like the first hit of a drug. And you wanted me, too. Every time our eyes met…”
“I want you,” I whisper. “I want…”
“To forget?” His tone is knowing, like he can see through me, through every broken, needy part of me, to the aching heart at the center who never believed that love could find her.
“Yes…”
“To hand over your power, your will, your sense of self?” He studies me like he’s reading the pages of a book only he can understand. “I feel it, Aemelia. How much you hate to be weak, but how much you crave it.”
His thumb drags over my lower lip, slow and possessive. He hooks it inside my mouth, pressing against my bottom teeth, forcing my lips apart. Everything with Luca feels like a test, a challenge, a boundary crossed, a line eviscerated.
A battle between resistance and surrender.
I touch his thumb with the tip of my tongue, tasting the salt of his skin, and sense the tensing of his body. Still, he holds me tightly by the wrists, anchoring me to him while he fights a war with himself.
“The things I want,” he murmurs, staring transfixed at my mouth. “The things I need… I shouldn’t take them from you.”
I wrap my lips around his thumb, hollowing my cheeks, and his eyes blaze. I can’t voice what I want, but I can show him. His breath hitches, his pupils blowing wide, undone by something so small.
“Sweet Aemelia,” he rasps. “So precious. So eager to please. Such a good girl.”
A shiver runs through me at his praise, burning through my skin, settling deep in the hollow place inside me that has always ached to be filled. I hate how good it feels—how much I need his praise and compliments. I should have enough backbone to stand on my own, to know my worth without a man‘s approval. But I was stripped of so much by my father’s hatred, left with so little when he abandoned me.