Different from the elevator. That was collision. This is arrival. His mouth on mine, unhurried, his hand still on myface, his thumb moving across my cheekbone in slow arcs. He tastes like the house red. His lips are warm and dry and when he opens his mouth against mine, when his tongue touches my lower lip, my hands come up to his chest on their own. My fingers spread against his shirt. I feel his heartbeat through the fabric. Fast. Faster than mine.
The Don's heart is racing.
Something in that fact breaks through whatever restraint I had left.
I pull his shirt free from his trousers. My hands go under the fabric, flat against his stomach, the hard plane of muscle beneath warm skin. He inhales sharply through his nose, mouth still on mine. My fingers trace upward. His ribs. The ink I can feel in texture where the tattoo lines are slightly raised, needle scars, stories written in skin.
He pulls back. Takes his shirt off. Over his head, not unbuttoned. Impatient. It drops somewhere behind him.
The tattoos in the dim light. The compass rose. The Latin along his ribs. The sleeve on his right arm, dense and dark, the Caravaggio fragment I noticed at the massage. I want to read every line. I want to press my mouth against the ink and taste the stories underneath.
Later.
He reaches for the hem of my dress. His fingers gather the fabric. He lifts it, slow, up my thighs, my hips, my stomach. I raise my arms. He pulls it over my head.
I'm standing in his foyer in my underwear. Black. Simple. No lace.
He looks at me. Takes his time. His gaze moves from my face to my throat to my collarbone, down my chest, my stomach, my hips, my legs. It's not assessment. It's not the male gaze I've felt from men at the restaurant, the one that calculates and consumes. He looks at me the way he looked at the Caravaggio. With reverence that has nothing to do with ownership.
His eyes reach my thighs. The scars. The network of thin white lines on my inner left thigh, the topography of fourteen years that I cannot explain and he promised not to ask about. His gaze pauses there. I see the question form and dissolve. He keeps his word.
His mouth goes to my shoulder. Then my collarbone. The hollow at the base of my throat where my pulse beats against his lips. He tracks it downward. His hands find the clasp ofmy bra behind my back. A simple hook. He opens it with one hand. The fabric loosens. He pulls it away. Drops it.
The air is cool against my chest. His mouth is warm.
He kneels.
Don Niccolo Sorrentino, head of the Sorrentino family, one of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples, is on his knees in front of me in his dark penthouse with his mouth on my stomach, his hands on my hips, his thumbs hooked under the waistband of my underwear. He pulls them down. Slowly. Over my hips, down my thighs, past the scars, to the floor. I step out of them.
I'm naked. He's on his knees. The bay behind him through the windows, the city light on his shoulders, his silver temples, the ink on his back when he leans forward and puts his mouth on me.
My hands go to his hair. My fingers twist into the dark strands between the silver. His tongue is slow, precise, deliberate. The way he eats. The way he drinks wine. He gives this his complete and undivided attention, his hands gripping my hips to hold me steady because my legs are already starting to shake.
"Niccolo."
He responds by pulling me closer. His mouth opens wider. His tongue presses flat, then circles, then focuses on the specific point that makes my vision blur, the point he found in the elevator with his fingers and is now finding again with his mouth, with devastating accuracy.
I grip his hair. Pull. Not gently. He groans against me. The vibration goes through my body like a bass note through a floor.
"Fermati,"I say, and I barely recognize my own voice. (Stop.)
He pulls back. Looks up. His mouth is wet. His eyes are black in the dim light.
"Not like this," I say. "With you. I want you with me."
He stands. His belt. His trousers. He undresses with the efficiency of a man who has decided that clothes are obstacles and obstacles are to be removed. He is hard. He has been hard since the elevator ride up, probably. Since the trattoria, his knee against mine. Since before that.
We move to the bedroom. Not walking. Something faster, less coordinated. His hand in mine, pulling me through the dark penthouse, navigating by memory, by the geography of a home he knows blindfolded. We pass the kitchen. The living room where I rubbed oil into his shoulders. The hallwaywith the photograph of his mother in the drawer he thinks I don't know about. I know. I know everything about the spaces I enter. It's what I do.
The bedroom. Wide bed, white sheets, windows facing east toward the bay. The city light fills the room with blue shadow.
He lays me down. Not gently. Not roughly. With purpose. His body over mine. The weight of him, distributed on his forearms, his chest against my breasts, his hips between my thighs. I feel every inch of contact. His skin against mine, no barriers, no fabric, no performance. Just heat and weight and the sound of his breathing, fast, shallow, matching mine.
His mouth finds mine. We kiss while his hips move against me, not inside me, not yet. The friction of his dick sliding against me, slick, agonizing, a deliberate torture that makes me arch up into him.
"Ti voglio,"I say against his mouth. (I want you.)
"Dimmi come."(Tell me how.)