Luca told me to explore while he brought in our things. It took little convincing. The second the vehicle cleared the trees, unveiling a wide-open space, my spirits soared.
I wondered if I’d been claustrophobic, and I needed a change of scenery away from the mansion that had caused me more heartache than happiness. I circled the living room. The view was a lifelike panoramic painting of the Atlantic Ocean. I’d never seen anything like it. I opened the side door and stepped onto the patio.
How was it possible that I felt powerful and insignificant at the same time? I breathed in the saltwater air. It would be too cold for swimsuits in April. I checked the weather earlier, and the forecast said it was going to be in the fifties this week.
I felt Luca’s warmth behind me, but I waited for him to speak.
“You approve?” he rumbled.
A smile played on my lips. I turned to face him. “This is a strange first date.”
He chuckled and took a step closer, closer in a way that made me back up a step until the small of my back hit the railing. Closer in a way that had him caging me in with each arm on either side of me, making me tilt my chin up. Closer in a way that made my breath hitch and my heart pound faster.
His body was scant centimeters away. He didn’t press me against the railing, but his restraint was palpable.
“Ahh, but it’s not a first date. It’s our honeymoon.”
I worried he could hear the pounding in my chest. “I don’t think I’m ready for a honeymoon.”
“Relax,” he said softly, and the way he said it made me replay all our sexual escapades in Paris. The first time he took me from behind, the first time I took him in my mouth. The many times and places where he ate me out. Heat and wetness pooled between my legs.
A satisfied gleam entered his eyes, as though he sensed my reaction to that single word. “I put our things in opposite bedrooms.”
My brows furrowed. “What do you mean, opposite?”
He turned away from me and pointed to one corner and then the other. “Opposite sides of the house. There are four bedrooms on the property. Two on each side.” He turned back to face me with a rueful curve to his mouth. “I’m afraid I’ll forget my good intentions if I’m near you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. On our wedding day, I couldn’t wait for him to own my sensuality. When I saw him again after two years, I pegged him as a man who could be my one-night stand. I was willing to risk having sex with him. But finding out we were bound by marriage gave me pause. Our relationship was complicated before, made more complex by my amnesia.
His gaze was intent on my face. “Honestly, I’m not sure how long I can keep my hands off you.” He had caged me in again, and I glanced at his hand on my right, gripping the railing.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be standing this close.” I swallowed and tried to get saliva back on my tongue. “I’m thirsty.”
He stared at me for a beat before he stood back. I walked past him, straight into the kitchen. Since we were both new to this property, it was no use asking him where things were. I opened the refrigerator, and it was empty. I searched the pantry for a glass and pressed it against the water dispenser. Luca prowled into the kitchen, spread his arms, and gripped the counter, leaning into it.
Tension pinged between us.
“I’m attracted to you.” It annoyed me that my words were part squeak, part breathless.
His face had one of those patient expressions, but his eyes grew more alert at my admission. When he didn’t comment, I continued, “I think physically, I’ll always be attracted to you.”
“That’s a relief,” he said dryly. “We could work with that.”
There was another thing that bothered me when I had googled him recently. Before I got my memories back, it didn’t bother me, but now that I’d remembered, it had caused me a lot of misery during our marriage and I had to know. “I saw pictures of you and Jessica after I disappeared.”
“I never cheated on you, if that’s your question. I already told you we moved in the same circles. She’s an heiress who loves hanging out with morally gray men. She has daddy issues, and it’s her form of rebellion. Her father used to be an alderman on the city council and had been a pain in our asses because he blocked our licenses, so I enjoyed flaunting Jessica in his face. When he retired, so had my interest in Jessica. I kept her around because she was convenient.”
I stared at his throat. “Has she met Elias?”
His jaw fell open, and I recognized the self-righteousness that stiffened every line in his body. “No. I still considered myself married when you disappeared. When I said my vows, even if I scorned them, I meant them. I don’t care that mafia laws allow me a mistress.” He released his death grip on the counter and rounded it to get to me, reminding me of a predator. He stepped right up to me, but he didn’t cage me in like he did on the porch. He lowered his head. “I was desperate for you and you alone. My cock ached to be buried inside you, tesoro, and my hand was a poor substitute, but it got me through those endless miserable nights when I missed you.”
Oh my God, those filthy words still did it for me, but that he’d stayed celibate for two years because of his commitment to our marriage made my whole body come alive. Devotion and fidelity were an aphrodisiac to me apparently, and I wanted to jump his bones right there, but there was still so much to unpack between us and I managed, “Don’t…”
“Don’t…?” he said against my mouth. “Does it make you feel guilty? After having you, no other woman could replace you. I wondered…have you given yourself to another man?”
The accusation sounded so absurd, I snapped, “No.”
“Why not?” The way he asked that question was enough for me to deny his accusation because his face had morphed to murderous. I kept forgetting how Luca was such a mercurial man.
Honesty, Rachel’s voice said in my head. Even though it was going to make him a smug bastard, he deserved to know that I inadvertently stayed celibate because my body craved only his. “Because no other man seemed to do it for me.”
Yep. Smug. His brow arched at the same time a corner of his mouth curved.
“If you must know, that time you showed up at Danvers with Dario was the first time I was willing to consider having a one-night stand if it was you.”
I was expecting more smugness, but a pained expression crossed his face. The suddenness of how he grabbed me made me yelp. He plastered our bodies together, and I gasped at the hardness that was pressing against my belly.
His tortured voice said in my ear, “I want to savor this. You back in my arms again. I want to fuck you so badly, kiss you so badly, but if I start kissing you, I won’t be able to stop and I don’t want it to be reduced to a quick fuck on the kitchen counter.”
Luca let me go suddenly and strode away, calling over his shoulder, “Be ready in fifteen minutes. We’ll have to do groceries.”
That one-eighty had my head spinning and every single cell in my body aching with frustration.
Luca
I started the water, switching it to the coldest temperature. I yelled when it hit me with unforgiving needles. But my body was one rip-roaring fever. I nearly threw Natalya on the counter so I could bury my face in her pussy. The craving was so strong, I had to get away from her. No way were we having sex for the first time in the kitchen and have me last two seconds.
The water cooled my skin, but not the fire raging in my veins. I relented and twisted the dial to a reasonable temp. I fisted my cock and closed my eyes.
As the water swished over me, I imagined what I would have done. I wouldn’t have stopped at eating her out. I’d remove her pants, drag her panties down with them, and lift her legs over my shoulders. I would slip my hands under her ass and lift her hips sky high and devour her with my mouth. It wouldn’t be comfortable for her, but with the way I was feeling right now, I wanted to punish her for two years of suffering. I wanted her to scream my name over and over and beg me to stop.
My fist stroked my erection faster. I was about to explode. I would pull out my cock and shove into her, pumping her fast and hard. Was she on birth control? I didn’t care. All I wanted was to claim her again. Fill her with my cum and have it drip down her legs.
I groaned when I started coming. My hand slapped the tile and darkness edged my vision. After a few seconds, I switched off the water. I was still breathing hard, but partly relieved that I had taken the edge off.
For now.
Ten minutes later, I returned to the living room dressed for a casual day. I’d gotten used to wearing clothes other than suits ever since Elias was born. The boy had an uncanny ability to throw up when I had changed into one.
Natalya appeared five minutes later. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. Sometimes, it still jarred me that she was no longer blonde. For two years, that was the image I had of her.
“What?” She looked down at her khaki pants and dark sweater and white sneakers.
“Still getting used to you not being blonde.”
She self-consciously patted her hair. “Did you prefer me as a blonde?”
“I prefer whatever you’re comfortable with.”
Her mouth twitched. “Are you being diplomatic?”
“Not at all.” I cleared my throat, tilting my head to scratch my right brow to buy myself more time, but I felt I had to apologize for earlier. “I’m sorry for running out.”
“I wondered about that. It was like I suddenly caught a disease.”
“I had to get out of the kitchen before I made you my lunch.”
She was giving me a strange look. One with narrowed eyes and puckered brows, like she wasn’t sure she understood me.
“I wanted to bury my face between your legs,” I stated, inhaling sharply. Fuck, saying that wasn’t helping. “I had to beat one out in the shower.”
Her cheeks pinkened.
I gave a shake of my head. “Are you ready to go?” I was behaving like a schoolboy who was taking his crush on a first date. I was the fucking boss of the Chicago mob. But the stakes of my marriage were too high to fuck up by hiding my emotions. That was what caused problems in our marriage.
“Where are we going?” Her voice came out a whisper.
The air between us became awkward as fuck. Maybe it was better to just fuck and get it out of our system.
“I thought we could have lunch first and then go grocery shopping.”
The strange look on her face returned. “Have you ever gone grocery shopping?”
“Sure, I have,” I said. “When I was in Chicago, I didn’t have a Martha.”
She crossed her arms. “You had a wife who could have done that for you.”
I bit back a curse and gritted, “That’s why I suggested it.”
“What are we doing here, Luca?” she asked. “You know, we could just have it delivered.”
Something in what she said triggered a sadness inside me of something lost. “I took our marriage for granted.” Closing the distance between us, I continued, “I want us to experience this domestic bliss…”
She raised a brow, arms still folded over her chest. “Or torture.”
I chuckled. “That too.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “What I’m saying, baby, is I want you to show me how you lived away from me these past two years.”
“And as usual, you start with the basics.”
I shrugged. “Of course.”
So we started with lunch at a sushi place. That much had not changed. Before our marriage, we defaulted to Japanese food when we couldn’t think of anything else. My shortcomings as a husband were becoming more stark. I could only remember a handful of times we went out on a date after we returned from Paris. I wouldn’t even call them dates because they were usually after her checkups. When I realized I wanted more from Natalya, Elias made it impossible to go out on romantic dinners because we’d been sleep-deprived. Her more so than me. In my attempt to make her feel better with her decisions, I’d become the selfish husband in retrospect.
Now I was pushing the cart around in the grocery store while she inspected the cereal selections. When she saw my frown, she laughed, “Don’t tell Martha and Nessa I’ve grown addicted to Cap’n Crunch.”
I checked the sugar content on the box. “It isn’t good for you, baby.”
“Just while we’re here.” She pouted. “I want it for dinner. I’ll leave breakfast up to you.”
“You want cereal for dinner?”
“You woke me at four this morning. I don’t think I want to cook or eat anything heavy.”
We passed by the dairy section, and while she picked up milk, I grabbed eggs and yogurt. “I was thinking we could walk on the beach this evening.”
“I’m fading.” She gave me exaggerated droopy eyes that made me chuckle. I gave her a quick hug. “Okay, tesoro.” I was glad I hadn’t made solid plans tonight.
When we returned to the house and put the groceries away, we immediately set out for the beach. The wind was brisk. Natalya had to put on an extra jacket. We took off our shoes and walked parallel to the shore. It was five in the afternoon. Sunset wouldn’t be happening until seven, but from the way Natalya kept on yawning, I didn’t think she was going to last.
The surf of the Atlantic Ocean crashed near our feet. “So what was it like? Living on your own, not knowing what you liked?”
She watched a swooping seagull for a beat before answering. “By trial and error. Some things were instinctive. Naturally, I used Doc Gleason as my benchmark. I ate what he ate, drank what he drank, and struck out on my own to explore later. It felt like a reset of sorts.”
“I’m surprised you liked cereal. Your body has changed from feminine to athletic.”
She glanced up at me warily. “Brad. He was my physical therapist. I caught the gym bug from him. After my wrist healed, I lived in the gym for almost six months.”
At the mention of the coffee shop owner, my shoulders tensed. I moved closer to Natalya. I brushed her hand closest to mine. Slowly, but deliberately, I linked our fingers. She didn’t pull away.
“It didn’t last, but I went to the gym occasionally and I also started running,” she said. “I think it was a way of reclaiming my life. Something I could control.”
“We have a gym at the mansion. It’s in the basement.”
“I know. Danvers didn’t feel like home, but I made something for myself there. I don’t know how it fits in my life now.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
Natalya stopped walking. “Can we sit here?”
“Sure.”
We dropped our asses on the sand. I had never done this before. Why hadn’t I done this before? My life was the concrete jungles of Chicago and Vegas and other metropolitan areas. The only isolated place I loved spending time in was Tralestelle. Here, with the ocean and its vastness and depths of unknown secrets, I should be itching to get back to the city, but I wasn’t.
I dislodged the block of apprehension in my throat. “This is the first time…in…in my life I’ve sat on the beach with someone.” For fuck’s sake, I was stammering and I couldn’t meet Natalya’s eyes. It was as if I’d confessed to an embarrassing disease.
I could feel her regard burning down the side of my face.
“How come?” she asked.
This time, I glanced at her and shot her a brief smile. “Maybe for the same reasons you haven’t.”
“Mamma didn’t like the sun because she said it ruins the complexion,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper in the wind. “She also worried I would mess up my hair color.”
“Did you change your hair color because you were hiding?”
“That”—she thought for a few beats, digging her toes in the sand. Her pretty little toes—“and it was high maintenance.”
“Do you miss being high maintenance?”
She jerked back and cast me a horrified look. “No! I mean, nerds like me are pretty low maintenance. We like a lot of sugary snacks, as I found out. But I promise to do better for Elias.”
“You should. That’s where we will clash, tesoro. What we feed our child.”
She rolled her eyes. “You and your preoccupation with food. Waffles aren’t exactly the best to feed a child, especially when you drown them in maple syrup.”
I fought back a smile to wear a serious face as I said, “Then when we return, we should pay attention to what we feed Elias. Martha caves in easily when it comes to sweets.”
“The poor woman. Elias is too active for her.”
“But you’re there now.”
My last statement was met with silence and a pained smile. I was never going to let her go, but I didn’t want to come on too strong when her mind was in a fragile state of discovering who she was. But waiting for her to make up her mind whether she loved me the same or not was excruciating. For two years, the what-ifs tormented me the most. I should have loved her the way she loved me. Regretted the work I could have delegated to someone else and spent those times making Natalya happy instead. Had it only been two weeks since I found her again? Fate had given me a second chance, but fate had a sick sense of humor by giving her the worst memories of me to come back first.
“I need to ask you for something,” I said gruffly. Natalya visibly stiffened, even edged slightly away from me. “I’ve asked you to trust me before. I’m asking you again now. Not just for Elias, but because I’m in love with you. And I believe…” I paused. “You still love me.”
Natalya inhaled sharply, then looked away.
“I was an idiot,” I admitted. “I was so careless with your heart.”
“You trampled on it,” she said viciously, her eyes glassy with tears and condemnation. “Why did you do it, Luca? Why make me fall in love with you and then not want it?”
I’d contemplated that question myself. “It’s a combination of things. I saw what love had done to Junior. I didn’t want his weakness, but I needed to gain your loyalty by making you love me. I hid behind the men-of-honor code to put the Chicago family first.”
“Loving someone isn’t a weakness,” she said. “If that’s how you feel, then we were over before we started. You didn’t have to forsake your duty to family by forsaking me. If I’d felt more secure in your love, I think I would have understood you when you missed Elias’s birth.”
“I get that now,” I said fiercely. I got up from her side and sank to my knees in front of her. “I’ve loved you since Paris.”
She made a derisive sound. “You don’t have to lie—”
“I’m not. It started when I gave you the chocolates. I convinced myself it was part of the master plan to make you fall in love with me. I have this vicious cycle of when I start feeling something for you, I back the hell away. When you asked me to walk in the rain…”
“You were fighting it.”
I nodded grimly. “And justified it to the others by belittling it.”
“You were an asshole.”
I still was. “There’ll always be that asshole in me. You need to call me on my bullshit.”
She looked past my shoulder at the ocean. The silence was loud against the crashing of the waves. When her eyes returned to me, she said, “It also happened during the first checkup.”
My shoulders drooped, and I wanted to hug her, afraid she’d run away while I confessed one of my first monumental failures as a supportive husband to his pregnant wife. “Hearing the fetal heartbeat—with you in my arms, I choked with fear, because my mind skipped ahead that I would lose both of you.”
“That’s crazy.”
“And then when you left the mansion during that rainstorm, I lost it in front of my men. I had to do damage control.”
“That’s why you made an example of Tony.”
“To show my men that I was not ruled by my emotions for my wife.”
“After that, you set expectations.”
The litany of my sins continued. “I had to, Natalya. I wanted to show you how much I care for you, but I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea because that would also make me vulnerable to that weakness.”
“So what changed? How can I trust you not to be a coward again about love?”
Fuck it, I needed to touch her. She flinched when my hand tried to brush her face, so I settled by putting them on her knees. “What changed? The second I saw you and Elias, I started to change.”
Her mouth curved into a sneer. “You sent me to sleep in the nursery.”
“No, Natalya. That was what you wanted. I didn’t want to put the onus on you, so I behaved like an ass. And no, I’m not gaslighting you. I’d been after you to hire a nanny. You were stressed, baby. I didn’t know it was because you suspected me of sex trafficking.”
Remorse tinged her eyes. “Sometimes I wondered if we could have avoided all these tragedies if I were honest with you from the start. I couldn’t demand you tell me everything when I was hiding so many secrets of my own.”
“We can’t regret that now,” I told her with conviction. “What happened, happened. This was more my fault than yours, Natalya. I was the manipulative bastard. You couldn’t trust me because I didn’t give you enough reason to do so. But now I have you back. I just want to move forward.”
She dropped her gaze. “I have the Russians’ money. What do we do? Doriana isn’t responding anymore.”
I crawled back to her side and faced the ocean. The we in her statement gave me hope. I’d take any crumbs she could give me and run with it. “We’ll figure that out too.” I put an arm around her and drew her close. There were a few seconds of resistance and those few seconds felt like minutes in which I held my breath, waiting for her to reject me.
She slumped into me in a way that hinted of surrender. The hope had turned into full-blown elation but there was a cloud still hovering, an Orlov-sized cloud.
“I’m so tired,” she murmured.
I wasn’t sure if she meant she was exhausted from our trip today or about the whole Russian thing.
“I’ve got you.” I kissed the top of her head while she burrowed further into my chest. “I want you to relax. You’re not alone in this anymore, all right?”
She didn’t say the word but nodded in affirmation.
That was enough for me.
