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“Is this me keeping my distance, pet?” I ask through clenched teeth as I push inside her. “Is this how I stay away?”
I take up a merciless rhythm, and she pushes back against me just as desperately as I thrust forward. It’s violence between us. It’s vicious. It’s exquisite and terrible, chaotic and painful and perfect. Valentina’s spine arches needily as I fuck her, her neck bending back towards me. I fist her hair with one hand, wrenching her head even further back, then press my other palm to the front of her silken throat.
“I don’t care what the fucking will says,” I hiss against her ear. “And I don’t need a wedding to make you mine. You are already mine in all ways. Always. And just for the fucking record-” My movements grow harder. I punctuate every word with a brutal drive of my hips. “I will” – thrust – “always” – thrust – “come” – thrust, thrust, thrust – “back for you.”
No matter who she fucking marries. No matter who her daddy is. No matter what she’s done.
Valentina’s moan splits the air. Her pussy flutters, then contracts on me like a vise. I want to fuck her through it, but I can’t. My balls go tight and then I’m exploding, and it’s all I can do to stay standing.
I’m still inside her when she shakily inhales and says, “Maybe I am yours, Darragh. But I can’t be your fucking goomah. Good Sicilian girls like me can never be mistresses to men like you.”
“A good Sicilian girl,” I grind out, “wouldn’t have my still-twitching cock inside her right now.” I give a small thrust, feeling her silken walls quiver in response. “What are you saying, anyway? Are you saying that you want me to marry you?”
I go still, my cock yet inside her. I don’t breathe as I await her response.
If she told me she wanted me to marry her now…
I’d be powerless. Just like I was powerless when she asked me to come with her back to Toronto.
I’d probably burn my grandda’s townhouse down myself if only she’d willingly marry me among the ashes.
“That isn’t what I’m saying,” she replies flatly. “At all.”
Once, when I was sixteen, I took a very hard blow from my grandda to the head. That’s what her response feels like. Like a punch that comes very close to killing me.
I don’t know why it should stun me. I’ve always known any marriage to her would have to be forced. Otherwise, I would have gotten down on one knee with that ring, like some normal fucking sap, instead of arranging it all behind her back.
She might reach for my hand – or my cock – when she’s lonely or horny or feeling afraid of the dark. She might even beg me to stay with her.
But she won’t beg me to marry her.
And when she was free in Montréal, when she had her chance to run, when she could have gone anywhere, done anything…
She booked a flight to London. Not to Dublin.
When she learned of her da’s death, she said she’d come back to Toronto with or without me.
She didn’t choose me.
As I slide my cock out of her and fix my clothes, I grimly confront the fact that she probably never will.
Chapter 21
Darragh
The air is cool, the sky almost neon it’s so bright and blue. The trees in Toronto are starting to take on the orange hues of autumn. All in all, it’s a picture-perfect sort of day. The kind you’d immortalize in a painting and hang on a wall in a boring, generic hotel.
I already hate it.
Because Valentina is in the car beside me and I am driving her to the last place I’d ever want her to be.
I won’t leave her there overnight. I don’t care what she says or how angry she gets.
We drive from Forest Hill in Midtown, then drive north and east, passing lush parks and golf courses. The green spaces remind me of the first day I had her with me in Dublin, backed up against the trunk of that old tree on St. Stephen’s Green.
I glance at Valentina, who is looking out the window in silence. She had a quick shower and got changed before we left, because, despite her haste to go home, she snarkily told me that she refused to stand before her grieving mamma with my come dripping out of her.
So she’s all fresh and clean in her seat, with every foul physical trace of me washed off of her. Her dark hair is damp and tied in a loose braid. Little stray bits around her temples curl, and I want to tug on them. Tight jeans hug her shapely legs, and the cropped, knitted sweater she’s wearing is a warm rose pink. When she gives a small sigh, her shoulders shift, which makes the back of the sweater gape for a moment. Before it settles into place on the back of her neck once more, I glimpse the tag. Made in Ireland.