Page 24

This was such an explosive fantasy. Seeing him like this. When he pulled away from her, he was breathing hard, his eyes wild.
She had done that to him.
It was different than his frustration over his exacting standards not being met.
This was him at the edge of control. This was him pushed to his limit, by her.
She had power.
And she felt electric with it.
She had never been kissed before. And yet she was confident that no kiss could ever match what his did.
Because he was the man who had changed her life with a glance. She had been so certain she had seen him, and evaluated him as she did everyone. That she had seen everything. But nothing could have really prepared her for him. It was why he was dangerous and wonderful all at the same time.
And now that she was leaving, now that this was it...
She could finally have him. Just for tonight.
This explosive, wonderful, terrible, dangerous, sharp thing.
She was confident that no one could ever fully understand what this was. It wouldn’t be like anything else that had ever existed before or since.
Luca Salvatore was a singular man.
She knew sex with him would be singular as well.
As if determined to prove her point he wrapped his arm around her waist and lifted her up off the ground as if she weighed nothing. He carried her through the sitting room, propelled her back into his bedroom.
“I want to see you naked,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much?”
There was something burning in his eyes that was completely unfamiliar to her. She had thought that she had known Luca and all of his moods. But here it was. The hidden depths. The thing that she had never seen. She had imagined that he might be during sex as he was with everything else. There was an intensity to him, yes. But it was always entirely within his control.
He seemed to be pushing at the bonds of it now.
There was...desperation in his eyes. She had never imagined that. It took her breath away.
“No,” she said. “Tell me how much.”
She needed it. After all these years of feeling like nothing more than a particularly useful paperweight to him, she needed to hear that it was different. Now, at the end of this. At the end of them, she needed to hear it.
“I know everything about you,” he said. “About the way that you move, about the way that you complete tasks. There is a very particular way that you hold your wrist when you are annoyed with me. A way that you move your head when something interests you. You smile a particular way when you are pleased, and a different way when you’re upset. I don’t normally notice those sorts of things about people, but you have been an object of my fascination from the moment I first hired you. You are a study in contradictions. I think most people don’t notice them, but I do.”
She wanted to hide. She had never imagined that Luca looked at her that way. She had never imagined that he looked at her like much of anything.
She’d never thought, for one moment, that he had seen her quite so clearly.
“But...”
“You don’t think I notice details like that. But I only know details that matter.”
There was nothing he could’ve said that could’ve possibly aroused her more than making it clear that she mattered.
But this was somehow more than sex.
He kissed her again, hard and insistent. “I do not know how your body looks without clothes on,” he said. “I’m studying your face now. Your eyes are filled with... I don’t have a word for it. But you like this.”
“I do,” she said, not feeling embarrassed, not at all, because this was just so honest. He was honest. That she had always appreciated about him, whatever else was going on.