Page 75 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

The moment I was alone in the dark hall, my tongue peeked out of my mouth to tap at the salt slick on my lips. The flavor of saline and musk exploded on my taste buds, more delicious for the intimacy of having some of Dante in my mouth than it was for the true taste.

I wandered back to bed on wobbly legs like a drunk, slamming into tables, tripping on the stairs back up to my room. I was high off the fumes of our encounter, off the lingering oceanic taste of him on the back of my tongue.

My skin was tight and hot. Even the gray silk camisole and short set too much for my inflamed flesh. For the first time ever, I stripped down naked and slid into bed, almost shivering with the acute yearning that burned through me.

I wanted him.

I squeezed my eyes shut as if the sight of him wasn’t branded on the inside of my lids, spray-painted on the walls of my skull like crude graffiti.

I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything, even my own sexual release, and wasn’t that a revelation in itself.

Tomorrow, I was going in for a surgery that would hopefully change my life forever, bring the kind of lustful fervor working under my skin to a gorgeous boiling point.

I had been incandescently happy about the surgery since Monica told me it was possible, but now, in the wake of the most intense and positive sexual experience of my life, I was almost breathlessly excited.

What would Dante be able to do with those exacting hands onme?

If anyone could take my broken and newly healed body in his hands and make it sing, it would be the mafioso I shouldn’t, couldn’t have. The only man I’d ever wanted with this level of physical zeal and the only man I truly could not let myself want.

Thursday morning dawned grim and gray with the staccato ping of rain chiming on the windows outside. I enjoyed the pathetic fallacy of the weather as I got ready for surgery. In the wake of last night’s outlandishly out-of-character spectatorship, I found myself as grouchy as Jacopo and bloated with a lonely melancholy.

I hadn’t told anyone in my family I was having surgery done except for Cosima, and even then, I hadn’t given her the date.

It wasn’t that I was embarrassed per se, but admitting I had reproductive issues, let alone anorgasmia, was vulnerable, and I didn’t want to have to explain it to anyone more than I had to. I didn’t even tell Mama because I hadn’t told her I was temporarily living with Dante.

So, that morning I fasted and dressed to catch a cab to Monica’s private clinic. A flock of anxious and excited birds flapped in my belly at the thought that I could befixedin twenty-four hours.

I was almost out the door when Dante called out for me from the kitchen.

Everything in me wanted to avoid him and the embarrassment of being called out for my voyeurism the night before, but I knew we had to interact eventually, seeing as how I was his lawyerandhis enforced roommate.

So, I sucked in a deep breath, told myself to stop acting like a shame-faced schoolgirl, and went into the living room.

“A late start for you today,” he noted from the island where he sat on a stool drinking espresso and readingIl Corriere, a popular Italian newspaper.

It amazed me that he could sit there looking so cool and unaffected when I’d seen him at his most vulnerable last night, naked and splashed like a Pollock painting with his own cum. But then, wasn’t that part of his appeal? Dante felt no shame, he did not hide, and he did not suffer fools. If I wanted to be embarrassed, I could, but that wouldn’t affect his perception of what he undoubtedly felt was a natural activity.

That I could admire him somehow, respect him even more than I had before the incident, was as outrageous as it was somehow right.

From the beginning, Dante had caught sight of my red hair and turned to me like a bull, set on destroying whatever barricades lay between us in his quest to get to me. It still chilled me to wonder what he might want to do when andifhe finally succeeded, but that chill was only a cool breeze compared to the firestorm of lust that swept through me lately whenever we were in the same space.

I hesitated, smoothing my hand nervously down my cashmere turtleneck. “I have that appointment I told you about.”

His brow knotted, and I hated how handsome he was, how much I’d missed looking at his broad, beautiful face while I’d been avoiding him the last week. He was wearing a black turtleneck too, his thickly woven and snug over all those rippling muscles, heightening the fathomless black of his eyes and hair so that he looked nothing short of sinfully sinister sitting there.

I was thrown immediately back to watching him naked and aroused in his office. Those muscles bared to my eyes as they tensed and jumped in time with the sensations he pulled from his cock.

A shiver rippled through me.

Dante saw it and seemed to think about commenting on it before his frown descended again. Instead, he shocked me by offering, “Let me drive you.”

“No,” I almost snapped, moving back toward the entry room. That was the last thing I needed, this incredibly virile man knowing I couldn’t even come like a normal woman. “No, I’ll grab a cab. There’s no need to go out of your way.”

“It’s surgery, no? Shouldn’t someone pick you up when you’re through?”

“I asked a friend to bring me back,” I explained.

“He knows you’re staying here?”