Page 86 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

The last few mornings, I’d even woken up with wet between my thighs from dreaming of the ways a man like Dante might touch me there.

I squeezed my thighs together beneath the table on the patio that morning as Dante and I sat drinking coffee, both of us reading our respective newspapers before I headed into work. It was an oddly domestic scene, but I didn’t allow myself to linger too long on that.

“You seem…agitated this morning, Elena,” Dante noted in that smooth, accented drawl he used when he was teasing me.

I glared at him, irritated with us both for the interminable dance we were locked together in. “I slept badly.”

“Bad dreams?” he asked with a quirk of a black brow.

I pursed my lips and arched one of mine. “About a bad man.”

“Oh.” He folded his paper in his lap and leaned forward with a wolfish grin. “Do share with the class.”

I snorted. “Not likely.”

“Va bene. Then I will tell you about mine,” he offered, leaning back to cross those thick arms over his chest.

I pulled my stare from the bulging muscle only to land on that square jaw still ink-stained with stubble from the day before. Unbidden, I imagined what it might feel like under my tongue.

“That’s unnecessary.” My starched delivery was ruined by my breathiness.

Those eyes, twin galaxies, glittered. “I think it’s very necessary.”

He reached into the fruit bowl set between us and selected a red pomegranate. I watched avidly as he gripped it between his two mighty hands and easily cracked it in half with his thumbs. He smoothed a finger down the inside of the fruit almost sensuously, then brought a kernel of the bright fruit to his mouth. It summoned the memory of him trailing those fingers through his own cum and painting the liquid on my lips.

He hummed as he swallowed it.

I reached for my water glass and drank heavily.

“I dreamed that I was with a beautiful woman,” he began, still holding the fruit and feeding himself intermittently. There was red juice on his lips I wanted badly to lick off. “She was naked but nervous. I gentled her, stroking down all that creamy skin with just the tips of my fingers, the edge of my rough knuckles until I made her tremble.”

I blinked, so absorbed in the rolling cadence of his voice that I completely forgot myself.

“She didn’t want to get on her knees for me when I asked…” He pulled a few seeds of pomegranate onto his fingers and then inclined forward slowly to raise them in offering to me as he said, “So, I got on my knees forher. And when I put my mouth on her pussy, do you know what she tasted like, Elena?”

I didn’t answer because I was too busy telling myself not to take those thick fingers into my mouth with the proffered fruit.

He read my hesitation, and his eyes went from liquid ink to intractable obsidian. A moment later, he pressed the fruit to my closed mouth, painting my lips with the tart juice. When I opened my mouth, to protest surely, he slipped the seeds onto my tongue.

“Like pomegranates and red wine,” he finished, returning to a comfortable lounge in his own chair where he proceeded to suck the tips of his fingers clean.

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table.

“Will you hit me if I say yes?”

His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and nodded somberly. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I like it rough.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I said, giving in to my laughter but sobering slightly when I caught the look he was giving me. “What? Do I still have pomegranate juice on my mouth?”

“I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.

I swallowed the mass of emotion that rose in my throat. “Don’t say I should do it more often.”

“No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather possessive of the sound.”

I blinked at him as more of me unraveled, rolling across the space between us as if I wanted him to take the unspooled length of me and reassemble it in his hands.