But then, watching wasn’t enough.
If he was mine than I was his.
And didn’t that mean being at his side?
Fighting along with him.
When Umberto made the comment about Mirabella, I saw my opening. I knew what Dante didn’t, that he was protecting her not because of some transient passion, but a deep, abiding love and respect that spoke of family.
I knew this because I knew Sebastian, if put in the same position, would have risked his life to get any one of his sisters out of the same position Mirabella found herself in.
It was risky to involve myself.
Dante said he wanted me by his side, but thought and action were two very different things. Most mafia wives and women were kept in the dark, meant to stay willfully blind and happy that way. I wasn’t most women and Dante wasn’t most men, but we still lived and operated in that society.
So, I was nervous as I stepped out of the shadows, but no one stopped me. Not Nico, a familiar face from my childhood, or Frankie whose keen eyes told me he’d known I was outside the door all along. Not even Tore, who watched me with a steady, implacable expression as I crossed the floor, my bare feet sticking in cooling pools of blood as I went to Dante’s side.
And Dante?
He surprised me the most.
He wasn’t happy for me to be in that position. It was obvious by the twist in his wide mouth, like he’d swallowed a lemon. But he didn’t stop me, not even when I took a position of power and started to interrogate the stronzo myself.
Every day, even every hour, he proved to me that he was better than any man I ever could have dreamed up. He was real, raw and powerful as lithium.
When we finished planning with Umberto, Tore, and Frankie, Dante took me by the hand, his own crusty with dried blood, and led me from the room.
I followed blindly.
Not because I was traumatized by the violence.
But because beneath my skin, I was sizzling.
When we reached our bedroom, Dante had barely shut the door before I was on him. I pushed him hard into the wood, his breath expelling in a grunt as I tore off his black t-shirt.
“Elena,” he said, almost just to say my name, not because he wanted to stop me.
Which was good because I couldn’t stop.
I was possessed with need, my entire body shaking with it as I dropped into a crouch to drag his sweats down his thick thighs. I left them bunched at his feet, liking the idea that he had to stay exactly there or risk tripping.
“Elena,” he said again, this time on a moan as I rubbed my face at the furred junction of his leg and groin.
He smelled rich and masculine, like a man brined by a dip in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I loved the rough texture of his trimmed pubic hair against my cheek almost as much as I loved that heady smell. I breathed deeply, canting my face so I could look up at Dante as I inhaled, his cock swelling rapidly to full erection beside my forehead.
His eyes were twin blackholes, sucking up every thought in my head that didn’t center around him.
“You’re so sexy,” I murmured in a voice I’d never heard before, an almost guttural tone. With a little shock, I realized I was speaking Italian to him. “I want to show what you do to me.”
“Non hai idea di quanto sei sexy,” he told me as he raked those strong fingers through my hair, collecting it in one hand so he had a clear view of my lips nuzzling the base of his dick.
You have no idea how sexy you are.
I didn’t care.
That was the secret to Dante’s sexual power of me. Every single aspect of his person robbed me of thought, of the ability to self-criticize. My habitual voice of doubt and loathing was drowned in his scent, in the rough scrap of his deep voice against my senses and his skin on my skin. I was lost in him, less myself and more myself than I had ever been.
I loved that he thought I was sexy. I was usually too elegant, too studied, too cold to be called that.
But this wasn’t about me the way every sexual experience between us had been before.
I wanted this to be about him.
About paying homage to this big, brutal and beautiful beast of a man.
“Put your palms flat on the door,” I told him as I wrapped my fingers around his thick base, loving my pale flesh against his dusky length, the vivid red of my nails scraping just lightly up the shaft. “Don’t move them.”
“Giving orders?” he asked in low, tight voice that spoke of his barely leashed control.
He wasn’t the kind of man to submit.
I didn’t even want that from him, couldn’t really imagine it.
“Yes,” I said truthfully as I lapped once, kittenish, at the bottom of his plum-shaped head. “But only because I want you to see how mad I am for you. Only because I want to do things to you I’ve never even dreamt of before meeting you and I won’t have the courage to try if you take control.”
Without hesitation, Dante pressed his palms to the door behind him and braced his legs farther apart, straining the sweatpants around his ankles, the big muscles in his thighs popping dramatically as they tensed.
My mouth actually watered.
“Am I allowed to tell you how good you look on your knees for me?” he asked in that smoky mixed accent that turned each word into an exotic song. “Am I allowed to tell you how fucking hard it makes me to know you want me in that red mouth?”
“Yes,” I hissed before I couldn’t stand it any longer.
I placed his weeping head on the tip of my tongue, mouth wide, eyes locked up on his smoldering gaze, and slowly, I impaled my mouth on his thick cock. Wet raced to my eyes as I fought the urge to gag when he touched my throat then wedged inside the tight channel.
I’d done this before, my gag reflex just a passing instinct, but not in a long time.
I closed my eyes and hummed as I held him deep inside my mouth, feeling the veins in his shaft throb on my tongue.
“Cazzo, e’ incredibile,” Dante grunted as one of his fists slammed back against the door.
Fuck, you feel incredible.
I sucked a breath in through my nose then pulled off his length, inch by languid inch until he was resting on my tongue again. My own licentious thoughts surprised me as I fisted his base and rubbed his hot head over the flat of my tongue then sucked it hard into my mouth. I wanted to rub his length against my cheeks and lips, suck it down my throat and sit there filled with him, swallowing around him until he came like a geyser down my gullet. I wanted to take his length between my breasts and fuck him that way, smearing his precum over my nipples and licking it off his length whenever he thrust close to my mouth.
I told him this in low, liquid Italian as I jacked his steely cock, lapping at the head between sentences.
Dante grunted and groaned, his breath laboring through that barrel chest. His hands slapped and thumped against the wall as he fought to control himself from taking over and fuck if that didn’t make me wetter than I’d ever been before. All that leashed sexuality and dominance tethered by my simple request to let me have my way with him.
But this was Dante. He was never passive and the only way I’d given him to express himself was with words.
So, he gave them to me.
“Si,” he said. “I’ll fuck your tits, Lena. I bet no one has ever done that do you. But you know it’s not degrading with me. You know when I do these dirty, delicious things with you its only sex and pure fucking beauty.”