Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 148612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 743(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 743(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Her breath was so ragged, a musical symphony matching his own. That scorching-hot sheath clamped down like a vise. Surrounded his cock with a million sucking mouths. With a million flaming tongues lashing him as the mouths sucked greedily. He roared again as she sobbed his name.
Colors danced behind his eyes as blue and orange flames raced through his bloodstream and burned through his legs and belly. He’d never had such a hard, jerking release, over and over, the hot seed coating the walls of her sheath, triggering multiple hard orgasms in her, one rolling right into another so that she collapsed forward.
Valentino barely was cognizant enough to catch her before she could fall on her sore breasts. He had to roll both of them to one side so they could lie together on top of the bed, his cock still in her, feeling the aftershocks as they squeezed and gripped at him rhythmically.
It took a long time to get his breath back. “Are you okay, baby? I went a little crazy.”
“I think we had angry sex,” she ventured, her voice breathy.
“I think we did.” He wrapped his arm around her waist. “Did I hurt you?” He’d been rough. He’d always been rough, but they hadn’t had sex in a very long time—well, if you didn’t count the first two times—and she was still as tight as hell. He should have been more careful.
“Val, I was just as rough. Couldn’t you tell I loved it?”
“I think I was too busy being selfish.”
She laughed. That laugh of hers got to him every time. She was so damn perfect for him. She closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her head on his chest.
“Val, you were talking to me about sitting in on meetings with your father when you were young. Learning weaknesses and growing up wanting control and power. I need to know these things about you and what all that has to do with me and the shadows. It’s important for us as a couple.”
Confessing his greatest sins to her, his character flaws—would she look at them that way? The Saldi myth that wasn’t all just a myth, and part of it could be a nightmare—was torture.
“I didn’t want Miceli, or any one of those sitting in the meetings, to ever have the chance to wipe out my entire family in order to take over my businesses, my territories or anything else I had because they coveted it or perceived me as weak,” he said. “I’m not weak. I wasn’t raised that way. I can do what’s necessary to protect my men and their families, and I can protect my own. But my woman … my children …”
He stopped and rolled away from her to look back up at the ceiling. He couldn’t face her when he felt so vulnerable. He was a grown man spilling his guts to her. Letting her see his darkest fears. Now he wished he hadn’t insisted on the night-light being on, even so dim. He’d just had his cock in her, hard as a fucking rock, and now he was talking about what scared him the most.
“I wasn’t going to take a chance that a car bomb was going to wipe out my wife. Or my kids. I knew firsthand what that felt like.”
He would never forget the moment when Giuseppi and Miceli had come to him to tell him his parents were dead. The sorrow on Giuseppi’s face, the compassion for him. The sly cunning in his uncle Miceli that only a child would see that would forever make Val leery of him. There had been a kind of triumph, almost a glee in his eyes that Miceli hadn’t been able to hide. Val had suspected him of having the car bomb planted, but at his age, there was no way of proving it. When Dario had come to live with him, the two of them had worked to uncover evidence, but it had never been enough to take to Giuseppi, just enough to convince both of them that Miceli had devised a plot to murder his own brother and sister-in-law.
“I watched Giuseppi worry every day about my safety and Greta’s. And then there was Dario—what he went through. But there was that absolutely ridiculous fairy tale of a story I’d heard, first from my birth father and then from Giuseppi.”
Unerringly, he found her hand and threaded his fingers through hers. Her hand always seemed so small and delicate in comparison, but she was strong and she was lethal. He knew she could kill with those hands. If anyone could help him keep his family safe, it was Emme.
“I even talked to Dario about the stupid myth. We laughed about it. Then I went to that party and there was the most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on, sitting across the room in a corner, watching me. Women came on to me. I never had to go to them. I waited, but you didn’t come. Then I realized who you were. A Ferraro. The enemy. What the hell was a Ferraro doing at what was essentially a Saldi party? Worse, you clearly were underage. You were there surrounded by a pack of wolves. And believe me, honey, they were wolves. The thought of you with them scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t even know why.”