Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

S HE FELT THE intensity of what they had just experienced wrapping all the way around her skin. She didn’t know what changes had been happening inside of him, but she could feel them. Like electricity crackling over his body. And when they got into the car to go back home, her breath exited her body as she caught his eyes across the seat. “A job well done,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You were a triumph. In spite of everything. I was an ogre.”

“Only a little bit.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that when you met me we were snowed in on a mountaintop, and it might have seemed like I was... Something that I’m not.”

“How do you think you seemed?”

He laughed. Hard. “Normal?”

“You didn’t know how to heat up a can of soup. You did not seem normal, Rocco.” She closed the distance between them and put her hand on his thigh. “I came with you anyway.”

He looked at her, his expression charged.

And yet again, she had the feeling that he didn’t know quite what to say, so he wasn’t going to say anything at all.

Instead, he claimed her mouth with his. Ruthless, hard. And it was a claiming. He pushed his fingers into her hair, knocking the pins out, and letting it fall loose.

She was breathless. Undone by it and him.

He kissed her until she couldn’t breathe. Bit her bottom lip. Left her mouth swollen and aching with need.

When they arrived at the penthouse, it was all they could do to get out of the car. All they could do to make it up to the penthouse.

She had seduced him. Had teased him and tormented him before. But this was different. He was claiming her. Utterly and completely. His touch was rough, and exciting.

He tore her dress away from her body, and revealed the surprise she had on underneath. “What is this?” he growled.

“I got this for you. Days ago. But since you weren’t touching me, you didn’t know.”

“I know now,” he said, lowering his head and sucking at the tender flesh of her breast, hard. Then he bit her, leaving a mark behind. She loved it. She encouraged him. Because he was claiming her body for himself, and that was what she wanted. She didn’t want to be adrift. She wanted him to hold on. She wanted everything.

He tore at the lace. She didn’t tell him how expensive it all was. It thrilled her that he was destroying it. That it inflamed him enough that he couldn’t be patient.

She responded in kind. She ripped at his white shirt, at his tie, she undressed him all backward, her hands growing desperate. Then she leaned in and bit the muscle on his chest. He gripped her chin, forcing her face up, claiming her in a hard kiss.

She loved it. It was everything. So was he.

This was no gentle coming together. No soft Merry Christmas. No snow falling outside on evergreens. It was a storm. The kind that left you isolated on a mountain. The only two people in the world. The kind that toppled trees and power lines, the kind that caused landslides.

That was what they were.

Even here in this land of glass and steel, they were elemental. He clung to her hips, kissing his way down her body, pushing her back against the wall as he parted her thighs and began to lick her deep. He gave no quarter. He took her to the heights again and again, made her cry out her need.

“Again,” he growled, pushing two fingers within her and thrusting.

She came again, holding on to his shoulders, leaving blood behind where her fingernails dug in deep.

He pulled her down, wrapping her legs around his torso as he stood them both up, pressing her down onto the sofa and entering her in one swift stroke. It was brutal. It was magic.

It was the damn season of cheer and happiness and joy, and she cried out a hosanna at the top of her lungs.

When it was over, she was spent and breathless. She kissed him on the chest, and looked at his profile, hard cut and glorious in the darkness of the penthouse.

“I used to be a nice girl,” she whispered.

“And now you’re not?”

She leaned in and kissed his chest. “No. I am obsessed with sex. And you.”

“You could pick a better obsession.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“Too bad. Obsession works in mysterious ways.”

“Good for me, I suppose.”

He rolled so that he was over the top of her, looking down at her, his dark eyes burning with intensity. And that was when she realized, it wasn’t simply another half of herself that had come to the fore. It wasn’t simply that she had found a part of herself that she had never known before.

Being with him had changed her. Fundamentally.

It made her more assertive. It made her more sexual. It made her want things that she had never wanted before. It made what had been so important only a couple of months ago feel like a distant memory.

Being with him had changed her. It changed what she thought about. It changed what she ate, and where she was willing to live.

It upended every plan that she had ever had about herself. It was incredible.

She reached up and touched his face. And right then she knew. With a certainty. With a spark.

It was love.

She had fallen in love with him.

By inches. In hours and minutes and days. In his eccentricities, in his revelations. In the things that she learned about herself when she was with him.

The way that he made her feel. The way that he made her want to. The way that he was.

She loved him, and it was a stunning, stirring realization.

And it was a terrifying one. Something she didn’t know what to do with right then. Something so deep that she knew she couldn’t simply say it.

Because the problem with love was that it could be very real, and still not be enough.

At one time her mother had loved her father, that much she was certain of.

But she had folded herself into a life that she apparently hadn’t wanted.

And slowly, very slowly, everything had degraded over time.

She had betrayed the man that she once loved, because she was still searching for something else. It scared her. That realization.

That you could think you wanted something, and be so very, very wrong.

And it reminded her again of that feeling of being adrift. That feeling of being evolved. Like a creature who used to be at home entirely in the water, and had learned to walk on land, but still craved the sea. An amphibian. Not really one or the other. She wondered if that was love. Finding yourself trapped in the middle of two worlds, never being able to fully inhabit either anymore. That was the scary thing. That the change was the sort that left her destined to be unsatisfied.

He wanted to live with her half the time. He wanted to allow her a chance to go back home. To raise their child in a small town.

Being away from him she would never feel whole.

Being entirely away from Holiday House, she would never be whole.

That was the bargain that she had made.

It was the impossibility of loving him. Or maybe of loving altogether. A series of compromises that left you only ever half alive.

“You are thinking,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

“You don’t need to stop.”

“I probably should.”

She kissed his neck, and scooted to the side just a bit. He lay down next to her. “Maybe we should get a Christmas tree,” he said.

“It is eleven thirty on Christmas Eve.”

“I’m a billionaire.”

No sooner had he said that than he was on his phone. And a record thirty minutes later, a Christmas tree was being placed in the center of the penthouse.

Pre-lit and glowing.

The delivery crew had left behind a box of ornaments.

“We should decorate it,” he said.

Oh, yes. She loved him. Looking at him as he said that, with absolute earnestness, she was certain.

You can find a way. Just maybe. But still, she didn’t speak of love out loud. Instead, she looked at him, at the Christmas lights reflected in his eyes as he hung the ornaments up on the tree, and she hoped.

As a child, she had a life that had seemed perfect.

But it hadn’t been real.

It hadn’t been real.

But this was. That much she knew. If she never knew anything else, then she knew that.

And she would just have to hope that the sort of magic that had enticed him to get a Christmas tree would bloom into the sort of magic that would keep them happy forever.