Page 51 of Promised to the Don of Naples
VALENTINA ROSSI
I felt his forehead come down against mine.
Warm. Heavy. Like a man handing over thirty years' weight onto a woman's forehead because it's the only place available in the room.
I didn't move.
I didn't take my hands from his face. I felt his stubble, the scar through his eyebrow under my right thumb—small, hard, smooth. I felt his breath hit my chin in an uneven rhythm.
Thirty seconds. Forty.
And then he raised his head half a centimeter and looked at me.
His black eyes were closer than they'd been under the arbor. Darker, more disarmed. The scar through his eyebrow shining in the light coming through the half-closed shutter. The smell of whiskey on his mouth. The sandalwood.
Him.
I saw the question on his face.
I didn't see it in his eyes—I saw it in his mouth. In the way his lower lip dropped half a millimeter, in the way his jaw relaxed for the first time in weeks.
And I, with my hands still on his cheeks, went for the answer before he asked. I rose half a centimeter on my tiptoes.
And I kissed Luca Moretti...
It wasn't how I'd imagined.
I'd imagined rage, haste, teeth colliding. I'd imagined the story of eight thousand scenes from eight thousand books I read in the convent, hidden from the Madre Superiora, with women pinned against walls and men pulling off dresses with both hands.
It was none of that.
It was slow.
His mouth moved against mine as if he were afraid of pressing too hard. His lips were warm—warmer than I expected—and tasted of whiskey.
His hands moved up from the sides of my body to my back—I hadn't noticed when he'd put his hand on my waist, but both his hands were there now, open, holding me without gripping.
And they moved up, very slowly along my back, along my bun, and stopped at the nape of my neck.
His fingers slid into my hair, and I breathed in against his mouth.
And he deepened the kiss. Slowly. Like someone tuning an instrument without hurry. His mouth opened a millimeter more, and mine opened too. His tongue touched mine lightly—it didn't invade, it asked—and I answered with a want that didn't come from the convent, didn't come from the Madre Superiora, didn't come from any book I read in secret.
It came from somewhere in me that had been waiting twenty-three years to meet this exact question.
I held his face more firmly, and he pulled me closer by the nape of my neck. His body touched mine—chest to chest, Ifelt his breath through the thin fabric of his shirt, felt his heat pass through my blouse the way light passes through water.
I felt something else too—him, hard and ready for me...
He'd been kissing me for maybe forty seconds and his body had already responded.
I felt it.
And that—that—was what made me stop.
It wasn't fear, it was power. It was the realization, in real time, that I, Valentina Rossi, twenty-three years old, raised in a convent, could dismantle the Don of the Naples Camorra in forty seconds of kissing. It was the realization that if I didn't pull back now, I wouldn't pull back at all.
And it wasn't time yet.
