Page 71 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Bella."
I got up. I didn't walk. I ran.
I didn't think. Sixteen feet of room that I crossed in three steps, and I threw myself against him with the full force of my body. His arms caught me before I reached him—one hand on my nape, the other on my back—and I buried my face in his chest, in the blood, in the torn shirt, in the smell of cigar and gunpowder and sandalwood.
"Luca. You're alive."
"I am."
"The blood..."
"It's not mine."
"Whose is it?"
"Later, bella."
He held me tighter. Both his hands firm on my back, holding, the way he'd held me under the arbor, but with force now—the force of a man who's just killed, who's just not died, who's just come down off the wave of adrenaline without switching off yet.
I lifted my face, and his mouth found mine before I had time to ask.
It wasn't like under the arbor. It wasn't like in his room after Matteo.
It was hunger.
His mouth came hard, no longer asking, tasting of whiskey and something metallic—blood, maybe his after all, or he'd cut his lip on something, I didn't know.
His hands moved down from my back to my hip, and from my hip to my thigh, lifting me. I wrapped my legs around his waist without thinking; his back hit the doorframe, right on his wounded shoulder.
"Luca, your shoulder."
"It doesn't matter now."
His mouth moved down my neck, and I threw my head back. I felt his teeth lightly on my collarbone—not biting,marking—and something inside me I didn't know, something that must have been ancestral, that came from before the convent and before my mother and before all of Italy, answered.
"Bella. I'll kill a man a night until your wedding day if I have to."
"Don't say that."
"I'll say it."
"Luca. Take me to your room."
He stopped.
His mouth half a centimeter from mine, his breathing quick. The black eyes opened, looked at me, lingered.
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"Bella. Do you know what you're asking? I won't stop again."
"I don't want you to stop."
He lifted me clear off the floor—effortlessly, and without care either, with the urgency of a man who'd waited several days to do it.
He walked out with me in his arms through the family corridor, and I gripped his neck with both hands.
