Page 109 of Secrets of the Brother
My lips pressed against her skin. I needed to feel the vibrations of her pounding heart. I imagined I could almost smell her fear. I dragged my teeth up the column of her neck, over her jaw, scraping her skin, marking her.
“Real love. True love. Is not fit for poetry. It is vicious and ugly. It is a jealous, possessive, spiteful beast that claws and tears at your insides when separated from its other half. I should know.”
I tore at her cashmere wool coat, wrenching it off her shoulders, pinning her arms to her sides.
I pushed her back, slamming her against the brick wall, following with my body. “It is ever wakeful and relentlessly ravenous, waiting for the moment when it will be made whole again.”
Fisting the collar of her black silk blouse, I ripped it almost in half, sending buttons scattering, exposing the thin lace chemise she wore underneath. I palmed her breast through the silk while I sank my teeth into the soft flesh of her neck.
She cried out as she twisted her torso and arched her back trying to escape me. “Enzo, stop! You’re hurting me.”
I ran my tongue over the crescent moon bite mark. “Good, I want to hurt you. I want to scar you. To ruin you for any other man.” I grabbed her face and searched the beautiful terror in her eyes. “I want to break and wound you, so that you have no other option but to curl up in my lap and let me hold you for eternity.”
She gasped. “You’re mad.”
I ran my thumbs over the fresh tears that spilled from her eyes. “Of course I am. That’s what happens to a man when he is separated from the woman he knows, deep in his heart, in the very marrow of his bones, that he was put on this earth to love and cherish and protect.
He spends his days in tortured misery thinking about her and his nights howling at the moon like a beast searching for its mate.”
I fell on her mouth, thrusting my tongue inside, tasting her horror and confusion. Relishing the soft feel of her face between my hands and her body crushed against mine.
She wrenched free.
Yanking up her coat, she stumbled several feet away as she scrambled along the ancient wall, all the while keeping her wide and frightened gaze on me. “It wasyouwho cast me aside. It wasyouwho decided that your family name and honor were worth more than the undying love you are professing now. And you want me to sacrificeeverything… my independence, my career, my freedom…everything… for you now? You, who wouldn’t sacrifice yourpreciousreputation for me?Vaffanculo!”
I pulled on the Windsor knot securing my tie.
Yanking it free from my collar, I twisted the expensive silk between my fists as I slowly stalked her. “I am tiring of this argument, Bianca. I made a mistake. I admit it, but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll let that stand between us now. You’re mine. And it’s past time we moved forward with the future we were both denied.”
She scurried around the wall to the interior of the ruin, placing a large stone altar-looking structure between us. She slammed her palms on its worn, pockmarked marble surface. “That’s what I’ve been desperately trying to tell you since I returned to Italy.I no longer want that future with you.I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to carry your child. It’s too much, Enzo. All of it.You’retoo much.”
Each word was like a body blow.
My vision blurred in a smoky haze of red smoke, as if I were viewing her from the middle of a stormy battlefield. ‘
That was what this felt like, like I was battling for my life, for my soul, for my love. I knew without a doubt if I lost this fight with her, this battle, then I would lose the war.
For there was no life for me without her.
I knew that with absolute clarity.
She was my everything.
My brother’s words came back to me.
See the hurt not the hate.
Focus on the hurt.
Focus on us.
At my silence, she let out a resigned sigh and turned her back on me. She had only taken a few steps toward a jagged opening in the tower wall caused by several collapsed rocks when I said, soft and low, “I’ll kill him.”
She turned her head but kept her back to me. “What?”
I took several steps toward her. “Iwillkill him,” I repeated more decisively.
She slowly turned to face me, a crease between her brows. “Kill who?”
