I watched as Maria slept next to me, reaching out to shift a strand of her hair from her face. She shifted in her sleep, pouting slightly, and turned her back on me.

 

I still couldn’t believe the things that this woman let me do to her. Yeah, today in particular, it had been a way of distracting both of us from the conversation we’d had, from the seriousness of everything I’d told her—something to confirm that she wasn’t going anywhere and had no plans to junk out on me once she realized the kind of person I was. But she seemed all too happy to stay, especially when I made her come twice before we went to bed. Not that that was any particular annoyance to me.

 

I guess the most twisted side of my lust for her came from the fact that I was the one meant to protect her. All these guys who would go up to her in public, look her up in down, reach out to grab or touch her—I had to stop them. Not one person would lay so much as a finger on her as long as I was her bodyguard.

 

I’d protected women before, but none of them had thrown out quite the vibe that Maria had—despite the fact that she was obviously smart and together when you got to know her, with her bleached hair and tight clothes, she seemed to attract a very specific type of attention when we were out and about in public. She couldn’t help it, and I took great pleasure in chasing away the dumb boys who tried to get their hands on her.

 

She seemed oblivious to it, and I wondered how much of that was because her father had kept her locked up in that place for so. And how much of it was to do with who she was, and people recognizing that she was the daughter of Lucca D’Orazio and they might as well be sticking their hands into a vice. Touching her without her consent would be the equivalent of walking into traffic—yeah, you might make it out unscathed, but it wasn’t worth the risk. If any of those guys who did make a pass at her knew who she was, they wouldn’t have even looked at her twice for fear of losing their heads.

 

But I—I could touch her. She wanted me to, begged me to. Maria looked at me with such lust in her eyes that some days I wondered if I had taken it too far, if we had gone somewhere that we couldn’t return from. I’d never gone this far with anyone before, never found myself as connected to a woman on a sexual level before—she made me ache just to look at her, the way she would so willingly give herself up to me, the way she trusted me to do whatever I wanted with her body. The fact that she was so willing to give her body over to me left me feeling as though I could be a little more open with her.

 

She would never know everything, of course, because no one but me would ever have to carry the burden of everything I knew and everything I’d done. But she could easily tease little snippets of my past from me, little hints of my history, and those seemed to be enough to keep her sated. I wasn’t sure she truly wanted to know the truth—after everything her father had done, which she couldn’t even have known the half of, finding out that I was wrapped up in that same world would kill whatever little thing we’d managed to nurture between us.

 

I lay down next to her, curling my arm around her waist and drawing her close to me. I closed my eyes and pressed my nose into her hair, inhaling deeply—the scent of her made me feel at ease. One time, I woke up to find her missing from the bed, and the first thing that alerted me to her absence was that her smell was missing—the rich, sweet scent of her perfume and skin only a lingering memory on the sheets. It had turned out she was just in the shower, but it had still taken me more by surprise than I would have liked. The intensity of my panic, however momentary, hinted towards a fact I knew was true—that I liked this woman for more than what we did between the sheets, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit it.

 

I didn’t know how she saw this relationship progressing, if she saw it progressing at all—after all, this was a woman who’d spent her whole life having everything laid out for her, and now that she had some freedom, she didn’t have to settle for the first man who could help her. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a few days or weeks or months, she grew tired of me and found someone else to express her newfound freedom with. Maybe I would have to stand outside her hotel room and guard her while she went to heaven and back with some new beau. Or maybe, just maybe, she felt the same way I did.

 

I kissed her hair lightly, and glanced at my watch—it was almost time to take her home. I shook her awake, and she turned, eyes bleary. She smiled up at me tiredly and stretched her arms out over her head.

 

“Is it time to go?”

 

“Time to go,” I agreed, and scooped her up in my arms. She giggled and wrapped herself around me, pressing her lips into mine. And right then, all I wanted was to cast caution to the wind and have the woman I was dating stay the night, just for once. Just for once.