CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Luca
I IGNORED THE pinch of guilt as I gathered Katherine into my arms, squeezing tight. I had broken through the first barrier. Someday she would realize that this had been the right choice.
“Thank you,” I murmured against the crown of her head, inhaling the citrus scent of her hair. “I will show you that I’m a different man.”
That part wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t the same kid who had carelessly broken her heart without realizing the depth of his consequences.
Of course, in some ways that was a good thing and in some ways it wasn’t. I knew the value of having solid people in your corner, but I also knew that you couldn’t always afford honesty.
But for now, we were cocooned in Malvagio’s nest of iniquity, safe from prying eyes and free to be whomever we chose.
And in this moment, I chose to be her willing everything.
I rose and poured cold artisan water into frosted glasses for us both. She accepted the water and finished it with greedy gulps and a satisfied sigh. “Perfect,” she murmured with a smile as I agreed.
Once finished, I climbed back into the bed and pulled her close. I would worship her body many times tonight, but for now I was content to just hold her.
Her arms closed around me as her head nestled on my chest.
“Tell me about this place,” she said with a small giggle. “I mean, a sex club operating right under the nose of the snootiest people in society? I would kill to see the looks on some of those snobby matrons if they found out who exactly was a member.”
I tapped her nose playfully. “That’s the point—they never will. Malvagio’s member list is a closely guarded secret. That’s why it’s so difficult to get a sponsor and even more so to become a member.”
“So what’s the point? All this cloak-and-dagger, secret passwords, anonymity...it’s kinda silly, don’t you think?”
“Of course it is, but as you know, the wealthy bore easily. Malvagio plays to their twisted sense of privilege, and the Buchanans were brilliant enough to take advantage.”
“How do you know the Buchanans?”
“Dillon and I met in grad school. Jesus, he was crazy. I never saw a man treat his body the way he did and not die as a consequence. But he dropped out of grad school before getting his degree—something about his old man cutting him off. We lost touch until a few years later, when I saw him by chance in a bar, still abusing his liver with impunity, but he’d changed from a reckless asshole to a ruthless prick who’d amassed quite a fortune on his own, without his daddy’s money. I was fucking impressed.”
“That is impressive,” Katherine agreed.
“I was happy for him. His dad...what a piece of work. You think my father is an overbearing dick? Dillon’s father made my father look like Santa Claus.”
Katherine looked up at me. “Seriously? That’s pretty bad.”
“Yeah, the Buchanans got all messed up. Honestly, I don’t even know how Dillon managed to find a woman like Penny to straighten him out. All the Buchanan boys have changed for the better, but damn, I never would’ve thought it could happen.”
Katherine cast a dubious glance my way, saying, “Well, they do own a clandestine sex club—they can’t be all that lily-white and reformed.”
I laughed. “True enough. I guess they were lucky enough to find accommodating women.”
“I guess so.”
She traced a small circle around my nipple, causing it to perk immediately. I sucked in a tight breath. “Careful, or you’re going to get fucked again.”
“I’m not complaining,” she answered coyly. “If there’s one thing you do well, it’s what you do in bed.”
“Perhaps I should put it on my résumé.”
“Perhaps.”
I resisted the urge to push at my growing erection. Any touch would only make things worse. I tried to focus. Clearing my throat, I said, “The club was actually started by Nolan and Vince, Dillon’s twin brothers. Dillon only just recently acquired the club when Nolan decided he no longer wanted to be in the sex club business. Actually, it was his wife that suggested he find someone else to run the club, and he was eager to make her happy.”
“You mean his wife didn’t like her husband running a sex club? Go figure,” she said, chuckling.
“The Buchanan boys are the most wild, lecherous, fun-loving perverts I’ve ever known in my life. But once they got married, they became downright respectable. A little boring, if you ask me.”
“So you think marriage makes men boring?”
I answered her no doubt calculated question carefully.
“No, I think they got boring. I think that if you and I were married, there wouldn’t be a boring day for the rest of our lives.”
That part was true. I didn’t doubt that there would always be sparks and fireworks between Katherine and me. Our chemistry couldn’t be faked. There were some people in your life who interconnected with your soul in a way that was rare and precious. I wasn’t saying that the Buchanan men hadn’t found that—hell, maybe they had—all I knew was that I saw no reason to give up a harmless hobby just because another person said so.
“How long have you been coming to Malvagio?” she asked.
“Over the years, a handful of times. It isn’t one of those places where you want to spend too much of your time. It’s like eating a finely crafted dessert—too much of it is just too much.”
“Have you ever bought someone at the auction?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I chuckled. “Because as much as I enjoy Malvagio, I’m not interested in sponsoring someone into the club. It takes too much time and effort. You have to understand most of the people who frequent this place are trust-fund babies who wouldn’t understand the concept of working for a living. I don’t have that problem. Boredom has never been my issue. I’m running the Donato empire, so free time isn’t something I have too much of.”
I enjoyed my captive audience. For the first time in years, Katherine was actually listening.
“And, to be honest,” I added with a shrug, “it’s fun and games when you’re drunk and everyone’s naked and fucking, but by the light of day, it’s like the mornings at a strip club—sad, run-down and smelling of stale beer and bad decisions.”
“This is the nicest strip club I’ve ever seen,” she joked. “But I get what you’re saying. It is a little on the sleazy side, but in an intoxicating way. As in, you know it’s bad, but you want it anyway.”
I laughed. “Dillon will be happy to hear his branding is hitting the mark. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. He doesn’t want people trying to live here. It’s a place where people can indulge their fantasies, have fun in a safe environment and leave in the morning with a secret. That’s pretty much it. And because they don’t need the income, the money that the club makes actually goes to help fund a women’s shelter.”
Katherine lifted her head to peer at me with questions. “What do you mean?”
It wasn’t common knowledge, as the Buchanans liked to keep their business private, but sharing this information with Katherine would go a long way toward showing her that I wanted to be different.
“A handful of years ago, someone gained access to one of the Malvagio dungeons and nearly killed a woman named Lana Winters. Lana’s sister, Emma, came to Malvagio with the intent of exposing the club but ended up a victim of the same person who’d assaulted her sister. Vince tried to save the club by helping Emma, and they ended up falling in love.”
“That’s some love story,” Katherine said wryly. “And by help...you mean...”
“Oh, Vince totally kidnapped her to keep her from going to the police, but he made sure she had the best care while she recovered.”
“He kidnapped her?”
The story was not your typical meet-cute, but nothing the Buchanans did was ever by the book. I’d learned to just go with it. “But they fell in love eventually,” I reminded Katherine, adding when she gasped in feminine outrage, “And the incident left an impact on the Buchanan brothers. So they wanted to make sure that even though Malvagio might look like Sodom and Gomorrah at its finest, at the end of the day all proceeds go to help various nonprofit organizations, which are routed through the Buchanan trust, so as not to embarrass anyone.”
Katherine lost some of her ire. “I guess that’s admirable. What kind of donations are we talking about?”
I laughed. “Let’s just say it’s more than enough to keep the nonprofits comfortable and doing their good work.”
“I guess that’s one way to keep the balance,” she supposed, pausing to straddle me. Katherine regarded me with an arched brow, her hair tumbling around her shoulders. “And how many women have you fucked in this place, Luca?”
It was a loaded question. “You know there’s a law about self-incrimination,” I teased, reaching up to tweak her rose-hued nipple. “Surely you aren’t asking me to divulge information that might make me look like an asshole when things were going so nicely between us.”
“Withholding information doesn’t make the truth any less of what it is,” she said.
I anchored my hands at her waist, loving the feel of her hips beneath my fingertips. “Are you sure you want me to answer?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know. I have no illusions that you’ve been celibate all these years, Luca. For that matter, I haven’t been, either.”
My fingers tightened. Her smile told me she knew exactly what she was doing.
I surged against her, impatient to claim her again, no matter how many men she’d been with. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
“I don’t know the number. I never kept track. But I will tell you this,” I said, rolling her to her back, rising above her. “You’re the only one that matters.”
Sealing my mouth to hers, I silenced any further questions about past lovers. I didn’t want to know about hers, and I certainly didn’t want to share about mine.
I’d been with scores of women across the globe, from wild to mild, but I’d never found a woman who ignited everything inside me the way Katherine did.
In some ways Dante was right—my brother had always maintained that Katherine was not a good fit as my wife. She would never be malleable or dutiful, content to be arm candy, happy to serve my every need. Thank God.
I wanted exactly what Katherine was—the exact opposite of whomever Dante and my father thought I should marry.
I kissed her hard and deep, the thoughts in my head crowding the lust in my heart. I didn’t want to think about strategy, even though I should.
In truth, if I had never hurt her, she wouldn’t have grown.
I know, I was a bastard for saying it, but it was no less true.
If I’d never broken her heart, she wouldn’t have been forced to be the woman she was now, the woman capable of standing beside me. The one who would fight with and fight for me—but I couldn’t say this to her without sounding like the arrogant ass she already believed I was.
Private epiphanies were best felt by the heart, not forced down your throat.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” I whispered, my lips blazing a trail down her silky skin, returning to her soft mouth. I drank in her breath as she groaned, our bodies pressed against each other.
“Luca,” she moaned as I dragged my mouth down to her molten core. I could taste her over and over and still delight in the discovery of her flavor on my tongue. She sucked in a tight breath as I suckled that tiny, swollen pleasure nub, loving how her hands twisted and pulled at the bedding, her thighs shaking and trembling as I pushed her harder toward her climax.
I lost myself in her shuddering cries, drinking in her pleasure as she shattered beneath my tongue. Before she could recover, I flipped her onto her belly, taking a brief moment to admire the perfection of her ass, then went to reach for a condom, but before my fingers reached the bowl, I hesitated.
It was wrong, but a part of me knew that if I got Katherine pregnant, I’d never lose her. A baby might be the only foolproof way to get her to marry me.
But even as the ruthless Donato creed—Win at All Costs—urged me to simply drive myself unprotected into her womb, I couldn’t do it.
Doing so would betray her trust in the worst way, and we’d never recover. If I was going to win her heart, I had to show her that I would never sacrifice her wants and needs for my own.
Not even if it meant losing so she could win.
I grabbed a condom and slid it over my erect cock before feeding my shaft to her hot, wet southern mouth. Her folds swallowed my cock, and I lost myself in the exquisite torture of being inside the woman who was my entire world.
If I were lucky, someday Katherine would give me fine sons, strong, smart and capable. She would grace me with incredible daughters who would keep me on my toes and make me wish for the opportunity to be the man that my little girls would believe I was.
I would not be like my father. I would be kind and loving and adoring to my children.
But that wasn’t tonight.
Her hot sheath closed around my cock, a tight, wondrous fit. We were made for each other. I lost myself in the pleasure of knowing that she, in this moment, was completely mine. In this bubble of sheer perfection, hiding within Malvagio’s walls, I lost myself in everything that was incredible about this woman. The smell of her musk on the air was sweeter than French vanilla.
I would fuck her raw and give her such incredible bone-melting pleasure that all she could think of was when she would get her next fix. By the end of this week, I would have her so cock-drunk that she would not know where I stopped and she began.
I came quickly with violent spasms, spending completely inside her. Relief that I hadn’t made a terrible choice in a weak moment made me cling to her all the more. I’d come so close to fucking everything up before I’d had a chance to show her that I was worthy of being her husband.
Thank you, God, for knocking some sense into me, I thought with a grateful heart.
But I wouldn’t lie—the thought of Katherine carrying my child was the most incredibly mind-blowing concept. How ironic that I’d spent my adult sexual history doing everything that I could to prevent an accidental pregnancy, but now I wanted nothing more than Katherine swelling with my child.
I was jumping the gun. I hadn’t won her heart yet. I couldn’t start registering in the baby department at Neiman Marcus.
At our core we were still animals. Turned on by scent, aroused by the visual cues of a soft pussy and beautiful tits. Katherine was physically perfect in every way. And I didn’t mean that in some generic, plastic Barbie sort of way.
I loved that her hips had grown faster than her body could handle. Those tiny silvery lines that she deemed imperfections were absolutely beautiful to me.
And when she swelled with my child, I would lovingly bathe her with any oil or cream or anything she desired just so I could worship her body.
Instead of going through the motions of my mother’s silly courtship rituals, I should’ve been doing exactly what I was doing right now. Loving the shit out of her. Fucking her so hard and so often that all she could think of was me.
Instead, because of my arrogance, I’d half-heartedly followed a stupid plan set up by my parents with the belief that Katherine would come around eventually.
I’d known this woman nearly her entire life, but maybe I’d never truly known her at all. If anyone was having an epiphany, it was me. I was thunderstruck. And all of this happened in the flash of a blinding orgasm, when everything came together in a giant cataclysm of emotion, physical response and striking clarity.
I couldn’t even gasp her name, but I was screaming it in my head. Never in my life had I lost myself like this. It was scary and heady at the same time, but there was something so visceral about the way we came together.
Katherine would have to come to grips with the fact that I would chase her to the ends of the earth and take every opportunity to seduce her into loving me again if need be.
Katherine was hardwired for me, even if she didn’t know it yet.
I collapsed and rolled to my back, gasping hard. Neither of us spoke. The faint sound of music from the upper floor was the only sound. The air was dense with the energy we had created together. I knew she could feel it, too. I slowly turned to regard her, waiting.
Something had changed between us. Something deep.
Did she feel it, too? Of course she did. Was that fear I saw in her eyes? No. It was something else, maybe something she wasn’t ready to put a name to or define. I caressed her jaw in silent understanding. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted her to know. But it was too soon. Too soon for her to recognize that she and I were meant to be together. And so I simply waited.
When she said to me in a small voice tinged with happy exhaustion, “I’m starving,” all I could do was hold her in my arms with a grateful chuckle, feeling as if I’d just been given the secret to eternal happiness—a redhead with a voracious appetite.
My woman wanted food. Damn straight that was what she was going to get.