Mia

Why give him a chance you ask? I’ll tell you and before you start self-flagellating to mourn my fall from feminist glory, just hear me out. It’s become clear to me from recent events, namely my inability to resist Lucas and his amazing sex, that I am in love with the idiot and probably always will be.

My mama once told me that the Carmichael girls were one-man women and I guess she must be right. Either that or I am a glutton for punishment and a masochist.

Short of leaving and living out the rest of my life with regret, I’ve decided that I am up for the challenge of showing one Lucas Fabrizio that he will love me because I am more than worth loving.

I’m not trying to be a brood, it’s just that I don’t think, no, I know, that I can’t live the rest of my life knowing that I could have had him and walked away because I am such a coward I didn’t take the chance.

Now, I don’t much care if that’s not good enough for anyone else, I am happy. Or as happy as I can be with the man in question strutting around the penthouse in nothing but skin while I try, and fail, to concentrate on the files before me.

“Put on some damn clothes! I need to work.” I grumble, squeezing my thighs together when the sight of his hardness makes my sex protest my control.

Lucas just grins and keeps stalking toward the fridge, his tumescence-that’s a real word and I like it better than some other’s he’s whispered to me deep in the night while making love to me-well, his tumescence is on display and the man does not possess one crumb of modesty.

And why the hell should he, I think, pulling self-consciously at the hem of the shirt I filched from his closet. He may be built like a dream, a woman’s wet dream, but I have this stuff called cellulite that every woman has! Damn my vagina. Strutting around in the buff, no matter what Lucas says is not my thing. But apparently, it’s his.

“You do not need to work. I told you twice that I already went through those files and the deal is practically in the bag. The Lorens group is ours, Mia. They can’t afford to pull out now unless they want to pay penalties.”

Like I give a shit about business. I just don’t want to spend every single waking hour of our free time having sex. Even if my vagina disagrees. I need talking and sharing and all the stuff Lucas hates to do and the damn man refuses to be serious no matter what I offer for just a slice of information.

“So, who was the first girl to break your black heart?” I ask conversationally, focusing on the printout before me.

Lucas chuckles, pulls a tub of ice-cream from the freezer and stalks my way.

“I told you I’m not talking about other women with you so give it up.” He growls, spooning some ice-cream to shove in my mouth when I open it to argue. “Come on, cara, be reasonable, I just got you back and you’re looking for a fight.”

Dammit. He’s right but I feel so…vulnerable and have for the past three days since I agreed to be with him. It’s an undefined relationship at the moment, just as I requested, and I find myself second guessing everything because the truth is that I need definitions. I’m just too scared to ask again because it may kill me to hear him admit he doesn’t love me again.

The first time was enough, not that I expected anything but come on, a bitch can dream right.

“Fine. Then what the hell else are we supposed to talk about?” I ask, shoving my files back into my briefcase and turning to face him with the couch arm at my back and my feet up.

I am currently wearing my ugly glasses because I attacked him yesterday just as we stepped inside the door and the good ones were crushed in the scuffle. And he doesn’t seem to care.

“How about you tell me why you sold your house for such a piteous sum when I know that was the one you wanted right off the bat?” he asks instead, getting an eye roll.

“I told you it was too big, too everything for just me. The boys are in Colorado and they’re staying there so why would I live alone in a three bedroom house?”

Lucas sighs as if I’m taxing him and grabs my ankle to pull me closer. I gasp when the shirt hem flips up and he grins, blatantly staring at my sex.

“Stop that, perv.”

“Can’t blame a man for looking, cara. You are bellisima without all these clothes blocking my view. Come on, take it off.” He purrs, licking the spoon with a lazy eyed taunt.

“We’d just have sex again,” I mutter, huffing when he wiggles his brows.

“Perfecto.”

“No, not perfect because you said we were going to build, Luc, not screw every second and pretend that nothing else matters.”

It’s important to me because otherwise all that is happening here is sex and the offhand flattery that he seems to give so easily. I love that he looks at me and sees someone he’s attracted to but I don’t trust this side of him because it comes all too easily and way too easily for a guy who used to tell me I look terrible more often than not.

Lucas sighs, leans back into the cushions and dips back into the ice-cream, staying silent so long I’m about to give up and leave before I say something I will regret.

“When I was nineteen, I fell in love with the daughter of my father’s vice president of marketing. Her name was Batista and she had the brightest laugh.”

Okay, I don’t think I anticipated what it would feel like to hear him say he loved someone. It hurts and worse, I’m crushed that I have never heard of this before. I just assumed he’d say ‘love? Why would I fall in love?’

“She must have been quite something,” I manage, swallowing silently.

“Si, she was funny and smart and she would make these stupid jokes that no one understood. I thought,” he sighs and offers me the spoon, fiddling with it when I shake my head. “I thought that we would get married and have babies and I would stay in Italy all my life. I was very young, had never considered starting my own business because I was Papa’s heir and so it was for me to step in when he retired.”

“You didn’t though. You came to California when you were what, twenty two?” I ask, trying to remember what his bio said.

“Yes.”

“Okay. So Batista?”

“She was mine, well at least I wanted her to be mine so I pulled out all the stops and did the most inane shit to make her see me. I bought flowers, wrote love poems, I even wrote her a song,” he says, laughing derisively when my eyes stretch wide. “I used to play the guitar, cara.”

“You? But you never said. Why haven’t you ever played?”

“Because I soon realized it was frivolous and would not get me what I want. Batista and I got together the night of my twentieth birthday party and two weeks later I proposed, believing that we were meant to be. It’s funny but I never thought that she would say no. In my youthful arrogance, I just assumed that having made love and shared our inner most thoughts she would love me.”

“Oh no.”

“Indeed.”

“She said no?” I whisper, my lip trembling.

“Give me a break! She knew I was set to inherit and that I was already filthy rich. Of course she didn’t say no, Mia. She said yes and cried and did everything she was supposed to do and I was so happy it was unreal. I was going to tell my parents the next week when I went home from school. They didn’t know about us yet because I wanted her all to myself but that weekend…”

“What happened?”

“She left school after I did, even though she’d told me that she needed to stay to study for her finals. I…this is pointless, Mia, cara.” He explodes, shoving the tub onto the table with a curse.

To him maybe but somehow, I don’t think so, and to me, well I need to hear this because if I’m to know what to do, how to show him how to love me then I have to know where it all went wrong.

“Not to me. Finish,” I whisper, resisting the urge to take his hand because he’s so tense he’d just push me away.

“I was on the way home to talk to my family when my mobile rang. It was the police. Batista had been killed while trying to jump the train with her boyfriend, a man who I was friends with for years. My number was the first contact in her phone so they called me. Apparently, she was running late because she saw me off and tried to make the train before it left. The station was busy, teeming with people. Someone bumped into her and she fell onto the tracks, hit her head…it was instant,” he says tonelessly, rolling the tension from his shoulders.

“Oh no. Luc, I am so so-”

“So was I. I refused to believe it, of course. We were in love, she said yes…but these things have a way of coming out and I soon learned from her mama that she’d been with Marco since she was sixteen and that a lover’s quarrel had driven them apart for two years. In essence, I was a rebound relationship and obviously she was loathe to refuse me when I proposed because her father worked for mine. I learned a valuable lesson then, cara, everyone wants something, everyone. Love? I do not know what love is because I swear to you whatever I felt for her was gone the instant I knew the truth. Does love exist? I don’t know, what I do know is that I care for you, deeply, and I have never been this happy in my life.” He finishes, wiping at the silent tears pouring down my cheeks.

“It must have been awful.”

“It was life. The next month saw me transferring out of school to England where I fast tracked my business degree. I left straight after and came here when a friend invited me to invest in his company. For the first year, we invested whatever my trust fund would allow into business, him developing software while I took care of the business side of things. We boomed after that and made a pretty packet, enough for me to recoup my investment and then some. Afterward-”

“You sold your shares to him and started buying and selling companies,” I fill in, leaning back tiredly, suddenly exhausted by the sadness he refuses to acknowledge.

“Si. And I became more than rich while doing it. I’d go so far as to admit that by the time my trust fund was fully released it was not even half of what I was worth.” He laughs, pulling me close to snuggle against his side.

I go easily and wrap myself around him, needing to touch him in some way, even if right now it’s got nothing to do with sex or even comfort. I think Luc just likes having me close. And that’s good, I tell myself, my hopes flagging the more I think about what he’s told me.

Some chick he loved not only accepted his proposal but dumped him for his best friend and…and he proposed to me, something that must have been really hard for him and I threw the ring back at him!

Oh God. God, why don’t you just help me out before I do things I can’t take back?

“I’ve never been in love until you,” I admit softly after a long silence, my mind whirling with the ramifications of what has happened so far.

I’ve loved him, slept with him, twice, well more than that, but on two separate occasions before we got together officially and all this time I’ve just thought…he was a dick. It never crossed my mind that he could have gone through this, alone from his own admission, and that love isn’t something that is in the cards.

Oh I know he said he wants to try, to learn to love but is that even possible with a man like Luc who is more than jaded? The man had his heart ripped out at nineteen and has spent the last twelve years up to the age of thirty-one rejecting anything that even resembles emotional entanglement.

How the heck am I supposed to convince him that it’s not a myth, that it is more than possible. I think I’ll start with honesty and if that’s not enough then I’ll have to decide whether I can accept the way things are or if I should spare myself further heartache.

“Si, and look what I did to you.” He grates, pulling me closer as if afraid the reminder will drive me away.

“That’s true. You hurt me a lot and yet no matter how many times I told myself to walk away I always found myself right back here, with you as the center of my world.” Luc laughs mirthlessly at that and scrubs at his eyes.

“Because I couldn’t let you go! After you left me the first time I told myself that I didn’t care, that you were disloyal and unfeeling and it was good riddance-”

“Hey!”

He kisses me softly, cutting off my protests and comes up over me, pinning me to the couch with a wicked smile.

“Even then, I had decided that I was going to seduce you, cara, that I would lock down my little Mia with a ring and a comfortable marriage of mutual respect.”

“Disgusting.”

“And then you left and I was pissed.” He chuckles, licking over my lips before pulling back. “The guys laughed their asses off at me because I refused to stop looking. I told myself you were just a helpless idiot who needed my protection even if you didn’t deserve it.”

“Is this supposed to make me want you?” I growl, glaring at him when he laughs.

“No, it’s supposed to be honest. So then I finally track you down, telling myself that it was my duty to keep you if only to ensure that you didn’t run off again and get your plump little ass murdered by strangers who would spot your weakness.”

“Jesus, you are digging this pit really deep.” I grumble, wiggling to get away because he’s pissing me off. Badly.

He restrains me with both hands pulled into one of his much larger mitts and starts unbuttoning the shirt with a smile made of pure, predatory possession.

“I was being an ass and I knew it when I landed in Spain and the time to see you drew near. The closer I got, the happier I was and I realized I didn’t want to lose you.”

“Okay.” I gasp when the shirt is pushed aside to expose my breasts, the peaks hard tips begging for his mouth.

“I saw you at the very same airstrip I landed at, just got off the jet to be honest. Kissing some Spanish bastard who had his hands clamped to your ass.”

“Oh, Luc.” I giggle, laughing when he takes exception and sinks his teeth into the side of my breasts, right beside the nipple. “That was Santiago. I tried to date him, even kissed him a little but it wasn’t happening, I just couldn’t forget you.”

He looks up at me from beneath his lashes, his mouth surrounding my nipple and grins when I moan and try to move closer.

“You kissed him, cara, I saw you.”

“To say goodbye!” I gasp, writhing when he grazes his teeth just over the tip and sucks strongly, letting me go with a pop.

“You will not kiss other men. Ever.” He commands, licking a trail to my other breast.

God, I am getting so wet I want to pull his hips between my legs but the fiend has me trapped, his knees on the outside of my legs keeping me pinned with my legs closed.

“Stop torturing me! I thought you wanted sex.” I huff, gasping when he sucks a love bite into the white flesh beside my nipple and grins at the already darkening mark.

“I want to share. I want to share with you my unhappiness seeing you kiss not one but two other men.” He purrs darkly.

Should I mention that I’m still friends with Bronson?

Nope, I think when he uses his discarded tie to tie my wrists together, securing them to the couch in a surprising show of ingenuity.

“That was a mistake. I was trying to get over you.” I whine, kicking out when he goes to his knees and grabs for my legs.

“Let me show you why that will never happen, cara.” He purrs, pinning me down with hands clamped to the inside of my thighs.

He shows me why I will never get over him. Man does he show me, I think, screaming when he pushes my legs as far as they can go and lowers his mouth to me.

“Oh, Luc!”

“That’s it, cara, scream for me, tell me why you are mine.”