It sent his mind spinning back in time, to another evening drive they’d taken together on vineyard business. The one that had ended with both of them undressed and tangled together on a blanket under a midnight blue sky streaked with shooting stars.

“Come on, Ettore! Isn’t it amazing?”

She grabbed a bottle of the newest Aglianico from the wooden cases in back of the truck and started running up the side of the nearby hill. He watched her go, her long legs bare and her curvy backside clad in grape-stained, faded denim shorts. He was always in a state of arousal around her, but seeing her dance away from him under the thin moon glow turned his cock to granite.

“Bella, you’d better come back. I don’t think this is a good idea.” Nevertheless, he pulled an old wool blanket from behind the seat and jogged after her.

She helped him spread it out on the cool grass, then pulled him down next to her. “Here, open this.” She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew.

“I don’t drink wine,” he reminded her as he pulled the cork out with a soft pop. None of his kind did, but she knew that well enough.

“Do you ever wish you could? Even a taste?”

“No.” He had never craved wine, but then he watched her tip the bottle to her lips to take a sip and he knew a thirst unlike any he’d ever known. Her throat worked as she swallowed, her head tipped back, drawing his eyes to the creamy column of her neck.

He cleared his throat, searching for his voice as his fangs punched out of his gums and his vision began to fire with amber. “Your father and Sal are expecting us back at the vineyard.”

She slowly brought the bottle down from her mouth and set it in the grass. Her lips were wet, as dark as cherries from the wine. Long black lashes framed the solemn pools of her eyes. “Do you want to go, Ettore?”

He knew it as the chance it was—his only hope to stop this need for Bella before it went too far. They had been circling this moment for weeks. Hell, from the moment he first walked on to the Genova property.

Fleeting glances. Brief touches. Shared laughter. Then, later, after he’d fought his attraction for as long as he could, there had been a kiss, a few stolen embraces. Followed by heated caresses that had left both of them in flames.

But she was an innocent, just eighteen years old to his twenty-five.

Even worse, she was the Breedmate sister of his closest friend.

The last thing he should be doing was sitting beside her in the starlight, staring at her throat and wishing he was a better man. One with honor enough to lie and say he wasn’t out of his mind with desire for her.

“What do you want, Ettore?”

“You.”

He took her down beneath him on the blanket and unwrapped her as reverently as a precious gift. Each breathless moment was seared into his senses, from her soft moans as he kissed and licked and sucked every tempting inch of her…to her shuddering cries as he entered her virgin body and introduced her to an even deeper pleasure as the sea of shooting stars skated overhead.

Savage groaned at the uninvited recollection and the need it stoked in him even now.

By the time they reached the ancient hillside town of Matera, his body was rife with desire, his cock so hard it was a wonder he’d been able to drive.

His palm still burned from the sweet kiss she’d placed there.

His veins throbbed with hunger for her—a hunger that was startlingly more intense than simple desire. If he’d imagined that their years apart would cool his feelings for her, that tender kiss to the center of his hand had obliterated all hope of that.

Holy hell, he was in trouble here.

He should be thinking about his duty to the Order—and about the mission status that was uncertain at best—yet his mind was wrapped around Arabella Genova.

So was his heart. Although to be fair, that part of him had been hers for a lot longer than his life had been pledged to the Order.

How many times had he considered defying the wishes of her father and brother to go back and beg for her forgiveness and take her away with him forever? How many human blood Hosts had he drunk from, wishing it was Bella’s vein that was nourishing him instead, her Breedmate blood ensuring that she would always be his?

Now, all he had were regrets.

He only hoped he could somehow get the chance to make things right. But first he needed to make sure she was safe.

“This way,” he told the women, after leaving the old truck in a church parking lot as Trygg had instructed.

Carrying Chiara’s bag so she could focus on her child, Savage placed his hand at the small of Bella’s back and brought them to a flight of well-worn stone steps on the other side of the church. The stairs descended away from the quaint hotels and restaurants near Matera’s city center, into the thickly settled community of limestone dwellings that appeared to grow out of the walls of the broad ravine.

Waning blue moonlight and the golden glow of random lanterns and street lamps illuminated the uneven trail Trygg had given them to follow. At the predawn hour, there were no tourists on the tangled network of stone paths and meandering steps of the sassi. The ravine was quiet, nothing but the sound of their footsteps on the dusty old cobbles and the occasional jangle of a sheep’s bell from the flock starting to awaken on a grassy flat across the way.

Savage followed the path to the left, as he’d been told, which took them toward what appeared to be the low-rent section of the Paleolithic-era neighborhood. White limestone residences with the occasional flower box in their window or potted plant outside the door gave way to an unlit stretch of cobbles lined with rustic domiciles in various states of neglect, most with weeds and cactus sprouting out of their cracked and crumbling walls.

“Stay close,” Savage advised the women as he led them deeper into the settlement. “We should almost be there now.”

A few minutes later, just as Trygg had described, his brother waited up ahead on the walkway. At least, Savage hoped the immense, black-haired Breed male was Scythe.

As they approached, Savage walking protectively in front of Bella and Chiara, the other male lifted his head and swung a glance in their direction. Long ebony hair hung several inches past his shoulders, and a trimmed black beard outlined the grave set of his mouth. The male’s eyes, as dark as jet, narrowed on Savage across the distance.

Yep. Definitely Scythe.

Savage nodded to him in greeting. Scythe’s face remained expressionless within his curtain of dark hair. Dressed in a black leather trench coat that covered more black clothing beneath it, the male looked every bit a cold-blooded killer.