I know we shouldn’t,” Luciana whispered as she rubbed her cheek against the edge of Gianpierre’s stubbled jaw. She was his employee, but he smelled good, of musk and earth, and she breathed him in as deep as her lungs would take him. She knew that he wasn’t going to stay, that he was going to leave and that it was going to be as soon as he could, but he was here tonight. It was enough.

“You are a bewitching vixen, but you are right. I can’t be this for you,” Gianpierre said, his hands someplace that was not on her.

“What? You can’t be my lover for a night?” Luciana teased as she dragged the tip of one nail down his shirt.

Gianpierre growled, but he still didn’t touch her. “Is that all you want? A night?”

Luciana went still as she looked up into his eyes. A part of her had felt empty since the day that her sister had died, but—somehow—that feeling had eased since getting the job with Gianpierre. When she wasn’t with Natalia, the job was her purpose and focus, plus Gianpierre’s presence had slowly become a comfort to her. All she had to do was be near him, and he had a way of eclipsing all of her fears with his calm strength. He could be so gruff, so dismissive, yet she’d never felt safer than when she was with him.

“What I want is for you to remind me what being a woman feels like.”

Gianpierre growled, and his chest vibrated beneath Luciana’s hand. It was then, finally, that he put his hands on her. Trailing them up the long line of her back, he sank the fingers of one hand into her thick hair and squeezed, pulling her head back and tilting her face up higher. “You could have any lover, anyone. Why me? Is it because I’m here, because I’m convenient?”

“Yes.” Luciana threw the word at him like she was throwing a knife and felt his fingers tighten even more in her hair. Of course, it wasn’t true. She didn’t want him because he was convenient. She wanted him despite how wrong he was for her. She wanted him because she hadn’t been able to bring herself to want anyone else. He didn’t need to know that, though. He didn’t need to know how special he was to her. She was setting herself up for heartbreak by inviting him into her bed—in a manner of speaking—and she hated him for that, but it didn’t stop her from wanting him.

“Then find another,” Gianpierre ground out through clenched teeth. In that instant, he released her hair and was gone, stepping away.

They weren’t on the restoration site but yet Luciana felt the earth shift beneath her feet. “What is this?” she demanded. “At first you’ll barely look at me, but now you live with me. You kissed me in the tunnels—without invitation—but now you push me away. What is your game?” The pain of being rejected by someone she wanted so much made her temples throb and made it difficult to think clearly. Even though he hadn’t done so, she felt as if she had been bodily shoved away from him with a violence that filled her with a venomous anger she’d never felt before. She’d been holding in so much since her sister had died, bottling it all up and making sure she was forever the strong one so that Natalia could feel secure and safe, but now all of her feelings of abandonment boiled their way to the surface and focused on Gianpierre’s retreating back.

Taking off her strappy sandals, she threw one of them at him and hit him square between his heavily muscled shoulders. “Look at me!” she yelled. “Don’t walk away from me! You don’t get to walk away from me!” Everyone left her. Everyone. And she couldn’t take it happening tonight.

Gianpierre whirled on her and stalked forward with long strides that devoured the distance between them. He came at her so fast that despite her demands that he give her his full attention, Luciana walked backwards until she hit the small, windowed shed that he’d constructed as a rooftop gym. His powerful hands were on her arms below her shoulders a second later, and his touch sent a jolt of electricity through her. His simple nearness did something to her. It made her defiantly happy to be alive.

“I don’t want you,” Gianpierre rumbled low in his throat with his head tilted and leaning forward as if ready to kiss her, and Luciana couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or to himself. She had the sense that he was fighting an internal war, one that he was losing, but then his face hardened. “You’re trouble. You’re a burden.”

Luciana gasped, and her hands shot out to slam her palms into his chest. She knew that it wasn’t enough to move him if he wasn’t willing to move, but her force pushed him aside all the same.

A burden… In the half-second of selfish grief after her sister had died, that was how she had seen Natalia—a burden that she wasn’t ready for and didn’t want—but she’d been wrong. Natalia was a burden that blessed her life every single second of every day.

Tears stung Luciana’s eyes as she marched back toward the door that would lead to the apartment below, but she never reached it. Gianpierre’s hand closed around her arm and turned her to face him.

Toe to toe, chest to chest, they stood with their faces mere inches from each other.

“I don’t want you,” Gianpierre said again, “but you have turned me into a man who has to have you. Before you, I’d been content. I’d been happy. But now all I do is want, and you’re always at the center of it.” Despite his angry words and tone, he brushed a tear away from Luciana’s cheek with a feather-light touch. “You and that little girl, you’re eclipsing everything I’ve worked toward in my life, and it’s killing me. I am not the man I was when I met you. You’ve replaced him and left a person who is torn in two. How can I be in Dubai doing what I must do and still be here with you, making love to you and living my life for you?”

“Kiss me or move out tonight,” Luciana said on a breath. “Stop living on the fence.” She didn’t know where the words came from, but they were there and within her aching heart she knew that she meant them. She couldn’t be half of who she was with Gianpierre anymore. She needed him to need her as badly as she needed him. And it wasn’t a want, it was a need, a painful one.

Gianpierre dipped his head forward so that his lips brushed hers. “I’m going to kiss you, and I still have to leave. Not tonight, but I will leave.”

“Then do it already,” Luciana taunted. “Kiss me!”

That was all it took. Gianpierre’s hands were in her hair and his mouth was crushing hers. Luciana’s hands clawed at his back as she climbed his body to wrap her long legs around his hips. She kissed him back as hard as he kissed her until her mind filled with the sense of him and pushed all thoughts of everything else about her life out. All worry left her. All consequences were gone. There was only him and his body against hers. Visceral. Animal. It was what she wanted from him. Needed from him.

Their kiss never faltered as Gianpierre walked them blindly forward. With one jerk, the door of his small rooftop gym was nearly torn off its hinges, and it was not until Gianpierre had her laying on her back atop the forgiving cushioned gym floor mats that his kiss softened.

She fought him when she felt his body ease against hers. She didn’t want a lover in him. She wanted someone to have sex with. He wasn’t going to stay, and she didn’t want her body to be deceived into thinking that he cared. Someone who cared didn’t just up and leave the person they cared about, and that meant she was nothing to him. She wouldn’t have him fooling her into thinking otherwise. So, she sank her hands into his thick hair and squeezed as she intensified their kiss back into its formerly crushing intensity. But Gianpierre’s hands closed around her wrists and lifted her arms above her head and pinned them to the floor. He then lifted his chest away from hers as he gave more of his weight to his elbows.

“Let me go,” Luciana demanded, struggling to regain control of her arms so that she could rip the shirt off his back.

“Not like this, cuore mio,” he said. She recognized the words. He was calling her his heart, and it made her fight him more. She would not believe he cared about her more than what was convenient for him to do. She tried to sit up enough to take back control of their now-absent kiss, but with her hands pinned over her head, she wasn’t able to. Anger raged within her, and she bit back words designed to cut and injure. “Not like this,” Gianpierre whispered again, as he let his body’s weight gently settle on top of her. He blanketed her with himself, and before Luciana knew what was happening, her lower lip began to quiver.

“She wasn’t supposed to leave me,” she said, her voice full of anguish. “We had our whole lives in front of us. It’s not fair. Why couldn’t she have made the trip to the airport one minute earlier or one minute later? Why did it have to be right then? I was just coming to visit for a couple of weeks. I didn’t know everything was going to change.” Her voice broke, and her breath grew staggered as hot tears fell from the corners of her eyes.

Gianpierre released her wrists and stroked her hair as he pressed his cheek to hers. “Sometimes our lives change when we’re not looking, cuore mio.”

Luciana wrapped her arms around his back and held on as her breath stole away from her body and silent cries filled the air. It was the first time she had cried—really cried—since Sophia had died. She had wanted to before, had needed to, but had always felt too selfish to let go. Somehow, though, she felt allowed to do that with Gianpierre. He made the world calmer and less rushed. He made it okay to be herself. He was strong enough to let her fall apart.

When his lips found hers again, she let him lead her in a kiss that opened her heart despite the scars left on it from the loss of her sister. She held to him, and lost herself in his gentle touch as his lips trailed across her cheek to capture the lobe of her ear. Her pain turned into something else, then. It turned into a hunger, and she moaned as she arched her back to press her breasts into the solid mass of his chest. Pulling at his shirt, she tugged it free from his pants so that she could drag her nails up his naked skin. His body shivered and then his muscles bunched and moved beneath her touch as he found her mouth once more and kissed her deeply.

With a pull on the belt that wrapped around her waist, Gianpierre got her dress open and bliss followed as his hands explored every inch of her flesh. A second later, Luciana was pulling his shirt off over the top of his head.

Sitting up, they helped each other escape from their clothes like a couple of rushed teenagers eager to get to their promised prizes beneath. With herself bared before him, Luciana was surprised to discover that she did not feel naked. She felt at home, but her eyes travelled over him like he was a new favorite gift on Christmas morning. Athletic didn’t begin to describe him. His powerfully muscled body was perfection, and watching him shift and move was poetry in motion. And then, lower down at the end of the little happy trail of hair beneath his belly button, his ready want of her was undeniable… and impressive.

“Protection?” It was all she had to say before he reached for his jeans and pulled his wallet free. A little foil packet appeared in his hand a second later. With a rip to open it, she helped him roll the condom on over his thick girth and ample length.

With that done, Gianpierre picked Luicana up and helped her settle astride his lap with his hard length trapped between their bodies. Sliding her hands behind his neck, she kissed him once and then again before reaching down between them to stroke the tip of his head with a swirling finger.

Gianpierre moaned and pulled her hips tighter against him with a hand flat against her lower back. Instinctively, she lifted her knees and immediately found herself pressed into the hard shaft that would soon sink its length into her. But that didn’t appear to be Gianpierre’s plan just yet. Holding her hips snug, he moved his own so that he ground himself against her, rubbing the underside of his heavy want through the layers of her hot center.

Luciana’s breath hitched when he shifted his angle and the stroke of his head’s ridge over her caught her clit just right. Letting her eyes drift half-closed, she moved her hips in a circular motion as he held her in place to slide and move against her. It wasn’t long before her entire body was trembling and tight as her core clenched with its entire strength and a growing desperation to release its tension in a wave of ecstasy. The thumb of Gianpierre’s free hand brushed across her beaded nipples before he dipped his head to capture one with his mouth and then his teeth.

Luciana whimpered as she held on to the back of his head, completely at his mercy as he teased and tortured the two most sensitive spots on her body. It was more than she could stand, and arching her neck back as she fully gave him her chest, she let herself fill with a blossoming warmth of trust. He held her as her body lost itself to the pulsing pleasure that flooded all of her senses to finally leave her limp in his arms.

He enveloped her in his strong embrace, and Luciana’s body stayed loose and relaxed as he shifted them until she was flat on her back with her knees bent in the air and him laying between her thighs. She felt exposed in that moment in a way that she hadn’t felt since her earliest days of sharing her body with a man. Somehow, she felt new. She felt as though she was having her very last first-time.

Gianpierre reached between them and she felt the fullness of his head press against the throbbing, ready ache of her center. He kissed her then, soft and sweet, and he waited until she kissed him back before his weight shifted and she felt herself stretched by him. The experience was more than she’d expected… more intense, more gentle, more sensitive. She could feel every part of him, every glorious inch that filled her being with the certainty of his own. She sighed, letting go of all her tension as she took in his strength and opened herself to him as much as she could. His hips flexed and his back bowed, and she cried out as he sank himself to his full depth. He was more than she’d ever known in so many ways. He was infinitely strong and demanding yet also painstakingly patient and coaxing of her body to give up its secrets of how to make her cry out his name.

His hips ground against her and then he thrust hard enough to pulse her body forward. He held her knee high against his side with the tips of his fingers hooked behind its bend. He thrust again and again, hard yet taking his time, a contrast of motions that confused her brain and made her dizzy. Again and again, he reached her greatest depths and made her channel’s pleasure points swell with an overwhelming need to become his in ways she had never been anyone’s before.

Her breathing came in gasps and her body shook, hanging on to her pleasure and refusing to let it flow, but Gianpierre kept on and on, moving inside of her, thrusting and grinding, steady and strong until finally she cried out and held to him with all her might. It was not until then that his pace changed, that he sped up, that he took her harder and faster until the pounding pace that he needed for his own release triggered a rolling orgasm to overflow from her core as she clamped herself tight around him yet again. With a ragged cry of his own, Gianpierre lost all that he was inside of her. The walls he’d built around his heart crumbled. She could feel it, she was sure of it. And, just as she’d been at the start, he was now naked with her. Truly naked, bare and vulnerable.

She held him tight. She held him until his labored breath slowed and the shields of his heart seemed to reconstruct themselves. She could tell when the distance between their souls increased even though the heat of their bodies, flesh against flesh, was still entangled.

He will never be mine, she reminded herself again, and this time she believed it.