THE DON'S SECRET HEIR

Chapter Three: What I could not Name

"I want to kiss you." The words were barely sound

More like a dragged breath than voice. They landed against the side of my face and traveled through my whole body before I had processed them with my mind.

I should have said no.

I knew I should have said no. I had come here for Camilla. I had driven through the rain for her, for the truth of what happened to her, and she was just two days in the ground and this was their apartment and her love story and I was standing in the middle of it and I should have said no.

The soft gasp that left my mouth was not the sound of no.

He kissed me softly at first.

Just pressing his mouth against mine. Breathing into me, not taking, just touching, like he was asking something too careful to say out loud, I could feel the whiskey in his mouth, could taste the breath of hotness in his breath

I kissed him back.

And the softness shattered.

He kissed back so fiercely now, like he had a pent up lust hiding beneath.

I wasn’t sure if he was actually kissing me or just reminiscing how he’d made up with Camilla here, before I had time to process what to decide on

His hands came to my waist and pulled me in hard and the kiss turned deep and demanding and I grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him back with something I did not have a name for yet, with grief and heat and the desperate recklessness of a woman who has just buried her best friend and needs to feel something that is not loss.

I slid my hands into his hair, he has dark and thick curls and so impossibly soft it pulled a sound from me into his mouth, and he growled low against my lips and pulled me closer and I stopped thinking entirely.

He walked me backward and I went without hesitation, all the reasons I should’ve stop him before dissolving one by one like lights going out in windows until there was nothing left lit in me but this.

He took the wet dress from my body in one slow movement and the way he looked at me in the amber light was not what I had expected. It was not just hunger, though it was that, but something more careful underneath it, something that moved through his dark eyes like a man holding something he understands he cannot afford to be careless with.

He came back to me with the warmth of him, a solid shock gasped from my mouth as he came against my skin and kissed my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, unhurried and deliberate, his hands caressing every inch of me like I was something worth learning.

When he pulled my left n****e slowly into his mouth I made a sound I had no control over, desperate and completely honest, and he lifted his eyes to my face without stopping and I felt the look the same way I felt the touch, then he moved on to my right n****e, tasting, teasing, circling his tongue round the dark spot, I gasped out loud

He worked his way down my body, his hands never leaving my n*****s, squeezing and caressing then he came back up and I was trembling by the time he settled over me, and I looked up at his face and found him already looking at mine.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked into his beautiful italian eyes and I felt his gaze asking for a quiet permission

He slid inside me slowly and I gasped at the ceiling, at the amber light and the dark above it, at the rain still running soft against the glass. He filled me completely and stayed still for a moment, just watching my face, letting me feel all of it, and there was something in that pause that was more intimate than anything that came before or after.

Then he moved.

Slowly at first, pulling back with a deliberateness that made me reach for him, pulling him back in, and he moved with the patience of a man who had decided to take his time and meant it. Learning the places that made my breath change. Staying at each one. Building something between us that I had no language for.

Then he moved harder.

I dug my fingers into his shoulders and buried my face in his neck and the rhythm built until there was nothing left in the room but the rain and his breathing and mine and the particular undoing of a woman who stopped fighting something she could not name and let herself fall.

I climaxed with my hands in his hair and my whole body pulling tight and breaking open at once, and he followed me with a sound that was raw and unguarded, nothing controlled in it, just real, just honest, just him.

I lay in the dark afterward and listened to him breathe.

I looked at the ceiling.

I let the guilt arrive, and I did not argue with it. I just let it sit with everything else.

When his breathing told me he was fast asleep, I got up.

I dressed in the dark. My clothes were still damp. I found my shoes by the door. I did not look back at him and not because I did not want to. Because I understood that if I looked back I would lose something I needed to keep.

I put the key back under the pot.

I sat in my car outside for some moment with my forehead against the wheel while the rain finished itself and the city went completely quiet.

I had come for closure.

I drove home with something I could not name and could not put back.

I found the name for it six weeks later in a London clinic, alone and very still, holding a small white stick in both hands in a room that had no sound in it at all.

I sat there for the longest of time and decided right there its mine to keep, my cross to bear.

Then I went home, and called my mother, and started building a life that could carry the weight of what I had just decided.

Few months later, I named him Andre. I didn’t want to involve Lucas, some secrets are best buried forever or so I told myself I was protecting my son.

I told myself many things.

Only for me to walk five years later back into the arms of the man I’d been hiding from.