Forbidden Never Felt This Good

~ 26

0026

~ Luca ~

I watched Jean walk out of that conference room like he had just won something, and I wanted to put my fist through the wall.

I didn't. I stood exactly where I was, exactly as I should, expression giving away nothing.

But inside I was running through every reason that man should not be breathing the same air as Aria, let alone taking her to dinner. And the list was getting longer by the second.

Jean-Paul Merci. Calculated, sitting across from her with that smile that didn't reach anywhere near his eyes, watching her the way people watch things they want to acquire.

I had clocked him the moment he walked in. The way he assessed the room, the way his gaze had moved over Aria with something that had nothing to do with business, roaming around her body.

And she had said yes. She had looked him dead in the face and said yes.

What was she thinking?

The door clicked shut and the room was suddenly just the two of us and I turned toward her and opened my mouth to address it…

"What were you thinking?” I said out of anger.

“What do you mean? I am doing what I was supposed to. Is that a problem for you!”

Her voice was easy. Almost amused. Like she had already prepared for this exact moment, which, knowing her, she probably had.

She turned from the table to face me and then her hand came up and pressed lightly against my chest, and whatever I had been about to say simply evaporated.

I looked down at her. She didn't seem to notice what she was doing.

"I know what you're going to say," she continued, her tone patient, not rushed and calculated. When she speaks like this, it reminds me of her father. "But this time, we will play by my rules."

I said nothing. Mostly because her hand was still on my chest and it was doing a significant amount of damage to my ability to form sentences.

"Jean is hiding something." She said it plainly, like she was commenting on the weather. "I don't know what yet, and neither does anyone else. But keeping him at arm's length doesn't help us figure it out faster." She tilted her head slightly. "Keeping him close does."

"By going to dinner with him."

"By going to dinner with him," she confirmed.

"Aria—"

"He thinks he's walking out of here with the upper hand." She said it with confidence. "Let him think that. Men who think they've won get comfortable, and comfortable men get careless." She raised an eyebrow. "I'm not going on a date, Luca. I'm gathering information."

I looked at her for a long moment.

The logic was sound. It was actually exactly the kind of move her father would make, and the fact that she had thought of it herself, in real time, in the middle of what should have been a standard business meeting, I would have been impressed if I wasn't so busy being furious.

"You could have discussed this before accepting," I said.

"There wasn't time for a committee meeting." She rolled her eyes.

"I'm not a committee."

"You're my bodyguard. I am well aware, I think you made that perfectly clear Mr. Moretti."

There it was. I deserved that one.

I exhaled slowly. She was still close, closer than she had probably intended when she reached out to stop whatever I had been about to say, and neither of us had moved to correct the distance.

I was aware of exactly how many inches separated us. I was aware of what was forming down there.

"I don't like it," I said.

"I am not telling you to." She said calmly.

"He's not trustworthy." I argued back

"I know that too. That's the whole point."

Her calmness mixed with coldness is so f*****g hot. There it was, I was thinking with my d**k again.

She was looking up at me with those eyes that have always known too much, and she was so close I could see the faint shadows beneath them from last night's lost sleep.

She still had a trace of the morning's warmth in her expression from the shelter, something that hadn't fully left her face.

My mind went to Jean’s hands reaching for hers across a dinner table somewhere. The image twisted in my chest, not anger alone, but something worse. Envy and longing. Everything I couldn’t afford to feel.

I didn't know when the gap closed.

I couldn't tell which of us moved. Maybe both of us. Maybe neither and it was just gravity, the kind that has always been there, the recklessness .

As if the rules I’d set for myself to keep my distance, and be disciplined, all those sensible, recited reasons meant anything against this. Against what I am feeling.

My mouth found hers.

She didn't pull back.

I kissed her the way I had been starved for days, like something that had been held too tightly for too long and finally let go.

She was warm and soft under my hands, her fingers curling slightly against my chest where they had already been resting, and the folder she had been holding slipped from her other hand and neither of us looked at it.

This woman. This impossible, infuriating, extraordinary woman.

Every time felt new. Like the first time and a hundred times all at once. I didn't understand how that worked but I had stopped trying to explain anything that had to do with Aria Santoro. She existed outside of explanations.

We pulled apart slowly. The kind of slowness that means neither person is entirely sure they want to.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Both of us breathing a little differently than we had been thirty seconds ago, the space between us smaller than it should have been given where we were and what we were supposed to be doing.

Her eyes searched mine. I let her look.

She opened her mouth like she was about to say something.

A sharp knock landed on the conference room door.

I closed my eyes in frustration.

Her expression shifted. The moment sealed itself shut like it had never existed.

"Come in," she called out, her voice steady in a way that mine would not have been, already turning toward the door. Then she turned to me. “Please, resume back to your post Luca.”

Ouch.