He grabbed her hips as she began to turn away, and jerked her close, pressing his face against her mound. His mouth moved, hot and hungrily against her clit, his strong, clever tongue probing, seeking.
The feeling was knee-weakening, shockingly wonderful, but she was too electric, too emotional to bear it. She swatted at his face. “No.”
His expression was now impossible to read in the darkness. “Your ‘no’ is meaningless.” His voice was low, as soft as silk. Full of his own secret knowledge of her. His mysterious power.
She shivered at its promise. “Too bad for you. Let go.”
“No, I will not.” He flung her down onto the bed, and yanked her arm toward the headboard.
Too late, she realized what he planned, and by then, the cuff was snapped closed over her wrist. She flailed and slapped with her free hand, but he slid down the length of her and pulled her body on the bed so that she was stretched out, long and taut. All she could reach were handfuls of his hair, which she grabbed, yanked. In vain.
He put his mouth to her, and loved her with it, eagerly, desperately. He suckled, licked and swirled her into a state of slick, creamy desperation. Jerking, shivering. Trying not to whimper and beg.
The handcuffs helped, perversely. Even though she yanked and rattled, even though the metal hurt, the cuff gave her a fixed point of reference that she could cling to. It left the rest of her free…to feel it.
Really feel it, as she never had before. She’d always had to pretend to like cunnilingus, for those lovers who had insisted upon it. Too intimate, too exposed. It had been hard to pretend.
She wasn’t pretending now. She writhed at the tender tremolo fluttering across her clit, the slide up and down the furled folds of her labia, the plunge of his tongue into her pussy. He found her sweet spots, and exploited them, exalted them.
Time stretched and warped. She came apart, over and over, until she stopped struggling and lay there, damp and sprawled and vibrating.
He turned on the hideous bedside lamp, and picked the lock again, then petted and kissed the angry red marks on her wrist.
She glanced at the huge erection waving right at eye level, and cleared her throat. “Ah, do you plan to do anything with that?”
“If you want it,” he said quietly. “I get tired of hearing only no.”
“You won’t hear it this time.” She caressed his cock with one hand and cupped his balls with the other, swirling her fingers tenderly around the hot, heavy globes. She pulled him down on top of her, guided him between her legs. Nudging, wiggling, pressing him inside.
Tears welled into her eyes at the perfection of it when he pushed himself deeper. They settled into a lazy rocking against the squeaking bed, clutching and sighing, riding the soft, surging waves. In no hurry. It was all pleasure. It was all perfect. He was perfect.
And if she were not so exhausted, that would have terrified her.
When they were too tired to move, he rolled over onto her and stared down, as if he could see her face in the dark. “Someday you will make that promise to me,” he said.
She put her hands on his cheeks, stroking the angular shape of his bones, the faint, scratchy sting of his beard. “I will not make false promises,” she said softly. “Not to you, Val.”
He turned his head, kissed her palm, with those soft, hot, supple lips. “No,” he said, his voice stubborn. “The promise will be real.”
She shook her head. “You’re wildly romantic, Val, did you know that?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Since I met you, I have become so.”
“I hate to break this to you, but I’m the most unromantic person on the planet,” she told him. “Which doesn’t mean that I don’t care.
I did what I did because I care. I wish I could make you understand that.”
“I do understand it.” He grabbed her hand, rubbed it against his cheek. “But I reject it. I will not ask that of the woman I love. I would not ask it of myself. The subject is closed.”
Love. The word made shivers of marvelous terror course through her. Along with something else, something nameless, sweet and dangerous, that fluttered through her, rustling her, like wind shaking a tree.
She shoved it away instinctively. “Toughen up, Val.”
“Leave the subject alone,” he growled. “It is irrelevant now. We have burned that bridge, and thank God for it.”
“Not at all,” Tam said crisply. “As far as he knows, you burst in and abducted me. I could contact him, feed his vanity—”
“No!”
She sighed. “Damn it, Val. Do you want to save Imre, or not?”
“Don’t put it in those terms. It is an intolerable thought. Just let me protect you. Please. For once.”
She was startled, and moved. “I don’t need protecting,” she told him.
“Of course you do not,” he said wearily. “I do not give a fuck whether you do or not. I want to protect you anyway.”
She shook her head.
He grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it, shook it. “Tamar. My love.” His voice sounded exhausted. “If someone offered to protect me, I would not spit in her eye. I would be flattered. Perhaps even…touched.”
“Oh, I think we’ve got the touching part all covered,” she murmured, smiling in the dark. “Do you need protecting, Val?”
“No. But it would be nice to have someone care enough to try.”
She pressed her face against his shoulder and licked, savoring the deep, salty flavor of his dried sweat. Relaxing against his heat, his strength. She inhaled and realized that her chest had relaxed.
She was breathing so deeply. The breaths so unforced.
It was true, what he said. It would be tragically futile, to try and protect someone like her.
But it was so nice that he cared enough to try.
The overhead light switched on, without warning. Val and Tam both sprang up, Tam lunging for the purse, with the gun…
Ah. Never mind. It was just Signora Concetta, her hand on the lightswitch, her eyes huge and shocked. She crossed herself.
Tam grabbed for the towel that lay on the floor and wrapped it around herself. Val had no such recourse. He got up, picked up his trousers, and started putting them on. Lazy and unhurried.
The signora took a long look at Val’s body, and cleared her throat, with a great, phleghmy, gurgling cough. She looked as if she were trying not to smile, though the expression looked a bit rusty.
“
Scusatemi.
You wanted dinner,” she said stiffly.
“So I did,” Val said calmly. “I still do. Especially now.”
The good lady had taken Val’s suggestion of wine, bread and cheese as a challenge to inflict death by food. The assault started with a jug of homemade wine and two thick crockery cups to drink it out of. Then a crusty loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese with a filthy green rind that looked like it had been rolled in dead grass, and a creamy, yellow-white interior that smelled powerfully of sheep. A huge, phallic chunk of homemade salami followed.
“
Cinghiale,
” the signora said proudly. “Wild boar. My sons killed it.”
Then she went out onto the patio and bent over what they then realized was an enormous wheelbarrow. She began bringing in earthenware oven crocks, each wrapped in its own artfully knotted dish towel, each filled with a fragrant hot baked or stewed dish.
She covered the rickety table with them and went out again. Her next armful of jars held vegetables preserved in vinegar, oil and garlic; sun-dried tomatos, eggplants, peppers, olives. A basket of freshly picked oranges was the crowning touch, or so they thought until the signora reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a slender-necked corked bottle filled with a pale yellow liquor.
“Limoncello,” she announced proudly. “My own lemons. Very good.”
Val grabbed the lady’s hand, which fortunately no longer appeared to be covered with chicken blood, and kissed it fervently.
“Signora, you are an angel sent from heaven,” he declared. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
The signora yanked her hand back with a smirk and took a long, appreciative look at Val’s naked chest and half-fastened pants. She grunted her approval. “You will need it,” she said.
“Buon appetito.”
“God, yes,” he said in heartfelt tones.
The signora frowned at Tam and pinched her upper arm. “Eat some of my
braciole
,” she admonished. “You’re too skinny. That man will squash you.”
After the signora had gone, they perched on the rickety, termite-riddled chairs on each side of the loaded table, and dug into the feast.
Tam discovered, to her astonishment, that food just kept on going right into her and space kept opening up for more. It was so different from her usual feeling when eating or trying to—that the food was bumping up against a blank stone wall that would let nothing through.
Not tonight. Tonight, she was open, yawning wide, eager.
Usually, strong tastes repelled her. Tonight, they were strangely marvelous. She ate three times as much as she usually managed to choke down, and Val inhaled over ten times that much on his own.
When she finally stopped, stuffed, she sat back and just watched in awe as he continued to eat, and eat, and eat.
“You’re risking your life with that stuff, you know,” she informed him. He layered sun-dried tomatoes with the wild boar salami, cheese, and fleshy red festoons of peppers on a huge chunk of dripping, oil-soaked bread. “Salmonella, botulism, and ten other lethal bacteria that I could name.”
“Don’t name them.” His white teeth bit down, eyes closing in delight as he chewed. “And this from a woman who travels with at least twenty different types of deadly poison in her beauty case?”
Tam grabbed an orange and began to peel. At least its contents would be more or less sterile. “That’s different. Those compounds were cooked in a lab under controlled conditions by people who hold advanced degrees in chemistry from MIT and Stanford.”
He ripped off another chunk of bread and fearlessly prepared another heap. “But they do not taste as good,” he pointed out.
She took a bite of orange. The explosive, tangy sweetness made her gasp. “The chicken blood alone might carry you away,” she warned.
Val stabbed his fork into the crock that held thinly sliced dark meat wrapped around flavorful cheese, hot pepper, parsley and garlic, floating in a rich lake of spiced tomato sauce. He chewed fearlessly and stared her in the face, a suggestive gleam in his eyes.
“Don’t think for one second that you’re going to kiss me after you eat all that garlic,” she warned him.
“Don’t think for one second that you can deny me,” he retorted coolly. “I’m much bigger than you are. Faster, too.”
“Ah, but I’m more treacherous,” she teased him.
His face sobered. He looked at the food in his hand as if he’d forgotten what to do with it. “I would not want to put that to the test.”
She missed that fleeting moment of lightness. It was so rare in her life to laugh and joke, kick around a man and have him come back for more. To have fun. Typical Tam. Trust her to kill it by accident.
She tended to kill things, as a rule. She abruptly hated herself for it. “I won’t betray you if I can help it,” she said, a lame attempt to save the moment.
“Me neither,” he replied quietly. “I swear it.”
She lost her appetite for the uneaten orange, delicious though it was. She held it out. “Freshen your breath with this,” she commanded. “And then come back to bed.”
That worked, but sex always did with men. His face brightened.
He devoured the orange, stripped off his pants to reveal his already lengthening cock, and slid between the sheets, holding the covers up for her. Oddly, his doggish male predictability bothered her less than usual tonight. She eased between the covers, curling up against his heat.
He was, of course, at full salute. It was ridiculous, but she felt too mellow to say anything about it, even when he rolled on top of her.
She was wet and soft from the last time, and very sensitive. He pushed his big phallus slowly inside her. Tam looped her arms around his shoulders and wiggled, seeking the perfect angle.
“Do not come inside me again,” she warned.
“I will not come at all,” he assured her. “I’ve come enough.”
She made a dubious sound. He took her face in his hands and looked earnestly into her eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “Please.”
The snide comeback was ready on her lips, but somehow she stopped it. It was the look in his eyes, the intensity behind the words.
He wasn’t feeding her a line, jerking her around. It was a plea from someplace deep within him. He wasn’t even talking about sex.
She swallowed, clamping down on her mortal dread of being made a fool of. She could risk this. Maybe just this much, for once.
“I will…try to,” she said, haltingly.
He bent his head down and kissed her reverently on the forehead.
“Thank you,” he said. “I will try to be worthy of your trust.”
That was too much for her. “Oh, stop it, you melodramatic fool,” she snapped. “Don’t get swishy on me, Val. I can’t handle it.”
He proceeded to wrap her in a breathlessly tight, hot, marvelous embrace and express himself nonverbally, most eloquently…and to her utter satisfaction.
András strolled down the darkened corridor of I Santi Medici. The security of the place was lax. He’d slipped in a door that someone had left conveniently propped open; he’d sauntered through dim, deserted halls and stairwells, and he’d been obliged to kill no one so far. The nurses and doctors on call at this indecent hour had all been elsewhere, chatting in the nurse’s station, or dozing on unused beds. No one noticed him sliding by like a big, quiet ghost.
He knew exactly where to go, having sent flowers earlier that afternoon. The stringy youth who he’d paid to deliver them had ascertained the room number for him. Ah, yes, there it was, a big bouquet of calla lilies and birds-of-paradise. The nurses had placed it with the other flowers clustered around the white and blue ceramic statue of the Madonna who presided at the end of the corridor, her electric crown glowing eerily in the darkness.
A grim-faced old man in pajamas and a green bathrobe sat outside his room door with an IV in his arm, the rack clutched in his fist. No doubt trying to evade the groaning or flatulence of his roomates. He blinked at András with clouded eyes. A witness. Pity. András took note of the room number. Unfortunate for the old man, but he was well into his eighties and clearly not enjoying his life overmuch. András would probably be doing him a favor by holding his nose shut for a few minutes after he finished with Hegel.