He locked hard arms around her, holding her tight, just short of squeezing her. His hands moved with possessive familiarity, one splaying under her bottom and angling her hips into his groin.
She rubbed against him, inciting him with the grind of her hips and the scrape of her teeth against his lips. She wanted to bite him. Hurt him.
He grunted, kissing her harder as he took control, holding her with restrained power just short of crushing her while he pulled at her lips and ravaged her mouth.
To hell with her recovery and the tenderness across her belly. She wanted him. Her body went weak, signaling her willingness to be taken.
She felt the reaction in him, the gather of his muscles as if he would pick her up and carry her to the nearest surface. The floor. He had in the past.
He tore his mouth from hers instead, one hand moving to the back of her head to tuck her crown under his chin where he held her as though protecting her from the fireball that had exploded into flames between them. They panted, hearts slamming.
To her eternal shock, she realized they were in a restaurant. Voices drifted over the music from the other rooms.
She closed her eyes, needing this moment to collect herself. That had been raw and voracious. Alarming. They’d never been like that before. It made her a little frightened for when they could make love again. They might shred each other to pieces.
“It hurts,” he said gruffly. The hand low on her spine pressed just enough to make her aware of the iron-hard muscle digging into her tender abdomen. “It hurts to touch you and not have you. To smell your hair and feel you against me and kiss without having the rest. It damned well hurts, Octavia. That’s why I stayed away. But I’m not letting you leave me.”
Fine trembles gripped her as she tried to think and couldn’t. She just wanted to feel. She wanted him. She wanted to believe this was something they could build on.
“You haven’t even said you’re sorry,” she managed to say, forcing herself to pull back enough to see him. Pathetic as she was, she needed his support to stand, even as her voice cracked with suffering.
Remorse convulsed his features.
“I am sorry.” It wasn’t an apology. He wasn’t trying to convince her. It was a statement. “Deeply sorry. I took you for granted and underestimated my cousin. But how can I ask your forgiveness when I’ll never forgive myself?”
She’d never heard that particular scrape in his voice before. Never seen such a bleak, devastating anguish leech out all the green to completely gray his eyes. His fingers on her arms were gentle, but she felt pain from them. His pain.
An urge to comfort pressed her heart toward him, giving her a flat, aching sensation against the inner wall of her chest. She wanted to tell him it was all right, but it wasn’t. And he knew it. He felt it. He wasn’t as oblivious as she feared, which filled her with that wretched, misguided hope that kept sparkling before her like a lure.
He very tenderly caressed her cheek, fingertips smoothing her hair back and tracing a line down her jaw. The backs of his knuckles grazed under her chin and down the delicate, pulsing cords in her throat.
“We’ll save sleeping together for when we reach Italy. I want you to rest as much as you can while we’re here. Heal.” His touch, the look in his eyes, made it sound as though he wanted more than physical repair for her. As though he understood her heart was fractured and needed time.
The first tendrils of mending began as she glimpsed the man who’d turned her inside out on a three-week honeymoon, concerned and focused and with a touch like magic, thumb grazing her bottom lip so it felt puffy and incapable of anything but kissing.
Their next course came, but they just stood there, looking into each other’s eyes. After a long moment, he dropped one more very, very gentle kiss on her mouth and slowly released her, leaving her burning as he drew her back to their table.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE WENT TO Naples with him. They landed three weeks later and went straight to see his grandfather at the Castello di Ferrante.
The castello would be Alessandro’s one day, but all of his extended family came and went, treating it as a hotel. A few members were more or less permanent, something Octavia privately viewed as squatting. Alessandro’s youngest sister had been one of them until recently, before her modeling career took off. Now she might have a room here, but she spent most of her time in Milan, Paris and New York.
From the few times they’d spoken, Octavia had liked all of her husband’s sisters, but the older two had families of their own and lived in other parts of the country so she didn’t see them often. Alessandro had far more cousins than she did and was close with many of them. It was an odd dynamic for her to have been thrust into since most of her father’s siblings had emigrated to America and Australia before she was born and her mother was standoffish with her side. Octavia had grown up in a familial void made worse by being an only child. It had made her feel like an anomaly in her own country, where big dinners and frequent reunion s were the norm.