Her eyes grew thoughtful, the warmth he’d been sorely missing flooding back in them. “So you don’t like considering what you do philanthropy?”
“I just have the means to achieve things. So I do.”
“And you hide your altruism while you leak info about a criminal past and affiliations. You want the world to learn about your lethal edge but not your gooey center, huh?”
He swung her around to her squealing delight, grinned down widely at her. “See? You read me like no one ever has.” Putting her back on her feet, he probed, “But how did you know about Casa do Sol? Did you investigate them, too?”
“No. I just made visits everywhere, and they were the only ones I felt...good about.”
“So again your instincts proved infallible. You read everyone, not just me. It’s your superpower.”
“It never felt like a good thing. It leaves me with precious few people in my life.”
“You only need a few who are precious.” He squeezed her tighter. “Though I’d rather you only need me.”
The flush that flooded her face was adorable. Before he commented on her paradoxical shyness—given that she hadn’t batted an eye while asking him to have sex—he realized his hand was hurting like hell. He’d been using it as if nothing was wrong with it.
He raised it up. “Aren’t you going to ask about my hand?”
A stubborn look came into her eyes. “No.”
“You don’t care that I broke it?”
“Are you going to take me now?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t care.”
He guffawed as she stuck her nose up at him. He’d never laughed that way, so elated and unfettered.
Still laughing, he swept her up, and his heart boomed at the way she clung to him, fitting into his every emptiness. The memory of her earlier rejection jolted through him, making him gather her tighter. He was never letting her recede from him again.
In her bedroom, another place full of her mementos, he laid her down on the burgundy comforter and came down half over her. She wriggled beneath him until she’d brought him fully over her, pulling him into an all-body hug.
He rose on one arm, the pain in his loins becoming agony. “You’ll blow all my fuses.”
She arched up into him. “Serves you right.”
“It wouldn’t serve you right.”
She giggled, clung harder and brought him down between her thighs.
He groaned. “I was right. You are an enchantress.”
“I was wrong. You’re not a sorcerer. That sort of implies a level of benevolence. You’re pure evil.”
At once laughing at her pout and grunting in pain, he rolled off her. It was unheard of for him to defer having anything he wanted. But doing so with her was the most pleasurable thing he’d ever experienced.
If anyone had told him last night he’d be lying side by side with her in her bed, just to hold her and talk, when he’d never hungered for anything as much as he hungered for her, he would have thought them insane. But now, he couldn’t imagine anything better as she slipped her limbs into the exact places where he needed them, holding on with the exact intensity he craved.
Sighing after she’d settled into him as if she’d been doing so all their lives, he reached over her and picked a frame off her crowded bedside table.
The photo was of a woman and a little girl, both grinning unreservedly at the photographer, throwing their arms wide as if to embrace him and the life they loved with him. The object of their all-out affection was obviously her father.
A pang twisted in his gut at yet another proof of the depth of emotions she had for that man.
Banishing Ferreira from his thoughts, he focused on this piece of her past, another detail bringing him closer to her.