His eyes flickered with sparks of amber light as her lips met his skin. She only meant the contact to be one of gratefulness and caring, but she felt the jolt of awareness too.
Her chest tightened, heat spreading across her breasts, licking down to her core.
Oh, yes, she still cared for him.
She wanted him.
Memories of stolen kisses and secret, tender embraces filled her head. She’d had only one night with Ettore, naked in each other’s arms, but she had held it close to her heart ever since.
Neither the cruelty of time nor fate had diminished anything she felt for him. To the contrary, it had only made the craving deepen. It had only made her recognize how keenly she had felt his loss all this time.
And how profoundly happy she was to be reunited with him now.
Even if in a shadowed corner of her heart she dreaded that fate wasn’t nearly finished with them yet.
Chapter 7
Savage didn’t know how he’d managed to endure more than an hour in the truck, seated so close to Bella. Her thigh had rested against his the whole trip, contact that had distracted him, soothed him…aroused him beyond reason.
It sent his mind spinning back in time, to another evening drive they’d taken together on vineyard business. The one that had ended with both of them undressed and tangled together on a blanket under a midnight blue sky streaked with shooting stars.
“Come on, Ettore! Isn’t it amazing?”
She grabbed a bottle of the newest Aglianico from the wooden cases in back of the truck and started running up the side of the nearby hill. He watched her go, her long legs bare and her curvy backside clad in grape-stained, faded denim shorts. He was always in a state of arousal around her, but seeing her dance away from him under the thin moon glow turned his cock to granite.
“Bella, you’d better come back. I don’t think this is a good idea.” Nevertheless, he pulled an old wool blanket from behind the seat and jogged after her.
She helped him spread it out on the cool grass, then pulled him down next to her. “Here, open this.” She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew.
“I don’t drink wine,” he reminded her as he pulled the cork out with a soft pop. None of his kind did, but she knew that well enough.
“Do you ever wish you could? Even a taste?”
“No.” He had never craved wine, but then he watched her tip the bottle to her lips to take a sip and he knew a thirst unlike any he’d ever known. Her throat worked as she swallowed, her head tipped back, drawing his eyes to the creamy column of her neck.
He cleared his throat, searching for his voice as his fangs punched out of his gums and his vision began to fire with amber. “Your father and Sal are expecting us back at the vineyard.”
She slowly brought the bottle down from her mouth and set it in the grass. Her lips were wet, as dark as cherries from the wine. Long black lashes framed the solemn pools of her eyes. “Do you want to go, Ettore?”
He knew it as the chance it was—his only hope to stop this need for Bella before it went too far. They had been circling this moment for weeks. Hell, from the moment he first walked on to the Genova property.
Fleeting glances. Brief touches. Shared laughter. Then, later, after he’d fought his attraction for as long as he could, there had been a kiss, a few stolen embraces. Followed by heated caresses that had left both of them in flames.
But she was an innocent, just eighteen years old to his twenty-five.
Even worse, she was the Breedmate sister of his closest friend.
The last thing he should be doing was sitting beside her in the starlight, staring at her throat and wishing he was a better man. One with honor enough to lie and say he wasn’t out of his mind with desire for her.
“What do you want, Ettore?”
“You.”
He took her down beneath him on the blanket and unwrapped her as reverently as a precious gift. Each breathless moment was seared into his senses, from her soft moans as he kissed and licked and sucked every tempting inch of her…to her shuddering cries as he entered her virgin body and introduced her to an even deeper pleasure as the sea of shooting stars skated overhead.
Savage groaned at the uninvited recollection and the need it stoked in him even now.
By the time they reached the ancient hillside town of Matera, his body was rife with desire, his cock so hard it was a wonder he’d been able to drive.
His palm still burned from the sweet kiss she’d placed there.
His veins throbbed with hunger for her—a hunger that was startlingly more intense than simple desire. If he’d imagined that their years apart would cool his feelings for her, that tender kiss to the center of his hand had obliterated all hope of that.