I shake my head, eyes tightly shut.
He slides a finger back up to my asshole and holds it there. I’m mortified and turned on and I can’t seem to breathe.
“Open your eyes and look at me.” He brushes his finger over tight hole.
My face burns as I open them to find his eyes on me, darker now, pupils dilated.
He slides his fingers down to my pussy again, rubs a moment longer. Him touching me, it’s different than when I touch myself. Better. He softens his hold on my wrists, lets me slip them from his grip.
“Put your hands underneath you and don’t move.”
I should fight him. Push him off. Tell him to go to hell. But instead, I put my hands underneath myself like he said and watch as with his free hand, he rubs one cheek, then spreads me open.
I’m embarrassed and aroused as he shifts his gaze down and his fingers are moving in my folds, circling my clit.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, drawing his hand away, turning me, sliding me to the floor between his legs so I’m kneeling there.
He cups one hand on the back of my head to draw me up. He kisses me while he slides his other hand down over the seam of my sex to cup me, to rub. When he bites my lip, I open my mouth and my breathing comes in gasps as he slips his tongue inside my mouth and his finger inside my sex and I think this is the most intimate, erotic thing. This. Connected like this. Him and me. Close. So close.
His thumb circles my nub, presses against it. The finger inside me hurts a little but then it’s gone and he’s rubbing my clit and I think I’m going to come.
He shifts his mouth to my ear and my hands are squeezing his thighs, my body arching into his palm. Moving against him.
“That’s good, Gabriela. Like that. You’re so wet.”
I tilt my face up. I want to kiss him again. I want him to kiss me.
He must know because he smiles down at me and when he does kiss me it’s more a sucking of my lower lip than a kiss. I close my eyes and taste him, and I hear myself, my gasps and sighs. And when I slide my hand up along his thigh, I can feel him.
“I want to taste you,” he whispers, and my eyes flutter open as he draws his hand from between my legs and lifts me to lay me back on the ottoman. He spreads my legs and drops down between my knees. With his fingers on either side of my pussy, he opens and looks at me for a long time and him looking at me like this, it makes me feel so strange and all I can do is watch him as he takes me in.
“Stefan,” I start, but I stop because I don’t know what I’m going to say.
“You are so beautiful,” he says.
He runs his chin over my clit, making me gasp at the rough feel of stubble and the instant his mouth closes over it, I gasp, the sensation foreign, his mouth wet and soft and when he begins to suck that hard little nub, I cry out, reaching for him, gripping his hair to pull him closer as my thighs squeeze around him and I come. I come hard, harder than I’ve ever come and I think I’m saying his name. I think that’s me saying his name again and again and again, gasping it, desperate, like I’m gasping for life’s breath.
I don’t know when he finally lifts me onto his lap. I don’t remember him doing that, but he’s cradling me, and I’m limp in his arms, my head against his chest and this is what I want. For him to hold me like this. Safe and sound. Protected.
“I like how you taste,” he says. He tilts my face up with one finger beneath my chin and kisses my lips. I taste myself on him and I want more. More of him. My hand slides to his stomach, to the hard muscle of it. He takes my wrist and pushes it lower and I blink my eyes open to look at him when he closes my hand around himself over his jeans.
He’s big. Big and thick.
“Squeeze,” he tells me.
I do and he makes a sound and the way he looks at me, it’s dark and dirty and it makes me want him more.
“I want you to say my name like that every time you come,” he says, his voice a hoarse breath against my ear.
I close my eyes, not sure what I feel. So many things.
He tucks me closer into him, wrapping his strong arms around me, and I rest my head against his chest and think how I wish I could stay here forever, like this.
When he rests his hand against my thigh, I open my eyes and look at that hand. It’s the one he spanked me with. The one he touched me with.
That’s what I’m thinking when he interrupts me.
“We have some business to settle between us.”
My reckoning.
I turn my gaze up to his.
“Are you ready to answer my questions or do I need to take you back over my knee?” he asks.
We’re not finished yet. Did I think for a second, we were? That he’d given up asking me questions I don’t want to answer?
I shake my head.
“Good.” He draws back and I try to burrow into him, but he pulls away and I’m suddenly cold.
When he perches me on the ottoman, he keeps his hands on my knees and I look at his watch, big and masculine and his hands, big, too.
What did Rafa tell me? To stay in his good graces? I understand that as I look at those hands and remind myself of what he can do with them—good and bad.
I give a shake of my head to clear the fog from my brain. What am I doing?
“Eyes on me, Gabriela,” he says.
I look up at him, at his mouth, it takes all I have to not look away. What did he just do? What did I just let him do?
I hug my arms to myself, shivering, and I sit there, mute.
Who am I? I’m a fighter. I don’t cower to men. And yet, here I am and look at me now. Naked and trembling.
But this game Stefan is playing, it’s new to me. And he’s a pro. I’m out of my element. So far out of my league.
“Were you in Rafa’s car when he was sideswiped?” he asks.
No point in lying anymore. I have no loyalty to Rafa, after all. “You know the answer, or you wouldn’t ask the question.”
“Answer me anyway.”
Silence.
“Is that where the bump on your forehead came from?”
I blink, not denying, not affirming.
“Words. Tell me now.”
“Yes.” He knows. It’s not news to him. It can’t matter anymore.
“The man at the well, who was he?”
“He was the one who sideswiped us. One of them, at least. There were two cars. One on each side.”
“Where were you?”
“Taormina.”
“Why?”
I shake my head. “He invited me along. It was after you and I…after our fight.” I look at this hand, the one I sliced open with my stolen knife. It’s healed mostly. I wonder if it will leave a scar, though. I shift my gaze back to his. “He said he had a meeting and felt bad that I was cooped up. We had lunch. We were on our way back when it happened.”
He doesn’t like this. I can see it in his eyes, in his posture.
“Meeting with whom?” His eyes narrow a little.
“Can I get dressed? I’m cold.”
He looks around, gets up, picks up a throw from the arm of a chair and wraps it around my shoulders, then resumes his seat.
“Meeting with whom?”
“I don’t know. I stayed on the beach.”
“Unprotected?” Now he looks pissed.
“No, there were two men.”