ONE
IAN
LOVE WEAKENS YOU. THAT’S THE conclusion I’ve come to as I gaze down at the woman slumbering next to me. Victoria Corielli is a slip of a thing. My hands span her slender waist. In her stocking feet, the top of her head brushes my chin. While she has muscular legs due to her previous occupation as a bike courier, the rest of her is on the slim side—more due to poverty and illness than the intense dieting socialites engage in.
Despite her size and diminutive nickname, she’s powerful. With a word, a look, a gesture, she can bring me to my knees.
As if sensing my scrutiny, her body shifts under the sheet, a heady susurration forms as luxurious cotton brushes against equally luxurious flesh.
Ian.
My name on her lips is hardly more than a whisper, but it’s enough to send me from contemplative to alert in a heartbeat. It was only hours ago that we fell asleep, and yet I find cannot leave her alone.
I lift one of her legs over my hip and ease into her. She greets me with a murmur that is half gasp, half pleasure.
“If this is a dream, don’t wake me,” she moans.
A small chuckle escapes. “Surely reality with me is better than your dreams.”
Her lids flutter open, and in the moonlit bedroom, her eyes look wide and endless. “I don’t know. I was having a pretty good dream.”
“What were you doing?” My movements are slow, almost careless. There’s no hurry and that, in and of itself, is an aphrodisiac. I can have her as many times as I need, for as long as I need, but I know I won’t ever be sated.
“I was with this guy. He was tall, dark-haired. Wore a big cape.” She smiles sleepily. “He pinned me down and held my wrists together and told me that I was going to have to suffer endlessly for my sins.”
“And what was your response?” I roll her onto her back and gather her wrists together, pulling her body roughly beneath mine. In the recent weeks, Tiny had been too sorrowful to play with me like this.
“That his endless punishment couldn’t start soon enough.”
Dropping my head to her neck, I breathe in the scent of her warm, aroused body. We’re both drunk on each other, and I inhale, wanting to take her inside me and finding it nearly impossible to get close enough. Beneath me, her body tightens like a bow string, quivering and taut.
“Now,” she growls, digging her nails into my hips. “Come with me. Now. Now. Now.”
Her command is my undoing. Whatever idea I had about slow and tender goes out the window. I take her then, hard and fast, pounding her until we both explode—her release is screamed out and mine is expelled through gritted teeth.
Collapsing to the side so I don’t crush her, I pull her limp body close.
“Sorry,” I murmur into her hair, pushing the sweaty strands to one side to expose her temple for a kiss. Her head tucks itself under my chin.
“For what? Waking me with an orgasm?” she asks sleepily. “Please be sorry every morning.”
“It’s not morning yet, bunny.”
She cuddles closer, and I stroke my hands through her dampened hair and down her back, this time to soothe her. Soon her even breathing tells me she is asleep again. Carefully tucking a sheet around her, I rise.
In the bathroom, I dispose of the condom and return with a warm washcloth. She flinches when I press the cloth against her but doesn’t wake. With a frown, I realize this is the third time tonight we’ve made love. I need to be more careful with her.
Returning to the bathroom, I toss the cloth in the hamper and then stare into the mirror. Waking her for a third time like some randy teenager with no self-control is not like me, but then I haven’t been normal since I met her.
When I first saw Victoria—or Tiny as her mother called her—on the street delivering a package, I wanted her. I liked the way she carried herself—self-assured and comfortable. I thought her long, blonde hair would look tempting spread out on my pillow. I imagined her thighs would be steel-hard from the biking. She made me laugh when she kicked the doorframe of the store after realizing the shop owner, who needed to sign for the delivery, was missing.
She made me hard when she stared at my lips like she wanted to taste me.
In those few minutes of interaction between us, I saw a panoply of emotions—vulnerability when she considered my request to play hooky and enjoy a day in the park followed by a night in my bed; frustration when her customer was absent; and iron discipline when her sense of responsibility overrode all else. Her unfettered emotionalism was refreshing. But it was when she ran from me and my direct offer of pleasure that my appetite was whetted.
I was well and truly caught.
I hadn’t actively avoided love, but I hadn’t sought it out. Why should I? I’d spent most of my thirty-two years fixated on making money. And there were few bedroom doors closed to me. Reasonable attractiveness—made infinitely more so by the thickness of my wallet—ensured that bachelorhood in New York City was easy and entertaining.
Maybe too easy, because her refusal unwittingly transformed her into an irresistible challenge. The more she denied me the more I wanted her. Her mother was ill with cancer, and Victoria believed she couldn’t juggle both my interest and her concern for her mother’s wellbeing.
My arrogant belief was that money would solve her problems, making it easy for her to slip into my bed. After all, money had solved most of my issues, except one. But the more cash I threw at her, the more barriers she erected.
Even now, I’m not sure how many walls I’ve managed to tear down, how far inside the citadel of her heart I stand which is why I probably woke her for a third time. Why I can’t keep my hands off her. I’m afraid that all I have binding her to me is the response I can generate in bed.
The world I live in is inhabited by people whose lust for more—whether it’s power or money or influence—drives them to the basest of actions. Show a weakness and someone will attempt to leverage it for their own benefit.
Tiny had only one thought in her life—to save her mother. It was a story I understood all too well, and the ending was as tragic as I’d suspected it might be. Tiny’s mother lost her battle with cancer.
In slumber, she seeks my touch, the one thing that has given her pleasure in the weeks after her mother’s death.
Some might say that I was a lucky son of a bitch—in the right place at the right time—because she needed someone, anyone, after her mom passed. But I make my own luck. Tiny’s special, and I’ll do anything to keep her.