My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling NovelM80052 My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) (Chapter - 11)

My Dark Ever After (My Dark Mafia Romance) By Giana Darling

La vendemmia was a sacred time for winemakers in Italy, and an even more sacred one for the Romano family. Though my father had been a hard man, the weeks of the harvest had brought with them a different side of him. He spent every night at home with the family, flirting with his wife, joking with Uncle Tonio, Leo, and me, and throwing crumbs of affection to his daughters. It was the best version of him, one that lasted a few fleeting weeks. So it was no surprise that we all loved la vendemmia more than Christmas at Villa Romano.

It was a time of celebration and peace.

I stayed those few weeks at the villa, along with my most trusted friends and soldati, bonding over the rigor of picking grapes and carting plastic crates stuffed with purple bunches into the backs of trucks to transport up the hills to the main production facility a few acres away from the family home.

Though in all those years, I had never brought a woman with me to the grape harvest. I had never thought to.

It was time spent with family, something intimate and holy someone had to earn the right to be initiated into.

Of course, Guinevere had earned that right.

The links in the chains binding the Camorra together were forged in blood, and she had let enough of hers to be considered a made woman for life.

Despite the fact that she did not want to be here, both here in Italy and here with my family, in the Camorra, or in my vicinity, I could clearly see that a part of her belonged on this Latin soil. It was evident when I watched her at work with our community in the endless sea of green vines, dark head bent intently on her task as her mobile mouth moved around sound and smiles as she chatted happily in shockingly good Italian to the men and women around her.

Even Uncle Tonio, quiet and reserved, smiled at her through the gaps in vine leaves as she raced Carmine to collect the most bunches on a single trunk.

She had soil smeared on her forehead from pushing her heavy hair out of her face with her work gloves, and sweat glistened on her small nose, but she looked like some kind of model from a Vogue spread on the idyllic beauty of Tuscany. Stacci had lent her a drab brown apron to cover the bottom of her dress, but even that suited her, emphasizing the richness of her wavy hair and laughing dark eyes.

If I had not already been in over my head in love with her, seeing her work and laugh among the vines with my people would have done it.

“You are drooling,” Carlotta informed me, jostling me from my study of Guinevere with a shoulder bumping into mine. “Close your mouth, Raffuccio.”

“Do not call me that,” I said automatically, because I had been doing so since I was eight years old and none of my sisters had ever stopped.

“I see why you catch flies when you look at her,” Stacci murmured from my other side, looking at Guinevere through two rows of sloping vines as she petted Aio, whose tail was thwapping hard into her side. “There is something about her that is . . . incandescente.”

“Like a shooting star,” I murmured before I could curb the impulse. “Streaking across my life for only a brief time.”

“It is good to know you have not outgrown your dramatics,” Stacci huffed, sharing an eye roll with Carlotta.

I snorted as I clipped another bunch of Chianti classic grapes and dropped them carefully into the bucket so the delicate skins would not burst. “If I am dramatic, I learned it from my sisters.”

“Why are you so convinced she will not stay?” Carlotta asked. “She looks right at home to me.”

I followed her gaze back through the leaves to Guinevere to find she was pelting Carmine and Martina with debris, laughing so hard there were tears leaking from her eyes. She had stayed close to my soldati for most of the day, but had taken pains to introduce herself to the townsfolk too. At one point, I had caught three older men—all brothers, and all widowed or divorced—crowding around her in a blatant attempt to flirt. She had laughed—that vibrant, bells-ringing, celebratory sound—and indulged them, though Ludo, confined to a comfortable chair because of his gunshot wound, had scowled at them all.

Santa Madonna, she was glorious.

“You both do not understand what it is like to fall in love with a person outside the life. She thought she had fallen in love with someone else entirely until circumstances meant the real me was unmasked.”

“The real you?” Stacci scoffed. “Raffa, you are not so subtle as to be able to affect multiple personalities. Even as a boy, you were always exactly who you wanted to be, take it or leave it. If she loved you, Guinevere loved who you really are.”

“You are only saying that because you do not understand what it must have been like for her,” I argued in a sharp, sibilant hiss like the vipera everyone watched out for with wary eyes. “She did not know her lover was a killer.”

“She did not know she would become one either,” Carlotta pointed out with a raised brow as she carted a heavy plastic container of grapes in her arms, barely breaking a sweat at the load she carried under the warm October sun. “The best kind of people change and adapt. Especially if they are rewarded for it.”

“I am hardly enough reward for having blood on her hands,” I derided, grasping a bundle of grapes too firmly so they burst apart in my gloved hand, the vibrant skins staining the white canvas purple red.

“Does she at least know why you became capo dei capi?” Stacci asked. “Knowing you, she doesn’t.”

“It hardly matters why when the end result is the same.”

“It does matter, and you know it,” she pressed, poking me with a hard finger to the chest. “Does she know you did it to save us? Does she know the first threat came with the news that papà was dead? Does she know Leo had to stop a gunman from storming Carlotta’s delivery room? No one knowing these things could hold what you do against you.”

“She is a twenty-three-year-old girl from America,” I growled, thinking of Guinevere going to college classes, sunning herself with her family at Gun Lake. “What does she know about la mafia? What right do I have to want her to stay in this life with me where a gunman could storm her delivery room, eh?”

“Women in the life do not have to do much but stay silent and obey,” Delfina said, suddenly over my shoulder.

I scowled at her, but only because I was so mired in my own turmoil that I had not been alert to her arrival.

“Not my women,” I said firmly, raising a brow at my wayward, headstrong sister, who had insisted on going to college when our father disapproved, who had dated a woman last year even though it was tittered about behind lifted hands at church and in the piazzas. “My women do as they want because they know I will protect them. If worse comes to worst, they know how to protect themselves because I have made sure of it. Above all, they know what they want because they are smart enough to go after it.”

“And you want Guinevere to go after you,” Martina said, popping through the leaves with a childish grin, happy to have the opportunity to eavesdrop and meddle. “You want her to do more than just stay.”

“Si,” I answered, lifting my chin as if I expected to be punched and was bracing for the hit. It was what my father would have done if he had known I wanted to bring an estraneo into the family. “I want her to stand at my side, without secrets and without shame. My partner in all things.”

“You don’t think she is too innocent for that?” Carlotta asked, watching as Zacheo raced down the row of vines away from his older cousin to throw himself into Guinevere’s side.

She laughed and swung him up into her arms, blowing a raspberry into his cheek.

“She pushed a man off a roof to save Ludo,” I said without taking my eyes off her. “She would do worse to save me, to save any of you now that she knows you and has shared a meal with you. The biggest heart is the most ruthless of all because it knows no bounds when it has to protect those in need.”

“That may be true, but you are capo dei capi. Let us not pretend what you do is entirely altruistic. I know you came home and took vows to save us, but you lie, murder, and steal almost every day, and you cannot tell us there isn’t a part of you that loves it,” Martina rejoined.

“There is. A large part,” I admitted with a blasé shrug, like my own bloodlust and savagery did not alarm me sometimes. “But I have told her that, and she has seen it for herself more than once. I know her in ways you do not. She has darkness in her, seething and hungry. I just have to be patient and find a way to set it free.”

“Buona fortuna, fratello mio,” Carlotta said, squeezing my arm as she moved away with her crate of grapes to load them onto the waiting truck. “I have a feeling you will need it.”

Stacci and Delfina laughed, bumping shoulders as they took their own wares to the truck behind their elder sister.

But Martina lingered, her gaze a warm weight on my cheek like a cupped hand.

“I do not think you need luck,” she whispered to me in Italian. “Guinevere is too curious about the world, too hungry for experience, to be satisfied with the norm. Look at her. She fell in love with a mafioso eleven years her senior who never made light of his dark side, even if she did not know the extent of your underworld career. She sees you and she wants you, Raffa.”

“Then why the face?”

She pursed her lips. “You told us earlier this morning that Guinevere’s sister was involved with the Albanians. She mentioned when she was last here that her father forbade her from ever setting foot in Italia. Why do you think that is? Maybe she has secrets just as dangerous as your own.”

It was not an unfair comment, though the idea of Guinevere keeping secrets from me did not sit right. She was honest, my Vera, straight through to the bone, even when she was deluding herself into thinking she was not aroused by the very thing she claimed to be repulsed by.

“Ludo is checking out her parents,” I confessed in a hushed voice as I turned my attention back to the vines. “John Stone was originally from Italy, but all we know is that his given first name was Mariano Giovanni. Though Ludo has already discovered her mother, Elizabeth, was born in Albania.”

Martina sucked a breath in through her teeth, thoughts turning like gears behind her dark eyes. “Does Leo know? He warned you that she could be a plant, and I know we thought he was being ridiculously paranoid, but Raffa . . . Italian and Albanian parents? When both are involved in our troubles?”

“It does not look good,” I admitted, my head jerking up at the sound of Guinevere’s shriek as Maximo, Vitale, and Mattia joined Zacheo in pulling her to the ground for a tickle war. “But you have spent time with her—do you really think she is capable of such duplicity? To seduce me to destroy me and mine?” The idea was so absurd I almost could not speak it without laughing, and there was nothing much to laugh at. “You think she was waiting in the grass at the side of a random Tuscan country road to throw herself into the path of my Ferrari so that we could meet?”

Martina’s jaw flexed. “Well, no. You are not the only one who fell in love with her in the summer. But this is too strange for coincidence, no?”

“No,” I agreed. “There is something there. A connection between Gemma, at least, and the Albanians and maybe the Grecos. Otherwise, why would they have her cross? The man in the tower told her that he was a friend. I do not like the idea of someone trying to get to Guinevere because of Gemma.”

“You think she could have owed the Albanians drug money,” Martina surmised. “Not a bad possibility. It’s hard to imagine a sister of Guinevere’s doing something so foolish.”

I arched a brow. “She is more reckless than she would like anyone to think. I just have to prove it to her.”

Martina watched me watch Guinevere for a moment and then clucked her tongue. “You have thirty minutes until dinner, and the sun is already dipping. No one will notice if you go off together. We can discuss business tonight when we have finished here.”

“I told her the next time we touched it would have to be because she begged me,” I explained. “I will not go to her.”

“No,” Martina mused, her eyes pinned over my shoulder. “But I think she is coming to you.”

I turned my head again to track Guinevere as she made her way up the row of vines two over from where I stood, walking north, farther up the hill. Just as I was about to respond to Martina, Guinevere turned, her gaze locking unerringly with mine across the dozens of yards between us.

“Vieni,” she mouthed clearly before turning on her heel and moving deeper into the vines.

My mouth went dry when she untied her apron and dropped it to the ground behind her, and my heart almost stopped as she reached the top of the incline and flipped one of her buttoned straps open and over her shoulder so that material gaped between her shoulders and—no doubt—at the front.

She disappeared over the crest without looking back.

But I was already stalking after her, thinking that my little fawn was smart enough to lure a predator into any trap.

The air was heavy with the sweetness of ripe fruit and the sharp tang of the sunbaked limestone protecting the bases of the vines. I cut through the field on quick strides, eating up the space impatiently, eager to get my hands on Guinevere once again. The thought of her seducing me with my family and friends only a field away was making me half hard already, but when I conquered the hill and started down the slope, I did not find her waiting for me.

Instead, she had paused a handful of yards down the row, on her tiptoes, the hem of her skirt rucked up in her hands to expose her slim, pale legs. Her dress gaped open on one side, revealing the edge of a pale breast topped with a hard nipple the same shade as the red wine grape stains saturating my hands. As soon as I caught sight of her, a wicked grin curved her mouth, and she took off, sprinting through the vines away from me.

Without hesitation, I followed.

Leaves whapped against my shoulders as I raced down the narrow gap between trunks. My heart was sprinting even faster than my body, churning blood so hard through my veins it burned. Or maybe it was the violent edge of desire that heated me through to the bone as I chased after my cerbiatta. There was something primal and unbelievably erotic about having to hunt her down and earn her capitulation. Sweat broke out on my brow, and my erection pressed uncomfortably against my trousers as I ate up the space between us.

Finally, blood roaring in my ears, I was close enough to swipe at her.

My fingers passed through the ends of her silken hair, and she laughed.

Bright and crystalline like a nymph leading a god on a merry chase, intoxicated by the unusual power shift.

A growl sneaked up my throat and rent the air a second before I reached for her again, lunging to wrap both arms around her small waist, encompassing it entirely. Our joint momentum carried us forward to the ground, but I twisted to take the brunt of the fall, landing on my shoulder and back with Guinevere plastered to my front. Her breath whooshed out of her in a rush of exhilarated laughter. The thick, dark length of her hair curtained our faces, blocking out what remained of the sun at the base of the vines. In the shadows, her smile glowed.

“Well, I have hunted you down,” I rumbled, arching up to nip at her chin. “Now do I get to enjoy the spoils?”

“I think you’ll find it was me who hunted you,” she corrected haughtily, gathering my hands away from her hips to pin them above my head in the grass. “I was the one who set the trap. You were just the uomo sciocco who ran headlong into it.”

Pride and warmth crowded inside my chest, making it momentarily hard to breathe. It did something to me to hear her call me silly again and to know she was comfortable enough with me to play coy once more. “What are you insinuating?”

“I watched you play with your nephews all day, chat with your sisters, and help some of the elderly townsfolk with their work. A man with money and power like you would never have to do an honest day’s work in his life if he didn’t want to, and yet I saw you tend to each bundle of grapes you clipped as if it was a religious experience.” She paused to dip closer to me, an elbow in the ground on either side of my head, her nose near enough to bump mine. When she spoke, it was through a smile that made her dimples flash. “I recognized you today. As the man I used to know, the one I . . . liked very much.”

Her fingers tightened on my wrists, pressing my hands deeper into the earth as her expression shuttered.

“It helped to see that side of you, that sweetness you like to pretend isn’t there. It . . . it reminded me that I have the same tendency, but reversed. I was raised to be a good person, but the truth is, everyone has a little darkness, and I do more than most. I-I killed a man yesterday, Raffa.” She sucked in a quivering breath, and I drew the tip of my nose down the line of hers to give her comfort. “And I think I would do it again. To save Ludo or Martina or Zacheo or . . . or you.”

Then, so quiet I almost did not catch it even though she was practically speaking the words into my mouth, she added, “Especially you.

“I can’t say I’ll stay,” she whispered against my lips. “I can’t say I’m suddenly okay with any of this. But I also can’t deny that being with you is il mio posto felice. My happy place. That while your life and you are clearly dangerous, I never feel safer than when I am near you. And I’m so tired, Raffa. I’ve been tired since I left you in August, and now I feel it straight through to my bones. I don’t know enough about the life of a camorrista to commit to the capo dei capi, but I am willing to let my Raffa convince me to stay, if he can. So please”—she paused, but only to suck in a deep breath and adjust her tone to be as firm as iron—“make me beg for you.”

Before I could reply, her mouth was sealed over mine, tongue pressing firmly between my teeth to rub sinuously against my own. I let her take the lead for a second, stunned and aroused, with the knife’s edge of hope pressed to my throat so that I could barely breathe.

Convince me.

Make me beg.

Oh, I could do that. If keeping Guinevere with me was only contingent on fucking her brains out, I had no doubt of my victory.

It was the other unavoidable issues that whispered insidiously into my ear like the devil on one shoulder. Can you keep her safe? Can she really love the monster beneath your mask? Can she withstand the cruelties of your dark world?

I banished the voice and let my instincts, roused by the chase, overcome me.

With a snarl against her plush lips, I thrust my tongue over hers and canted my hips, throwing my bigger body so Guinevere slid off my hips and I could roll over on top of her seamlessly. She groaned at the display of strength and tried to sink her hands into my hair.

“No.” My voice rasped harshly between us as I reared up to pin her hands as she’d done mine. “You wanted me to make you beg, cacciatrice, and you will get what you wish for.”

I adjusted us slightly so that we lay diagonally across the narrow expanse of grass with our hands resting at the edge of a trunk. Without speaking, I raised her hands to curl around the wood.

“Do not move them,” I instructed her, watching as her eyes blew straight to black, mouth parting on a soft pant. “If you do, I will have to spank you again . . . though for a greedy girl like you, I am not sure that is a punishment.”

“No,” she agreed, tongue dipping out to touch her lower lip in a little tease. “It’s not.”

I pressed a hand to her mouth. “Do not speak unless it is to beg me for more, cacciatrice.”

She nodded before I moved my hand away to unbutton the other strap of her dress and peel the fabric down to her hips. Exposed, her nipples beaded in the cooling air as the sun kissed the edge of the green Tuscan hills. I ducked to take one into my mouth, sucking hard and testing the furled flesh with my teeth until she squirmed.

“Stai ferma,” I ordered against her wet breast. Be still.

She released a breathy moan of protest but instantly relaxed for me. The alpha animal inside me practically roared at her supplication and immediately took advantage. I lowered myself between her thighs, lifting the heavy linen skirt until it rested above her hips before pushing her legs as wide as they would go. Only a thin pair of white silk ruffled panties obscured her beautiful figa from view.

With a light snarl, I rent them off with my teeth.

Guinevere gasped, hips canting up toward my mouth as if the idea of my teeth so close to her sensitive flesh aroused her. I tested the theory by biting softly into the tender meat on the inside of her thighs, leaving impressions like stamps of possession in her pale skin.

I leaned back, braced on my forearms between her thighs to draw my thumb down the center of her cunt, revealing its wet, pink center. Moisture pooled at her entrance, and I slicked it up to her clit with the pad of my finger, rubbing light, tight circles over the nub until I could feel the tremor of her barely restrained vibrations under my hand.

“Scopami, per favore,” Guinevere gasped, arching up into my touch.

Fuck me, please.

In the deepening shadows, she seemed like a beautiful illusion, something flickering between here and some otherworldly there, half in my realm and half without.

I gripped her hips a little too hard, flexing my fingers into the muscles of her pert ass.

“Non ancora,” I said with that cold edge of cruelty I knew made her toes curl. “Not yet. You have not nearly begun to beg for it.”

With that, I dipped my head and dragged my tongue from her leaking entrance to the top of her pussy, sucking at the hot, swollen crest of her until she cried out senselessly. The vine leaves rustled in the breeze, cooling as the sun disappeared degree by degree over the edge of the hilly valley, but Guinevere’s skin was hot, almost burning to the touch.

I had set a fire inside her that I intended to nurture into an inferno and see through until she was nothing but ash in my hands, ready to be reborn into something new.

“Raffa,” she cried weakly as I fucked into her heat with my tongue, curling it inside her in a way that made her hips leap like a struck live wire. “Raffa, dio mio, per favore, please!”

“Tell me, cerbiatta, do you want to break apart on my tongue?” I asked her, my voice a deep, broken rasp as arousal threatened to strangle me. “I will lick you clean and share the sweet taste of your figa with you when I work myself inside this tight cunt.”

I did not wait for her answer. Instead, I twisted two thick fingers inside her, pressing them along her front wall as I used my mouth like a weapon against her clit, sucking while lashing my tongue over the bundle of nerves.

I held her body down with one forearm, and she almost choked on a sharp breath, body bowing, fingernails digging audibly into the bark of the Chianti tree, and then shuddered apart on a broken wail of completion.

“Raffa, Raffa, Raffa,” she sang like some ancient invocation, a spell that wove itself through the very fabric of my being and eradicated whatever was left of the civilized man inside me.

I reared back to undo my belt and trousers with one hand while the other still pumped inside her convulsing pussy, driving her orgasm on and on until she was a writhing, serpentine creature locked at the base of the vines. A vipera, dangerously beautiful, utterly toxic to a mere mortal.

She was still coming when I replaced my fingers with the head of my weeping cock and drove relentlessly inside her.

“Fuck,” she cried out, her hips flinching away from me even as her head crashed back into the ground on a fierce moan of pleasure. “Oh my God, Raffa.”

“There are no gods for us but each other,” I reminded her through clenched teeth as I started to fuck her brutally, hauling her legs up over my thighs so they were splayed wide around my torso, held open for me to watch as I wedged my thick cock inside her mouthwateringly pretty little pussy. “When you pray for help, it is me who will come. When you ask for your deepest wishes, it is me who will fulfill them. When you want to come, Guinevere, it is me who will drive you out of your mind with pleasure. Capisci?”

“Si, si, quello che vuoi,” she said in a slurring rush, driving her hips down onto mine, small breasts swaying with each thrust. “Meus Rex Infernus. Raffa mio. Please, just fuck me harder.”

There she was. My insatiable girl. A wanton, vibrant temptress only ever for me.

Possessive pride surged through my veins, tightening my balls and the base of my spine. I wanted to come inside her and watch my seed leak out that reddened, lightly gaping hole. I wanted to come on her belly, her breasts, rub it in so that we would both know she wore me beneath her dress when we went back to dinner. I wanted to brand her inside and out so that she would know the truth I was enslaved to . . .

She was mine as much as I was hers, and there was no reality—hers on the side of good, mine on the side of bad, or any other—where the two of us were not meant to be together.

This was just the first of many ways I would show her.

I lifted one of her slim legs higher, propping it onto my shoulder so I could fuck into her more deeply. Her eyes screwed shut, lavender lids fluttering, mouth open in a soft O as she trembled and clutched tighter to the tree for more leverage to grind back onto me with every thrust.

The force of our coupling made the vines sway and overripe grapes drop from overhead. I bent to retrieve one that rolled between her breasts, breaking the thick, slightly bitter skin between my teeth and then rubbing the purple-red skin into her nipple until it was stained the same color.

Guinevere shivered violently as I did the same to the other side and then drew it into my mouth with a hard suck. The sound of my balls meeting her drenched pussy was loud in the twilight quiet, underscored by the rustling leaves and the harsh rasp of our breath.

When I looked up into her eyes as I ground deep and felt the tremor of her oncoming orgasm, she had a ripe wine grape between her teeth, an offering she made by canting her head up toward me.

I bit into her lower lip first just to feel the clutch of her pussy around me and then ate the fruit out of her mouth, the two of us sharing the sharp, tannin-rich juice between our lips. The kiss was almost sloppy, panting breaths and punctuating moans.

“I love this,” she confessed onto my tongue, like a wafer placed there during a religious ceremony. “I missed this so much.”

“Anche io, mia stella cadente,” I told her. “La mia vita è tornata nell’oscurità quando te ne sei andata.”

I missed you too, my shooting star. My life returned to darkness when you left.

“E guardati adesso,” I continued as I collared her throat in one hand and then used my thumb to smear the grape juice across her bottom lip. “Non sei mai stata più bella di quando sei mia.”

And look at you now, never more beautiful than when you are mine.

A groan rattled through her throat as her tongue chased my thumb across her lips. I bent my head to nip at her ear as I shifted my free hand to the place we were joined, splitting my fingers across the broad stretch of me inside her, grinding the heel of my palm into her clit.

“Come for me now,” I demanded, pausing to drag my teeth down the line of her neck. “Take your pleasure from me, and then I will fill you up with so much cum you will be leaking for hours. Squirming at the dinner table as it drips down your thighs. Only you and I knowing you are my good, sweet little slut.”

Guinevere choked on her scream as my teeth fixed to her throat, sucking hard enough to bruise, and she came as if she had been struck by a lightning bolt, juddering in my arms, robbed of breath and filled with electricity.

“Brava,” I praised as she came, finally giving myself over to my own pleasure as it seared like an electrical current from her flesh into mine. The ecstasy was so keen, it ripped through me almost painfully, and my vision fizzed out, white blurs and black stars behind my lids.

This was it.

Raw, primal connection between two souls.

She could say she did not trust me, but enticing me to hunt her down and fuck her into the grass was not an act between two strangers. She could say she did not love me, but as she released the wood trunk and sank her trembling hands into my hair to hold my cheek pressed tight to her breast, over her beating heart, I thought that too must be a lie.

I could hear it in that very pulse, an echo of something like my name in its rhythm.

“Raffa,” she said, as if she could hear it too.

There were tears in her voice, roughened by pleasure, waterlogged with confusion and remembered sorrow.

“Guinevere,” I murmured back before pressing a kiss to her breastbone, running my thumb over the faint scar from her kidney transplant curving over her lower abdomen. “Cacciatrice mia.”

“Not yet,” she whispered so low, I thought she was speaking to herself. “But maybe one day.”