slipped around the sides of his torso, lovingly stroking him, feeling the bliss of his smooth back and sliding her hands over the slight sheen of his skin, exploring the muscles. And then she met his taut buttocks.
Now her head lifted and she offered Nico a devoted kiss.
Better that than sob his name.
Better that then tell him how much she loved him.
She would not give in.
And soon Nico would have no choice but to give in himself, because he was moving faster now, thrusting without any measure of control.
‘I want you,’ he told her, and he took her faster.
‘Nico,’ Aurora said, ‘I can’t do this over and over.’
‘You can.’
‘I can’t pretend I don’t want you.’
‘Keep wanting me,’ he told her.
‘I’m scared to keep wanting you,’ she admitted.
‘Never stop wanting me,’ he told her.
And those ragged words felt like permission simply to give in.
She collided with the stars, with the darkness, with the fantasy of husband and wife, with the rush and power of the orgasm he had made. She had not known such intensity lived in her and it felt as if she’d been tasered.
‘Nico!’ She thought she screamed his name, but her throat was so tight it came out as a hoarse cry.
Nico let out his own breathless shout as he drove into her for the final time.
And then they kissed—a breathless panting kiss that sedated her in her post-coital bliss.
He rolled off her and she lay in the dark bedroom, naked and uncovered, for the sheet had long since gone.
And now she found out what he had meant. For she was cooling now. The air on her damp body felt calming, and she could hear his breath evening out as hers did the same.
No, his slow love was not boring.
For even as she lay cooling she knew that at any given moment she would want him again.
Like this.
In his bedroom.
Night after night after night.
Did he regret it already? Aurora pondered as he lay quietly beside her.
Possibly she did, for she was replaying his words.
Keep on wanting me.
KEEP ON WANTING ME.
Aurora lay there repeating his words in her head.
Was that to be her destiny?
To keep on wanting him? To keep on being available to him?
That sated feeling was fading, and as Nico reached across her for his phone the doubts and the hopelessness kicked back in.
‘Nico, why did you come back to Rome early?’
‘Work finished sooner than I expected and I had a good visit with my father, for once.’
Couldn’t he just say he had come back so he might see her?
‘Can’t you give me even the smallest victory, Nico?’
He couldn’t.
Instead he sat on the edge of the bed and checked his damned phone.
What was she supposed to do? Get showered and dressed and head back to work?
Sit in her hotel room biting her nails and wondering if Nico would take her out on her last night in Rome?
She was far too easy where Nico was concerned. The sum total of their dating history was having a drink together.
‘Nico,’ she said. ‘Tonight, I would like—’
‘Aurora, stop.’
Just stop.
He looked at the endless missed calls and the frantic texts, and knew that if he had been able to choose he really would have preferred to be alone for this moment.
‘Pronto?’ he said into his phone.
Aurora heard for the first time a slight shake in his strong voice as Nico asked when. And if anyone had been with him. And if his father had been in pain when he passed.
She started to cry.
When he’d ended the call Nico did not speak. Aurora went up on her knees and pressed herself into his back, wrapping her arms around him and crying and kissing his neck. Not in a sensual way. This time she was the tender one. But though she held him, it was Aurora who shed the tears.
Nico did not know how to.
‘Your mother took him lunch,’ Nico said. ‘Then called for the doctor to come quickly. It was peaceful, the doctor said.’
She moved around him so she sat facing him, on his lap, her legs wrapped around his body. She tried to read his face, to measure his pain, but it was blank.
‘I shouldn’t have come away this week,’ Aurora cried. ‘I knew he was weak…’
Her tears were genuine, for she had both loved and hated the old bastard. Loved his wit and his humour and his proud ways. Hated that his hands had put bruises on her beautiful Nico, and she detested the insults that had been hurled from his mouth.
‘I need to get back,’ Nico said.
He prised himself out of her arms, but they sprang back.
‘Soon.’
‘Now,’ Nico said, and stood so she slid off his lap.
He went towards the bathroom and she followed, but he closed the bathroom door in her face.
She stood there with the thick wood between them.
Geo was dead.
Panic thudded in her chest.
She opened the drapes, and although Rome looked the same, as she turned naked from the French windows the bedroom did not. There were rumpled sheets and discarded clothes and the scent of sex in the air.
Aurora saw the chaos she’d brought to him.
He
