so right in his entire life, and he felt the pulse of that sensation deep inside his abdomen as a twist of pleasure. It was a pleasure that radiated out, to the very part of him that he wanted to bury inside of her.
“Marie, you’re mine. You’ll always be mine,” he murmured against the tops of her breasts as he felt her shuddering response against his own body. It only made him hungrier for her.
His hands moved from her waist to her back, to lift her against the wall so that he could cradle himself between her heated thighs. It was so warm there, so promisingly wet, that he could feel her against his suddenly naked body. He didn’t know how his clothes disappeared or why, and didn’t care, he just wanted to move, to pull back far enough to bury himself inside what he instinctively knew was her virgin sheath.
He’d pulled back, teeth set, ready to hold back as she took him inside of her body for the very first time. A piercing sound infiltrated the moment, destroyed it, as reality invaded. He was dreaming, that noise was his phone. Fuck.
He rolled over to answer the ring and saw it was Celeste. He couldn’t quite shut down as he normally did when he had to speak to her, but he faked it well.
“Yes, Aunty?” he asked in a bland voice, no sign of his anger at her or tiredness to be found in his voice at all.
“Did you meet the girl yet, Matteo?” Celeste came straight to the point, without even the courtesy of saying hello.
“I have, Aunty. She’s going to be… pliable, I believe,” he reported, despite the inner voice in his head telling him to hang up and get back to fucking the sweet temptation that had filled his dream. Would he be able to recapture that moment now?
“Good. You need to do this carefully, Matteo. By that I mean, don’t invite her to dinner tomorrow and fuck her tomorrow night.” Celeste had always been able to cut to the heart of the matter, and when the moment called for crudity, she could use it. Even if it was her nephew she spoke to. “I want her well and truly in love with you by the time you have your way with her. Then, you’re going to crush her, do you understand me, Matteo? No gentle letting down, no sweet parting, I want her crushed.”
“Yes, Aunty,” he said without a hint of emotion.
“Good. And Matteo? Don’t fall in love with the little guttersnipe, do you hear me? It wouldn’t do at all.” Celeste was just as cruel to him as she was to anyone else. He heard the sound of her nails tapping against the wood of her desk and cringed. He hated her, but she was the head of the family.
He would do as instructed.
2
Present Day
You’d think the vultures would wait at least a month before they started to circle, Marie thought a week after her mother’s funeral. She stared down at a pile of bills, a pile that she knew she could not pay. Final demands for payment, notices of new bills to be paid, and a warning from several that if Marie didn’t find a way to pay the bills, they’d take her to court and take the house from her.
They should have switched the house into Marie’s name a long time ago, she realized. But even that wouldn’t save her, she thought as she looked around the outdated kitchen. Sunflowers and ducks, that’s what her mother had decorated the place with. It had been Marie’s refuge for a long time, but now, she could see it with the eyes of a buyer. Outdated, and in desperate need of money that Marie didn’t have.
She’d have to sell the house she decided as she opened another bill, this one from a doctor she didn’t even remember seeing at the hospital. She frowned as she looked at the itemized bill. Smoking cessation therapy? Her mother didn’t smoke, why would they charge her for that?
Marie pushed her index finger into the spot between her eyes that ached so much her stomach started to turn. Some of these charges should be against the law, but she knew there was little she could do about them. Her fingers moved from her forehead down to the space between her mouth and her nose.
What the hell was she going to do?
The last couple of weeks had been hard. First, her mother