Reverence - Book 2

- 33 -

I had run into the side of the couch, the darkness colluding my memory of this great meticulous house and in my wake, the vase had splintered and the tchotchke lion had surmised my tendering middle section. 

The narrowing dark eyes that studied me told me it was as believable as a hurricane in the center of Sicily. But this Luca was quiet, tongue simpering with questions held at bay by tightly pressed lips. 

His fingers rejoiced my temples, smoothing through soft hair as my cheek lay against his slowly rising chest. 

I hadn't accounted for the casually billowing curtains or the opened too wide window in the den, but he hadn't pressed me on asking either. I felt oddly strange about his approach, when all I had known of this man was the domineering of answers and answers now. 

He was dangerous this way. Not knowing when the cooling Iron would strike before it missed it's hide all together. 

"And you are all right?" 

He whispered into my head, lips grazing lazily against my forehead. I nodded, my hands curling over the bruised flesh and aching bone. 

"You know how I am," 

I smirked, feigning playfully at my clumsiness. 

He sighed, his heart bowing with the movement. I huddled closer to his warm side, fanning my fingers over his muscled abdomen. 

"I'm okay, I promise." 

I soothed, letting my fingers trace assuring over his skin. 

I had managed to crawl back to the hall, my knees and palms burning from the rigidness of the carpet when he was on his knees beside me, frantic hands pulling me into him. His hands alike his eyes were wild and panic was painted across his surely handsome face. 

His strong arms were beneath me and my face was pressed safely into the repose of his neck as he placed us into our bed where we had lain for the past half hour, watching the moon sink lower in the inky sky, sleep fleeting from us at every wink of the silver man that illuminated our tangled bodies. 

His hands, his arms, legs, body, mind, soul had been wrapped into me. Around me, since I had arrived once more into his air. 

"I stopped sleeping in here, when you left." 

My fingers halted their reaching, breath waiting on his sentence. 

"I wanted to be...closer to you. As close to you as an oceans distance would allow." 

His voice was not sturdy, it was fraying and I was spindling the threads between my fingers. 

His fingers were twilling the silk sheets, running over ridges and smoothing over fibers. He was stalling, the words swirling in his throat but lost to roam over his tongue. 

"Silk is so delicate," 

He whispered. 

"And it holds moments of time like a photo. A memory. Like the lines of a body. And the scent of ghosts" 

His feral eyes glimmered in the failing moon light. 

"And on the sleepless nights, it warms like the solitude of another." 

His hands were abandoning the sheets, coming around the base of my neck. 

"Yelena, you are my ghost." 

My own hands embraced his coiled arms, a sigh slithering through my lips. 

"Stop haunting me." 

He breathed back. 

The way that he was looking at me, I had seen before. I had felt this bloom within my soul when warm air had curled around my legs like a purring cat and the soft wax of tulips brushed against my nose and fingertips. Wine, wanting. But this was more. 

"I want to kiss you." 

He whispered, the fine tip of his nose tracing along the bridge of my own. 

"You don't have to ask me Luca." 

I whispered back, my voice electric and buzzing. 

"I do. I must. I should've been asking for it long before now." 

I swallowed a sigh. 

"Kiss me." 

The ghost of a smile pulled at the corners of his lips. I let my eyes fall closed as he drew near, the brush of his breath intermingling with my own. 

"Yelena, I L-" 

I quieted him with the press of my lips. I felt the rigidness dispel and his skin was hot and his hands were sure and those lips tasted like my last drop of heaven. He was as powerful and assure as he ever once was. I felt solidified and there was no longer gravity. There was Luca, holding me to this bed with the fierceness of gentility. 

But as quickly as he came into me, my eyes began to flutter open at the touch of his mouth on mine. Over his hard shoulders I watched my body hanging there. Watching as it watched me back. 

Watching him. 

And the realization was startling, icy daggers. 

What had she really seen?