Page 131 of Made in Love and Blood

“I don’t need you in bed. I can get you anywhere, Salvatore.”

Goddamn.

“And even after telling you all this, here’s what I know for sure,” Carina said as she stepped further into the room. Her footsteps padded across the floor while she continued speaking. “You will be the first person she calls or comes to see when she understands the whole picture currently staring her in the face. I promise you. Because all she’s ever known is how you love her and that you’ll fix it. She needs that—you’ve made sure of it.”

“Stop.”

She did, right beside his chair.

He’d really meant to say something else—stop saying that thing; it hurts me. His frustration, at everything including her, simmered.

“You’re not close enough to make up for the things you just said,” he told her.

Carina let out laugh and promptly fixed the issue.

“When she does come back,” she murmured as she pushed his chair out further and straddled him without warning, “I suggest you start treating your daughter like the adult she needs to learn to be, as a lesson for you both.”

He tipped his jaw up, meeting her gaze straight on.

“So someday,” she whispered, leaning down to kiss his jaw as her words fell across his skin, “she doesn’t have to run back to you to fix the things she’s fucked up for herself and be told you love her while you do it. Is that what you want her to think love is? She will never be strong or capable enough to look at that boy you’re so scared of and tell him she doesn’t need him—she wants him.”

He grabbed her waist tightly. It had to sting a little.

“The two feel a lot a like,” she told him, unbothered, and gazes locked, “we both know that. But one is not the same as the other, and you’ve lived enough of a life to know the difference.”

Salvatore kissed Carina hard enough that she bit him in response. Only three times in their marriage had she bitten him during intimacy, drawing blood, and each time led to the same thing. Just like now.

One of his hands flew up to catch her throat, stopping the second nip of her teeth against bleeding flesh that would surely come. She only laughed a breathless gasp at the roughness, otherwise unconcerned.

She said it, after all. He was a monster. Just not hers.

Her back found the top of his desk with enough force to rattle the items on top. As her silk robe opened, falling away to expose the smooth expanse of perfect breasts and silken skin, bare all the way down to between her legs, he remembered. His fingers flexed into her thigh he’d shoved open; she already shook, and he could smell how much she wanted it.

Hell, he could see it.

He hadn’t forgotten, he just—

“Don’t you dare,” Carina breathed out heavily on the desk below him. “Not now.”

“You’re pregnant.”

“Don’t you dare.”

Her fingernails bit into both his wrists, urging pain as much as she begged for it. It wouldn’t be the first time he fucked her on his desk, but he usually didn’t do it with the door unlocked and wide open. Even if it was nearly three in the morning.

The desk became a victim to the two finding what they needed in one another, yet again. Carina just wanted to sleep, and Salvatore needed the distraction. He never once looked at the clock while he had his wife spread apart and trembling through her first orgasm of three. He’d given her that one with two fingers in her cunt and a thumb rolling circles into her clit. It gave him time to shove down the lounge pants he’d changed into shortly after the party ended.

He’d forgone a shirt entirely.

That meant his chest took the brunt of her fingernails when he fucked her so hard that the side of the desk left bruises along his thighs. Words became an unnecessary thing between them when he found everything he wanted to say reflecting in her teary, blissed gaze.

I hate you sometimes. I want you always. I love you forever.

He held her down against the desk, making her take it how he knew she wanted it. She came that last time gagging on those same fingers he’d fucked her with earlier, those tears in her eyes finally spilling when he came, too.

His hand splayed out across her stomach. The gentlest he’d been, somehow.

“Jesus Christ,” Carina panted the first moment she could.