Deviant Prince [Romano Brotherhood, #2]

19 | Massimo

This evening has been immeasurably strange.

I started it by kissing Vivienne in the back hallway of a club like a grungy hookup and am ending it at three in the morning, standing at my stovetop, cooking her an omelet.

I stare down at the pan, not really seeing anything. Quite honestly, although my brain is struggling to catch up with the events of the evening, the rest of me is not. The... reaction my body is having is nothing unusual—for other men, perhaps. But for me, things have always been a little different.

For me, sex has always been a little different. 

Yet not when it comes to her. The effect Vivienne has on me is unmatched by any other. Evidenced by the fact that it's been hours, yet every time I think of the way she tasted, the way her body curved into mine like melted butter...

"Is something burning?"

I snap out of it as Vivienne calls out from the living room, where she lounges on the couch still in her dress and heels. She was oddly quiet as I drove her back to mine. A silent Vivienne cannot be good, and I've been waiting for it. The freakout. The regret.

Although she briefly marveled at the smooth leather seats of my Aston Martin, she refused and completely clammed up when I told her to take it to work from now on. I don't understand the practicality of her walking to work when a car is available—especially a nicer one than the piece of junk she drives—but that conversation will have to happen another day.

Because the only thing Vivienne has said to me since I kissed her is that she could really go for some eggs.

"You're not really good at making eggs, are you?"

My muscles lock at the unfamiliar closeness of that voice. Low, with a hoarse note to it. Just thick enough to lodge beneath my skin. And when I turn, the sight of her in my kitchen is enough to shake me back to reality. She's so casual about it, the way she merely exists in my space. Still wearing the evidence of her long day but now with her heels off, as if she can relax here, with me. As if it's perfectly normal.

Vivienne might be the strangest woman I've ever met.

My thoughts are nearly enough to make me forget that the only thing she's said in the past thirty minutes has been about her damned eggs.

That tiny, tight thing of a dress makes me clench the spatula as she maneuvers around me and takes the pan off the heat. Between my mind being lost in the ether and my body deciding it's regressed back to its teenage libido, I've managed to thoroughly burn her food.

"Damn," she mumbles, "you're lucky I like them a little charred."

She plates some for me, although I never said I wanted any, and sits at my counter. Her dress is slightly wrinkled, hair a little messy, makeup smudged. She looks exhausted. But she also looks immensely happy to be eating burnt eggs in my cold, empty apartment.

A fullness overtakes my chest that is even more shocking than the appalling reaction of the lower half of my body.

I don't realize I'm staring until she pauses with her fork halfway to her mouth. "What's that look on your face? You're like... glaring at my eggs."

The eggs she has shown more attention to than anything else since she walked through my front door?

"Yes."

I continue what I'm doing. If she would like to categorize it as glaring, so be it.

But even under my scrutiny, she finishes her plate at a leisurely pace. When she finishes and bends to open the dishwasher, the material of her dress goes taut. It stretches and lifts to reveal more of that honey satin skin than she should be showing me right now.