"This is really good. Do you want some?" Valentina looked up to see he was staring at her again.
Luciano's attention was drawn to the side of her lips where a smudge of ice-cream trailed.
The first thing he thought about was cleaning it with his tongue. And then maybe he would get to experience what her cherry red lips tasted like.
Her Cupid bow was the deepest he had ever seen. But it wasn't too surprising, judging by how curvy she was at the middle part of her body.
"Hello?" She waved at him. "Want some?" She asked when he blinked.
He cleared his throat, after internally commanding himself to stop thinking like a teenage boy.
"No thank you–" he was going to add that she needed to wipe off the corners of her mouth, but all of the chastisement he gave himself just prior to his response, slipped away.
There was something alluring about that stain in such a pretty perfect face. He wanted it to stay a while, so he said nothing about it.
"Okay," she shrugged. "Your loss."
"I have another question," he said.
"It's not like I have a choice not to answer. So ask anyway." Her eyes remained glued to the ice-cream, gauging how many spoons she would need to scoop before it finished.
That thought caused her chest to physically hurt.
If it hurt that way now, she hated to find out how much it would hurt when she eventually took the last scoop.
"Your last names, and family names cannot be accessed because they're redacted. Last I checked, only people with things to hide, you know— hide their backgrounds through the help of the government."
"Hmmm, that's a problem isn't it?" She slowly lifted her gaze, sweeping it through every inch of his face.
Valentina would rather not admit he intrigued her.
For one, Natalia was right about his expressions. How he easily went from carefree to devilish in a second was rather impressing.
Devilishly sexy?
"Oh please! Spare me," she quickly silenced her thoughts.
"It is. I want to know why."
"What's the point? You won't believe me anyway. Isn't that why you have me locked up?"
"Still," he insisted with a slight shrug. "Let me be the judge."
"Okay then. The truth is, my parents, and Natalia's parents were victims of the American airlines flight 66 crash, twenty years ago. I don't know if you ever heard about it, but the story did travel across borders. Natalia, her mother, and I survived. The rest of our parents died. When an uproar was raised regarding the government's carelessness, they knew they had to keep the survivors a secret. Do you want me to go on reopening old wounds, sir?"
He shrugged nonchalantly, and with a dead serious face, nodded his head. "Yes I do."
Valentina felt her heart tense. She searched for the cause of the feeling, and it turned out to be disappointment..
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she might have let her guard down enough to think he wasn't an unredeemable bad person, because he brought her ice-cream after noticing she couldn't eat breakfast.
His response just confirmed to her he was like the others. What would anyone expect from a gangster, anyway?
She moved her eyes away from him, too upset to look at him.
"Natalia's mother raised both of us in a locked away mansion. We went to school online, and never stepped outside of the compound," her eyes took a faraway expression. "The government instructions were simple. We had to lay low, and that was what we did. Well until she died a few years ago, and Natalia and I became comfortable enough to explore the world." Her voice fizzled away, but she kept on looking faraway.
There was a part of Luciano that felt awful for pushing her to rehash her trauma.
But he also knew from experience that he couldn't let his guard down.
It would be more shameful to be done over by a woman, because he thought she was pretty.
"You're saying if I get a hold of the records, everything you've told me will be confirmed?"
Her head snapped towards him. "Yes, it will. Or are you still calling me a liar?" She asked brusquely.
Luciano's eyebrows twitched a little, but other than that, he showed no reactions to her temper that had obviously flared.
She was in her right to get emotional. He wasn't being very—sweet.
"Nope, I'm not. But I'd prefer you're telling me the truth. Or rather, I hope you're telling me the truth. It does set one free." He nudged his head from side to side.
Valentina rolled her eyes hard at his word pun. "If truths are so powerful, why am I still here? Why am I not free?"
"Because there are things that must be verified, and that takes an entire process. Also, freedom comes in many ways, Valentina. Just like the pleasures you get from licking your ice-cream, which is a kind of freedom on its own. Or one you get when you soar from sex. That also is a kind of freedom. You can choose moments of freedom to reach for, until you're granted the absolute freedom your mind craves."
Valentina scoffed. "Now you want to get philosophical. Well let's do it. One of your examples is not the same as the other. The only person sex grants freedom to soar, is selfish men like you. Everyone-no scratch that. Everyone with good sense knows sex only benefits men. And the fact you used it as an example shows the kind of person you are."
Luciano stared unflinchingly, despite the jab she sent his way.
But his interest was piqued at the way she thought of sex.
"You seem to have a rather flawed, and very odd view of sex. Then again, that's what you get when you deal with Chad in banking, and Brad in finance. Sweet boys who think their fingers and tongues are too pretty to make a woman soar."
Valentina's breath caught in her throat, as their eyes locked again.
"You don't know what you're saying," she said in a hush, barely audible voice.
"I don't? Are you sure about that? Because I know for a fact that sex gives you the best freedom, when done right. And done right isn't pretty. It is tongue diving into folds until you taste the core of her." As he spoke, his eyes remained glued to her eyes.
Valentina's breath became uneven. Something unfamiliar swirled inside of her.
"It is fingers deep into the foundations of her womanhood. Stroking every turn, and every corner." His voice dropped even lower, and deeper.
Luciano's heart doubled when he pictured a woman in his head as he explained the freedom of sex, and the woman wasn't Daniela.
Her hair was too amber. Her eyes were too green. The way the curve of her waist moved was too hypnotic. And her lips– her lips were the maddening bows of cherubs themselves.
Certainly, it wasn't Daniela.
"It is sex, inching into sex, slowly, or fastly, depending on what the mood calls for. Saliva, blood from nails scratches, sweating, swearing, explosion. That is freedom."
"OhGod,"
Valentina moaned internally, unable to pull her eyes off the enigma that was Luciano De Luca.