CAROL MARINELLI - Sicilian's Shock Proposal

She wanted to slap him.

Now that he was here, she wanted not just her dreams of freedom and working on the ships, she wanted him too.

Luka, who had swum in the river with her, Luka, who had told her the night he’d left her aching to be kissed by him that she must wait. He had been twenty years old when he had prised her off his lap and she had clung to him like glue.

She wanted the kiss that he had promised her then.

Instead, she finished closing his wound and then put a large plaster over the top as she spoke. ‘My father will be upset. He always thought that I would live close to him and that our children would grow up in Bordo Del Cielo.’

Don’t do this, she wanted to warn, though she knew that he was right to.

‘In my time away, I’ve come to understand things.’ Luka ran a tongue over tense lips as he reminded himself that he was going to do this without criticising her father. ‘The way my father conducts business, the way my mother used to turn a blind eye to terrible deeds...’ She looked at that beautiful mouth in his unshaven jaw and he confirmed her darkest thoughts. Malvolio was pure evil. ‘I don’t want any part of it,’ Luka said.

‘I don’t like the hold he has on my father,’ Sophie admitted. ‘I don’t think my father...’ She couldn’t bring herself to say it but she tried. ‘I think some of my father’s dealings are also wrong.’

‘That’s his choice,’ Luka said. ‘And I am making my own. I don’t think that a promise our fathers made on our behalf should be something we feel we have to adhere to. I think we should be able to date and fall in love with whoever we choose.’

‘And have you been dating?’ Sophie asked, and Luka said nothing. ‘Because if you have then it doesn’t seem very fair when I have kept myself for you. I haven’t so much as kissed another man, even though I have wanted to.’ That was a lie, she’d never want another man. She had only ever wanted him. ‘I have been to dances and parties and nothing, nothing has ever happened.’

Luka remained silent and Sophie assumed then that he was serious about someone.

‘Is she insisting we break up?’ The jealousy in her voice was not faked. Sophie’s skin prickled at the thought of him with another woman.

‘There is no one she,’ Luka said. ‘I have not been serious about any one person in particular, but...’

‘You have been dating?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve kissed, made love...’ all the things she had guessed he would be doing, all the things she had wanted Luka to do with her ‘...while all the time you were promised to me.’

Her hand came up then and he would have accepted a slap to the cheek but, hell, he’d just got the wound closed so he caught her wrist.

‘You still have good reflexes,’ Sophie said, because she had watched him play sport, catch a fork, grab her arm before she fell...

Luka frowned at the light tone to her voice and turned his attention from the wrist he was still holding and then saw that she was smiling.

‘Sophie?’

‘Perhaps I am not best pleased that you have been having fun while I keep myself pure for you, but maybe I am a little relieved too...’

He had never expected this reaction but, then, Luka remembered, she had always surprised him. Sophie had always made him either smile or want to tear his hair out in frustration. He’d never known what to expect from her.

‘I thought—’

‘You thought that I would cry and plead and say that you have shamed me. Well, I guess that in the eyes of everyone here you will have shamed me, but I don’t care what they all think. I am nineteen tomorrow, Luka, and I want a life. I want more fun than I could have as your wife.’

‘Were you ever going to tell me this?’

‘I was.’ Sophie smiled. ‘But after we had made love. I went and got the Pill...’

‘What, did you think I’d be more open to suggestion then?’

‘That had crossed my mind.’ She smiled again.

‘You’re really okay with it?’ Luka frowned because this reaction had been far from the one he had been expecting.

‘Of course,’ she said, and then her voice dropped. ‘Apart from one thing.’

Yes, she always surprised him.

‘You still owe me that kiss.’

‘Sophie, you don’t end a relationship with a kiss.’

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I want you to be my first kiss.’

‘Sophie—’

‘It has to be you,’ Sophie said, because quite simply it had to be. She sat on the kitchen bench and her hands went up and linked loosely behind his neck.

‘Remember the party, the night you left for London?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘Did you want to kiss me then?’

‘No,’ Luka said. Then she had been a girl, a teary teenager, now there was no doubt that a woman sat before him—and one who knew what she wanted.

‘Do you want to kiss me now?’ Sophie asked.

He answered with his lips. She felt the soft weight of his mouth and though she did not want to marry Luka, it did not mean she did not find him beautiful. Every kiss that Sophie had ever missed out on was made up for by this.

He held her face and his mouth was gentle. The last seconds of her lip glaze ensured their soft passage and his kiss was exactly as it should be, better even than anticipated. A soft tasting that had her hands move to his chest as they had ached to do on sight.

In her dreams he had crushed her mouth and his tongue had fiercely parted her lips, but in reality he had no need to for her mouth readily opened to his and mutually their kiss deepened.

Her palms pressed to his naked chest and as his tongue slipped in she slid her hands, loving the feeling of strength beneath the skin. His breathing was harsher as her hands moved over his flat, mahogany nipples and then it was Sophie who took his face in her hands.

She felt he was going to halt their kiss so her tongue pleaded for him not to. She wanted this just as he did.

She wanted his hand that was now stroking at her breast through the fabric of her dress and as her nipple thickened to the touch of his thumb he let out a small moan that sent a vibration to her core. He stepped in closer and her legs parted to enable him to. One hand still toyed with her breast while the other slid up the outside of her smooth thigh, but when he encountered her naked bottom he stilled and pulled his mouth back a little.

‘Do you always run around with no underwear on?’

‘You’ll never know.’ Sophie smiled and Luka returned it but when she went to kiss him he moved his mouth back and she ached because he had halted. ‘Please, Luka...’

‘You said a kiss.’

‘ We want more than a kiss.’

She was so certain in that moment that she could speak for them both.

‘I’m not ending things and taking your virginity,’ Luka said. ‘You’ve already got enough reasons to call me a bastard.’

‘Then don’t give me another one,’ Sophie warned. ‘I cried every night for a month when you left but I’m not going to cry this time. You’ve had all my tears, Luka. I just want a part of what was promised to me.’

‘Which part?’

‘This part.’

His eyes closed as her hand found him and she ran her fingers over his length. Lightly at first but then she pressed her fingers in a little.

She had never been shy around Luka.

She had never been shy.

She watched as he closed her eyes and felt the bliss as he grew to her touch. The ache in her groin grew too and so Sophie wriggled provocatively closer to the only man she had ever wanted.

She met his ear and kissed it as he pulled her in firmly.

‘I want you to be my first.’ She stated her wishes. ‘It has to be you, Luka... It was always going to be you.’