Semua Bab Desires In Mourning : Bab 1 - Bab 9

The rain had stopped. Odette Davenport stood at the mouth of the Moretti estate's private cemetery, her black coat hugging her body tightly, the wind seeping under the hem of her dress and running over her skin. Her boots sank tiny into the muddy earth as she watched her husband's coffin being lowered into the earth. Salvatore Moretti was gone. Three nights ago, she had found him facedown in the living room. Blood beneath his head and, Three bullets in his skull. Her fingers trembled from cold, as she tucked her hands into her coat pockets, willing her breath to steady. You should be consumed by sorrow for his passing Odette. That’s what she told herself countless times. But instead, a voice in the back of her mind says something entirely different, something she dared not say aloud. You’re free now, Odette. She flinched at the thought. Salvatore Moretti had been the ideal son, in the family's eyes—courteous, calm, a gentleman. But at home, he had been ruthless.

Three Penelope removed Odette's coat and began to undress her. Odette stood frozen, her loose arms at her sides. Her knees weak. For some very unusual reasons, her heart had not stopped racing. Not since Mr Moretti's corridor encounter. Not since Nico's arm went around her waist holding her in place against his chest. He'd touched her hardly at all. Only one hand. Only a few inches of closeness. And yet… Her body was still flamming from his touch, her thighs still squeezing tight in instinct. It was not something she'd ever felt before. The quick loop within her belly. That throbbed thoroughly somewhere below her hips, that had her shifting slightly on her feet now just to find some relief from this strange heat. "Ma'am?" Penelope's soft voice broke the silence. "Are you all right?" Odette nodded too quickly. "Yes. I'm— I'm—fine." She says her breath caught repeatedly. Penelope unfastened the back of her dress, as Odette remains perfectly still staring at the floor, disc

Odette’s blood ran cold. Her eyes whipped for the silhouette in the doorway, while still scandalously perched on the margin of her late husband's desk. Suzanna stood frozen—one of the oldest house keeper, her mouth slightly parted, her expression stricken her gaze fixed somewhere just over Odette’s thigh— refusing to see what might already be seared into her memory. She immediately averted her vision from Odette's positioning on the desk. "I beg your pardon, Sir Nico," she breathed, "I didn't realize the study was occupied." With that she redraw, the door shutting behind her. Silence closed in around the room. Odette remained paralyzed, unable to move. Her face burned with a heat that made her want to vanish into the floorboards. Her legs trembled fitfully as she tried to move against the desk, to modestly shut her knees properly, but the movement only tended to increase the burning pulsing low between her thighs. What in God's name was happening to me. She thought. Y

Nico had woken up at some wee morning hour, though he hadn’t slept well, for days now. Sleep had become some kind of myth lately, something his body pretended to do while his mind would roam in the dark, back to the study. To Odette. He ought to have been focusing on the case. On the folder locked away in his room, parked with Giancarlo's forensic overviews and tribunal-acceptable suspicions. On the evidence that Salvatore had been stabbed first, before even being shot, and that his murderer had likely dispatched him up close—intimately. In rage or terror. But instead— His thoughts, strayed elsewhere every night, every minute. To her. To the sound of her breathing. To the warmth of her skin against his. To the sweep of her waist, the soft flesh of her wrist. To something entirely and sinfully different. Making merciless love to her. God. She drove him mad without even trying to seduce him. And giving that he was not supposed to feel this way, or was not wo

*****"Scarcely a sprinkle of yarrow and marigold," Nanny Bellamy declared, moving a strand of her hair behind her ear as she tied a scarf across her neck. "Nothing more. I'll be back before you know you miss me.""I might have Dr. Pelham drop by," Nico proposed.She'd smiled at him then, making him feel like he was one and five all over again."And disturb your father with a few aches? Oh, no," she'd said in a gentle voice. "He won't appreciate the fuss. This will do."He hadn't objected. Maybe he should have.Bellamy pushed the basket onto her arm and dismissed him with the same smile. "Mind your sketches, young sir. I'll have that garden wall straight this time."He'd promised it would. As he watched her leave.Two hours later.He headed down the corridor to the servant's quarter."Has anyone spotted my Nanny?" he inquired of a small kitchen maid with a wicker basket. "Well, She ought to be back by now."She opened her eyes wide in surprise. "Not since morning, sir. I think she sa