Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

That night in her atelier the heir lays out his rules, she slaps him and then kisses him, and his fingers make her come on the worktable among the clay.

He came to the atelier at eleven that night, and he brought a typed page.

I was alone at the long worktable with a tray of unfired shepherds, because my hands needed something to do.

The knock was two taps, exact and unhurried.

When I opened the door, Antone Orsini stood on the stair street in the rain.

He had no umbrella, and he held the page flat against his chest.

"May I come in?" he said, in the voice he had used for the notary.

"It's your wife's atelier," I said. "You can do what you like."

"I am not your husband yet."

"No. Today you were only my buyer."

His jaw moved once.

He came in and shut the door behind him, and the small room felt much smaller.

He looked at the shelves of finished santons, the baker and the fishwife and the drummer boy.

Every little painted face was one my mother had taught me to make.

He looked at them for a long time and said nothing about them.

Then he laid the page on the worktable between us.

"Four rules," he said. "You will have your own room in my house, and I will have mine."

"Go on."

"No touching in private. Nobody says Mattei's name under my roof. In public you will smile."

I read the page twice, to make him wait.

It was typed.

He had sat down at a machine and typed it before he ever came through my door.

"Is that all?"

"The term is three years," he said. "Then you take your fifty-one percent and go back to your clay."

I picked up a brush and wrote my own rules on the back of his page, slowly, in black glaze.

The atelier and the Christmas stall are mine.

Nobody decides anything about my uncle but me.

You never raise your voice to me in front of my people.

I pushed the page back to him.

He read it standing, with no expression, and I watched his gray eyes go down the lines.

"Agreed," he said.

"Just like that?"

"I do not raise my voice."

"You held the ring out on your hand," I said, and my own voice was not steady.

"You did pick it up."

"You made me pick it up myself, in front of everyone. And you said my father drowned your brother."

"It is true," Antone said.

I hit him.

I did not decide to.

My palm cracked across his cheek, and the sound went around the little room and came back.

He did not step back.

He did not lift a hand to his face.

A red mark came up under his cheekbone, and his gray eyes stayed on mine.

Something moved in them that was not anger.

"Again," he said, very quietly, "if it helps."

My hand was stinging.

I was shaking, and I was not afraid of him, and I did not understand what I was.

"You typed that rule," I said. "No touching in private."

"Yes."

"Then I'll show you what it's worth."

I took his lapels in both fists and pulled his mouth down onto mine.

He made a sound against my lips, low in his throat.

For one moment he stood perfectly still.

Then his hands came up.

One went into my hair, and the other flattened on my back and hauled me against him.

He kissed me back hard, with a week of anger in it.

It was not gentle.

His mouth was hot and tasted of rain and bitter coffee.

I bit his lower lip, and I felt him shudder from his chest to his knees.

"Rule two," I said into his mouth.

"Santoni," he said, roughly. "Stop."

"Make me."

He didn't.

He turned us, and my back met the worktable, and the shepherds rattled on their tray.

"Careful," I said. "They're my mother's."

He reached past me and slid the tray to the far end of the table with both hands.

He did it gently, without looking away from my face.

Then he put his hands on my thighs.

I had worn a plain black skirt to my own selling.

He pushed it up my legs in one slow drag.

His palms were rough from the docks, and I heard my own breath catch.

"Say it," he said.

"Say what?"

"What you want."

"Your hand," I said. "Now. Between my legs."

His jaw tightened.

His hand went up my inner thigh, found the edge of my underwear, and pushed it aside.

He touched me.

Two fingers slid through the wet and stopped, and I felt him go still.

"You are soaked," he said, hoarse.

"You hit a nerve," I said. "Don't stop."

His fingers pressed into me slowly, to the knuckle.

My head dropped back, and my hands slapped flat on the table behind me.

He crooked them, and I cried out.

"There?"

"There. Yes. There."

He moved his hand in a long hard rhythm.

His thumb found my clit and circled it, and I stopped being able to think.

I looked at him through it.

His face was close, his gray eyes dark and fixed on mine, his mouth open and breathing hard.

He was fully dressed, and I was coming apart on my mother's worktable.

"Faster," I said.

He gave it to me.

My thighs shook open around his wrist, and the heat tightened low in my belly.

"Look at me," Antone said. "Santoni. Look at me."

I looked.

I came with his eyes on mine, hard, with a sound I had never made in that room.

My cunt clenched on his fingers over and over while he held me through it.

When I could breathe, I reached for his belt.

His hand closed on my wrist and set it down flat on the wood.

"No," he said.

I could see how hard he was through the cloth.

I could see his hand tremble as he drew it out of me.

He stepped back and straightened his jacket.

"Lock this behind me," he said. "Not that it matters. Nobody in the Panier would dare."

"You didn't finish."

"I did not come here to finish."

He picked up his typed page, with the glaze still wet on the back of it, and folded it once.

At the door he stopped with his hand on the latch.

He did not turn around.

"Rule two is already broken," he said. "Count it."

Then he walked out into the rain.

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