Chapter 1 #2
Their eyes had met. He’d looked her up and down without shame.
Her neck had flushed in that old remembered way from when she was a teenager, but she hadn’t looked away.
She might have matured from the tomboy she’d once been, but she hadn’t lost her fearlessness.
He’d abandoned his date without a thought and gone over to her.
He could still feel the heat and tremble of her hot, slender body from when they’d danced and smell the sultry scent of her perfume.
And he could remember, as vividly as if it had only just happened, the way she’d stiffened when he’d seductively whispered in her ear, “Want to come up to my suite for a nightcap when this is over and celebrate my birthday properly?”
The arms that had been looped tightly around his neck had loosened, and she’d slowly pulled her head back.
Something had pulsed in her eyes. She’d brought her mouth to his ear.
The lips he’d ached to taste had brushed against his lobe.
Her warm breath had danced over his skin as she’d whispered, “I’d rather die. ”
Any assumption that she was joking was cast aside when she pulled her head back a second time.
She’d smiled at him. Anyone watching them would have believed her happy in his company, but one look in her eyes would have told the truth.
The contempt in them had been unmistakable.
It was a contempt she’d rarely bothered to disguise since, not even bothering to hide it in his father’s presence.
Tommaso would have bet his last cent that she wished she could disguise the way her neck flushed whenever he addressed her directly.
He took delight in it; delight in knowing that for all her contempt, Gabriella wanted him.
For four years, they’d played a game of cat and mouse, tormenting and needling each other, the chemistry between them strong enough to taste.
For four years, he’d fantasised about the day he broke down her defences and finally made her his.
He’d believed her disdain for him to be wrapped in his deserved reputation as an unfaithful womaniser; a mask she wore to hide her desire for him.
He’d thought she looked at his family as her family.
Gabriella’s father and Tommaso’s father had been the closest of friends since infant school, and when Fabio Romano was killed all those years ago, Lorenzo had taken care of his family.
Lorenzo was the only father she had known.
Gabriella had been only sixteen when her mother died of cancer, and it had been the most natural thing in the world to bring her into the Espositos’ home to live.
When she’d finished her education, Lorenzo had taken her under his wing further and brought her into his empire.
Gabriella had been an Esposito in all but name.
Turned out her disdain for Tommaso hadn’t been a mask. It had been real, and it extended to all his family, and it ran much darker than contempt. The woman they’d treated like blood had been working from within to destroy them.
The moment Niccolo Martinelli uttered her name barely an hour earlier, Tommaso had known he was speaking the truth. Finding the evidence, though…
It had taken exactly two minutes to locate it.
Instinct had sent him straight to her bedroom and into her wardrobe.
Four large pink boxes neatly placed on a high interior shelf.
The front two were filled with old photographs and childhood memorabilia.
The two at the back were filled to the rim with documents.
A quick skim of the documents had made the room swim around him. Incontrovertible proof that Gabriella was gathering evidence to send his family to prison.
She hated them all. She wanted to destroy them all. It just happened that Tommaso was the one she hated the most.
What made her treachery harder to bear was remembering her slip of affection towards him only five nights ago, hours after his father had died.
He’d staggered into his mother’s suite at the hotel.
Siena and Gabriella had been there with her, all still white-faced from shock.
He’d slumped onto the settee next to Gabriella and, unthinkingly, lay down with his head on her lap.
Without saying a word, she’d stroked his hair with such tenderness that a sense of calm had stolen over him and he’d fallen asleep.
He’d woken before the sun had risen to find himself alone in the suite’s living area with a blanket covering him.
He hadn’t felt a hint of calm or slept properly since.
With everything that had been happening since his father’s death, Tommaso had put that night to the back of his mind. There was just too much to deal with.
But though it had been relegated to the back of his mind, Gabriella’s gentle compassion had stayed with him. The woman who’d spent four years needling him and treating him with contempt at every available opportunity had dropped her defences the one time he’d needed her.
He’d gazed at her only that morning in his mother’s kitchen and thought there could be no more cat and mouse between them. There was something between them, something real, and it was time they both stopped hiding from it.
The irony that he’d finally admitted his feelings hours before learning the truth about her just added petrol to his rage.
The silence in the tiny apartment would have been deafening if his ears weren’t filled with the hot, rabid pulse of his fury.
Gabriella Romano’s compassion had been fake like everything else about her. She was a rat, and there was only one price exacted for treason – life.
As if she could read his mind, she moistened her delicious, plump lips, lifted her pretty little chin, and cleared her throat. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here and waving that thing at me?”
He leaned forward and smiled cruelly. “Why don’t you tell me why you left my father’s wake so early?”
Her throat moved.
“Was it anything to do with the phone call you received when we were leaving for the funeral?” Her flinch at this was barely noticeable, but he noticed it.
When it came to Gabriella, Tommaso noticed everything.
His smile widened as the rage barely contained to a simmer in his veins turned up a notch.
“Niccolo warning you he was about to sell you out?”
She moistened her lips a second time. “I don’t know what you’re…”
The cobra struck. In less time than it took to blink, he was on his feet with her face in his hand, his thumb and fingers pressing into her cheeks.
“Don’t play games with me, you treacherous bitch,” he snarled.
“Today I laid my father to rest, and then I learned the woman he thought of as a second daughter is a rat who’s been working to destroy us all. ”
She tried to wrench her face from his hold. “You’re hurting me.”
He brought his face directly to hers. “Consider yourself lucky that it’s me who came to deal with you. If it had been Mattia, you’d be dead already.”
Her eyes blazed with fire and defiance, but fear was tinged in the mixture too, and it was a fear his rage fed on with a gluttonous greed. “At least if it was Mattia, my death would be clean,” she hissed. “If you’re going to kill me, get it over with.”
Aware that a little more pressure from his thumb and fingers would do some serious damage, he released her face with an oath, now furious with himself for even caring that he might cause her pain. The hatred he felt for her was beyond anything. Anything.
“Get up.” When she didn’t move, he aimed the gun directly at her face. “I said get up.”
Her beautiful features a contortion of the same defiance and fear blazing from her eyes, she gripped the side of the armchair for support and hauled herself to her feet.
It sickened him to see her wearing the black of mourning.
A simple black shirtdress and smart black leather jacket with knee-high boots, she looked as sexy as sin, and he despised her for it.
Despised himself for all the years he’d fantasised about breaching her defences and possessing her.
Despised himself for having thought she could be his future.
“Do it,” she whispered shakily, lifting her chin.
“You want to die?”
Her head jerked in a shake. Her jutted chin was wobbling, her whole body trembling.
The pulse on the left side of her neck was visibly throbbing, and he imagined her heart and the strength of its beats, imagined it pumping as hard as his own.
How easily he could stop it beating. One pull of his finger, and the vivid, beautiful life standing before him would be no more.
Her lungs would never again fill with air.
Her clever brain would never think another thought or store another memory.
It would all be gone. Her body would be nothing but a rotting shell, just like his father’s.
Only five days ago, Tommaso had watched the life leech from his father.
The bright eyes that never missed anything had become blank; the essence of life that had sparked in them extinguished, and as he gazed into the dark eyes of the woman so bravely refusing to turn her stare away from his and imagined the spark of life extinguishing from them, he felt everything inside him contract painfully.
“You know the rules, Gabriella,” he reminded her harshly. “The price for treason is life.”
Her lips were wobbling as frantically as her chin. A solitary tear rolled down her cheek.
One press of his finger and no tears would ever fall from those eyes again. One press of his finger on the trigger it rested on, and those eyes would never again fire her contempt at him. Her lips would never tell another lie.
“I have to take your life. You know that.”
Her eyes closed. She swayed, but didn’t fall. Even in the face of death, her bravery defined her.
Why did it have to be her, he thought with agonised fury.
Because she was right, if he’d let Mattia deal with her as Mattia had wanted, the essence of Gabriella’s life would already be extinguished.
She would be a corpse on the floor. It was the price she had to pay, the price of life that was demanded…
“But life doesn’t have to mean death.” He spoke the words slowly as they came to him.
Her beautiful dark brown eyes flew back open and locked on his. The essence of life still burned brightly in them.
“You can save yourself.”
She swallowed before choking out, “How?”
He stared at her, the alternate path revealing itself to him wrapped in such perfection he could laugh. “You told me once that you would rather die than come to bed with me… Now is the time to decide if that still holds true. I’ll spare you your life if you give me your life.”
Her eyes were as wide as he’d ever seen them. “You…” Her throat moved, plump lips pulling in. “You want me to…have sex with you?”
Now he did laugh. Even to his own ears it sounded as if it had been dredged from the lowest circle of hell.
“I don’t want to fuck you, Gabriella. I want to own you.
If I’m going to spare your life, then I want your life – your whole life.
” He let his gaze drift up and down her delectable, hateful, treacherous body. “It will have to be marriage.”
He laughed again at the shocked widening of her eyes. “Marriage or nothing – and for you, that nothing is literal. For me to let you live, you will be my wife, and you will be mine; mine to do with as I see fit for the rest of your life.”