Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The drum of Gabriella’s heartbeat was a roar in her head, her thoughts a rabid, tortured mess.
Tommaso was serious. She could see it in his merciless eyes.
That night four years ago flashed in her memories. His birthday party, when she’d told him she would rather die than spend the night with him. Four years of her life spent teetering on a knife-edge whenever in his company.
He’d taken her insult with the same grace it had been delivered.
After time had seemed to come to a standstill, he’d mimicked her smile and brought his mouth to her ear.
If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the sensation of his breath on her sensitive skin.
“If you remember only one thing, remember this – I never forget an insult.” And then he’d swaggered away without looking back, something she would always be grateful for.
If he’d looked back, he would have seen the weakness of her walk and, she’d feared, would have known it wasn’t through fright of his implied threat but from the heat of longing ravaging her. It was a heat that had never left her.
If he’d made the offer of a nightcap five years earlier, she would have raced to his room quicker than Speedy Gonzales on amphetamines.
Hours later, when the party was over, she’d taken the lift to her hotel room.
He’d followed her into it. The blonde woman he’d arrived at the party with had been draped on his arm.
Gabriella had avoided eye contact with both of them, right until the lift reached her floor, and her eyes had darted to him with no thought from her brain.
His black stare had penetrated her so deeply that she’d felt it touch her very core.
Her dreams that night had been of him and the blonde.
It had been a dream that had started her awful, shameful crush on him, but in that first dream, it had been Gabriella with him.
She’d been fourteen and it had been her first sexualised dream.
In the eleven years since, she’d never had erotic dreams of anyone but Tommaso.
Even when she’d learned the truth about her father’s death, even when she’d seen for herself how Tommaso treated women like disposable toys and spoke about them as if they were less than that, she’d never been able to rid herself of her body’s ache for him.
Fighting that ache had been the battle of her life.
His gun was still aimed at her, his pitiless black eyes fixed on hers, waiting for her to react.
There was no give in those eyes. No hint of mercy.
None of the sensual knowing that had always made her pulses race so fast. And there was no give or mercy in the beautifully masculine face with the thick black beard enhancing rather than disguising his strong jaw.
Tommaso despised her. Any feelings he’d had for her had been killed stone dead.
Her life for her life. That’s what it came down to. If she didn’t give him her life, he would take it. He would kill her.
That knowledge came close to flooring her. Tommaso would kill her. Tommaso.
Her pride urged her to repeat her words from four years ago, but to imagine saying them again, knowing that this time he would act on them, made her heart beat with terror that these could be the last beats it ever made.
Gabriella’s body wanted to live. She wanted to live. When he’d grabbed her face, and she’d thought he was about to kill her, she’d been terrified her death would be painful, had only been able to think that she wanted it to be quick, but now…
Now, for whatever sick and twisted reasons going on in his sick and twisted head, Tommaso was giving her the chance to live, but the price would be enormous.
To marry Tommaso Esposito, the most twisted and unpredictable of the Espositos, the man she hated and desired with equal intensity, to be his possession, the toy he would treat as he pleased and never dispose of…
“It’s time to make up your mind,” he said, cocking the gun. “Do I take your life or will you give me your life?”
She felt another tear splash down her cheek, and as it rolled off her chin, she vowed to herself that it would be the last tear she ever spilt for him.
She could hardly hear her whispered words. “I’ll give you my life.”
Could he have pulled the trigger, Tommaso wondered moodily as Edoardo, his driver, navigated them through Naples’ busy streets.
Waiting for Gabriella’s answer was the only time in his life he’d felt the palm of his hand sweat.
Could he have done it? If she’d refused his offer of life, could he have pulled that trigger and taken hers? It made his guts roil to imagine it, but he refused to think of it as an unwanted streak of weakness. Gabriella would spend the rest of her life paying the price for her treachery.
He could smell the familiar sultry scent of her perfume. It was a scent he’d always inhaled hungrily. He was only surprised he’d never choked on its poison.
She was poison; one of those white oleander flowers his grandmother cultivated for scent as well as beauty. They were toxic enough that Tommaso’s mother had warned all her children to keep away from them on their visits to their maternal grandparents.
He was going to make the most treacherous and poisonous woman in Naples his wife. His family would be pissed. More than pissed. They would think he’d lost his mind. Maybe he had.
“We’re here,” he said tightly when his driver took them through the opened gates to his villa. This was the first time Gabriella had been to his home since his housewarming party three years ago.
She’d turned up to the party with Siena, all beauty and contempt.
To needle her, he’d offered a personal tour of the place; had dropped a wink when he’d mentioned taking her down to his cellar.
She’d wrinkled her nose and, in a voice that perfectly matched the disdain in her stare, had said, “I’ll pass, thanks, but I’m sure any number of your female guests would be delighted to be given a tour of your sex dungeon.
Just remember to keep them hydrated so they don’t pass out. ”
Siena had howled with laughter. Even Mattia, Mr Serious, had looked amused.
Gabriella’s contempt for Tommaso had by that point become one big joke to the Espositos.
For Tommaso, it had been a turn on, a game in which he confidently expected to emerge victorious.
None of them had known her contempt was a disguise for her hatred and that it extended to them all.
The front door opened. Tommaso nodded at the man who appeared and said, “Dario will see you in.”
Her face, which had been determinedly looking out of the darkened window the entire drive, finally turned to him. “You’re not coming in too?”
He soaked in her beautiful features and felt her poison trickle through his veins. He could break this woman if he wanted. Maybe he would.
Bringing his face close to hers, he spoke in a soft but deadly tone.
“I have my father’s wake to attend – you remember him?
The man you pretended to see as a father, too?
The man who treated you as a child of his blood from the moment of your birth?
The man you cried tears for during his funeral service only hours ago?
I’m going to join the rest of my family in mourning his death and celebrating his life, and while I’m there, I’m going to have to explain why my hands are not soaked in your treacherous blood.
I’ll be back when I’m back.” He leaned away from her and held out his hand. “Before you leave, your phone.”
She threw him a baleful stare before pulling her phone out of her jacket pocket and practically slapping it onto his open palm.
He brought his face back to hers, close enough that he could feel her poisonous breath on his face; the breath she was only making through his benevolence.
“As much as I love a woman with spirit, I will not tolerate dissent or disrespect from you. When I return, I will go through the ground rules, but understand now that the top rule is compliance in all things, and that your compliance will be given with good grace. Understood?”
Her chin lifted, plump lips pulling into a tight line. “Perfectly.”
“Good. Wait up for me.”
By the time Edoardo had turned the car around, Gabriella had been swallowed into Tommaso’s home.
Tommaso’s villa was exactly as Gabriella remembered it from her one visit three years earlier, and for the blink of a moment, she could hear the blaring music and smell the alcohol and smoke.
See, too, the parade of beautiful scantily-dressed women all desperate to be the one – or one of the ones – to share Tommaso’s bed that night.
He’d taken one of them by the hand for a tour of his cellar and had made sure to catch Gabriella’s eye and smirk a wink before disappearing into it.
She’d hated herself for how that had made her feel and made her hate him even more.
At every social situation she found herself in where Tommaso was present, he always made a point of flaunting his latest lover to her.
It was as if he could smell the burn of jealousy sluicing through her veins, and revelled in making her squirm.
She hated herself for that jealousy. Hated that she’d never been able to control it. Hated even more that he’d known it, and it made her heart smash painfully to know she was now at his mercy.
The vast home once filled with noise now echoed in silence. Dario, Tommaso’s right-hand man, was someone Gabriella had known all her life, as much a part of the fabric of the Esposito empire as anyone. The usual grin and wisecrack she received in greeting from him were stark by their absence.
He knew, she thought with a shiver. Did that mean everyone knew?
Either things were kept tight inside the Esposito inner circle, a place Gabriella had held until that very afternoon, or they were deliberately leaked to the wider circle.
Dario, with his lifelong impeccable loyalty, was one of the very few in the inner circle.