Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The shock of Tommaso’s kiss ran through her entire body. Gabriella couldn’t move. It was like every single atom that made her had been stunned into paralysis. Her senses, though…
They were whirling.
Tommaso’s mouth was caressing hers, and sweet heaven, she could feel the sensations in all her paralysed atoms. Not just the sensations from his mouth, but from the soft bristles of his beard tickling her skin and the gentle massage of his fingers on the back of her head.
With silent, insidious tenderness, he coaxed her lips apart, and their breaths wove together for the very first time.
For the tiniest of beats, they both stilled.
Gabriella’s heart was on fire, and when Tommaso’s tongue slid slowly into her mouth, her nerve endings caught fire too.
Her bones melting, the taste of his breath and the musk of his skin infused into her dancing senses.
A whimper danced from her throat. Winding an arm around his neck, she met his silken tongue, heard the guttural groan of reaction a beat before he broke the fusion and pulled his head back.
More intoxicated than she could have believed it was possible to feel, she gazed into eyes reflecting the fire raging inside her through the lashes of her drunken vision.
His breathing was ragged, jaw clenching and releasing. “I have to go.”
Unable to tear her eyes away from his, incapable of speech, she nodded.
He dragged his fingers through the length of her damp hair and pressed the lightest of kisses to her forehead. “Rest. I’ll be back later.”
Still too stunned to react with anything more than a small nod, she watched him leave the bathroom.
Only when she felt the emptiness she was coming to associate with Tommaso’s absence did Gabriella drag a long breath from her compressed lungs.
She hadn’t wanted him to go, she realised with dim horror.
Almost as terrified of what she was feeling now as to how she’d felt when he’d kissed her, she staggered to her feet. Her legs could have been made from noodles.
The bag he’d left for her contained two varieties of painkillers and enough variety of sanitary wear that it would be impossible not to find something suitable.
He’d got these for her. Tommaso. He hadn’t sent one of his entourage out to get them. He’d done it. That huge mountain of testosterone had stood in a grocery store and purchased the most feminine products it was possible to buy. For her.
And then he’d kissed her. Kissed her like she meant something to him.
The tears were falling down her face before she even knew they were coming.
“What do you mean, you’ve lost him?” Tommaso demanded.
He’d arrived at the warehouse expecting to find Alfredo bound to a chair with Mattia and his crew keeping watch over him. Mattia and his crew were there. Alfredo was missing.
“He’s disappeared,” Mattia explained tightly. “The trackers on his clothes have stopped working.”
“You mean he’s got wind that we’re onto him and run.” Furious, he dragged his fingers through his hair.
“Don’t act like it’s my fault when you stroll in thirty minutes late, and the damage has already been done.” Mattia’s mouth pulled into a sneer. Dropping his voice so only Tommaso could hear, he added, “What held you up? Fucking your rat?”
Tommaso had grabbed his brother’s shirt collar before his brain connected with the hand clenching it or the fist pulled back like a coil ready to be sprung.
Mattia’s eyes widened in amazement. “You’re going to hit me? Over that bitch?”
His fist tightened. Blood roaring in his ears, jaw clenched, his fury like a thick mist of red, Tommaso forced air through his nose. The silence of the men watching them was absolute.
The Esposito brothers had fought too many times to count in their childhood, but never since leaving adolescence behind. And never over a woman.
The red mist turned cold blue.
What the fuck was he playing at?
Lowering his fisted arm, Tommaso released his grip on Mattia’s collar and gave him a friendly slap on the cheek before kissing him. “I’m sorry. I’m just stressed and uptight.”
“No kidding.” Mattia smoothed his shirt, his eyes holding warily to Tommaso’s. “You look like shit – not sleeping?”
“Not as much as I should be.” His lust for Gabriella was like a tap that couldn’t be turned off. He wanted her all the time, like a junkie needing a fix. That she was always so damned responsive only fed his addiction.
Damn it, what had he been playing at, kissing her like that? What were drugs if not poison? Kissing her had been akin to injecting her sweet, sweet poison directly into his bloodstream.
“You’re not in your twenties anymore. You can’t keep burning the candle at both ends.”
“I know.” Tommaso pulled in a breath and closed his eyes to rid himself of the look on Gabriella’s face when he’d pulled his mouth away from hers. “Fill me in on Alfredo.”
Mattia held his stare a wary moment longer, then gave a sharp incline of his head. “He left his apartment an hour ago. The trackers were all working. He pulled into a garage for fuel. His car’s still there, but the fucker vanished.”
“What was he wearing?”
Mattia brought a picture up on his phone. “This was taken when he left his apartment.”
“Your men followed him from there?”
“They followed him to the garage. We didn’t want to put the wind up him by following him onto the forecourt. He’s been jittery enough as it is.”
Tommaso zoomed in on the picture, thinking hard. “Those trainers and that jacket both have trackers in them. He must have got rid of them somewhere. You have the forecourt’s CCTV?”
“It’s coming.”
“And men searching the immediate area?”
“Yes.”
“How long after he entered the forecourt before you realised he’d done a bunk?”
“Thirteen minutes.”
He bit back a curse that would have raised Mattia’s hackles again. His brother was right. He couldn’t blame him for damage done when he’d been absent. Tommaso should have been there.
He wished Mattia had been right and that he’d been late through screwing Gabriella. That, to his mind, would have been far more acceptable than being caught up in emotions that had no place in his marriage.
What the hell had he been thinking, chucking his responsibilities to one side to go shopping for his treacherous wife and then hanging around to dry her hair and infuse his senses with a direct hit of her poison?
He’d left his brother to deal with all the shit of Alfredo’s defection because her pain and embarrassment had tugged on his heartstrings?
Mattia’s phone pinged. He opened the message. “We have the footage. We’ll see better on the laptop.”
Thirty seconds later, the brothers were leaning over a battered table studying the footage on the larger screen.
They watched Alfredo pull into the forecourt and fill his small car with petrol.
They watched him go into the shop. While he paid for his fuel, two other cars entered the forecourt.
One bypassed the fuel and pulled into a parking space at the front of the store.
Two minutes after Alfredo entered the shop, he exited without his jacket or trainers, looked in all directions, and jumped into the just-parked car.
Tommaso was already on the phone to his tech guys before the car had driven out of the CCTV’s range. It was answered in one ring.
“I have a car registration for you to trace,” he said tersely. “I want the ownership details, and I want the team to find its location.”
Within two minutes, the first part of his request had been relayed. The car Alfredo had vanished into was registered to one Durante Abate, a high-ranking associate of Gino Vicario.
It was late when Tommaso arrived home. Very late. Gabriella, who’d long gone to bed, woke as soon as his footsteps treaded into the bedroom.
She lifted her head. “Is everything okay?” she asked sleepily.
“Not really. How are you feeling now?”
“Better. Why not really?”
His laughter was hollow. “As if you give a shit.” He sucked in a breath and then, in a softer tone, said, “Go back to sleep, Gabba.”
Stung, she lay her head back on the pillow and gazed up at the mirrored ceiling.
Sometimes, in their early morning couplings when Tommaso always went on top and his eyes stayed closed, she watched the two of them together.
Any erotic charge she took from it always evaporated at the unbidden thought that always entered her mind: how many other women had watched themselves with him?
“Can we change the mirrors in here?” she blurted out.
“What?”
“I hate them.” Hated seeing the ghosts of all his past lovers reflecting at her. Hated it more with each passing day.
He took a long time to answer, and when it came, it was a curt, “Sure.”
Her whispered, “Thank you,” was lost in the closing of the bathroom door.
She closed her eyes. Not to avoid the mirror or to go back to sleep – her heart was racing too hard to drift back off easily – but to hold back the tide of fresh tears.
So much for never crying for him again.
Why was everything so screwed up? If she could just hold onto her hate for him, she’d have a fighting chance of surviving this marriage, because she shouldn’t go to bed wishing she had a means of calling him so she could check that he was safe and well.
The reason she had no means of calling him was because he’d taken her phone from her, and that was because she was his prisoner.
But she could still feel his lips on hers.
She’d never known a kiss could feel like that.
She must have replayed it a hundred times since. More. Replayed, too, the way he’d wrapped that giant towel around her and the tender way he’d dried her hair.
For those short but long minutes, all the hate and angst between them had simmered into something so tender that she wished she could bottle it and hold it close forever.
There had been no hate in his stare when he’d kissed her. And no hate in hers. Just an overwhelming ache of longing that had come straight from her heart and now sat like a fist in her chest.