Chapter 29
BEA
“Miss Mendez, I’m calling from Featherwood Assisted Living. I’m so sorry to inform you…”
The person on the other end rambles on, but I only catch bits and pieces. Heart attack… Did everything we could… Quick and painless.
Abuela, the person who raised me, gone. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
When was the last time I even visited her? The guilt that joins the growing ache in my chest is devastating.
You were too busy with your new life. Getting consumed by Raffaele and his world.
I am the worst granddaughter in the world, abandoning her when she needed me most.
I curl into a ball on the couch, crying silently. At some point, a box of tissues materializes next to me. The only one who could have left them there is Tomas—he’s on door duty again today.
When all my tears have dried up, I start waiting for Raffaele, hoping he’ll return soon. While I wait, I can’t keep the thoughts from eating away at me.
I hear the car before I see it.
Gravel crunching. An engine cutting out. Two doors slamming. I’ve been at the window for I don’t know how long—long enough that the ocean’s gone from gold to gray to almost black, and the cup of tea on the arm of the chair beside me has cooled to room temperature without my drinking any of it.
He’s back.
I stay where I am for one stubborn breath. The car’s in the drive, the doors have slammed, he’s coming up the steps—he can find me where I sit.
I last four seconds.
I’m on my feet by the time he comes through the front door, and I hate that, but I’m also halfway across the room before I’ve decided to move. So much for that, I guess.
He’s different.
He’s been gone all day and most of the night, and he should look like a man who hasn’t slept in two days. He doesn’t. Instead, it’s as though he’s been lit up from inside. There’s a hum coming off him I haven’t seen since—actually, I haven’t seen this before. Not on him. Not ever.
He crosses the room in three steps and pulls me up against him and kisses me hard.
“Bea.”
“You took long enough.”
“I have it.”
“Have what?”
He pulls back and holds something up between us—a folded piece of paper, slightly worn, the edges soft from being inside his jacket for the drive home.
“Vincenzo’s will. The real one. I got there before they did. It’s in my hand.”
I take a breath.
“That’s—okay. Okay. That’s good.”
“Good?” He laughs, short, almost giddy. “It’s everything, Bea. It names me. Raffaele D’Amico. As heir. Officially. Legally. Notarized, witnessed, the whole fucking thing. Nico has nothing. He’s got a forgery and a hole in the ground where his father used to be, and now I have this.”
He waves the page.
“The families have to recognize me. They have to. The minute this is read out loud at the next sit-down, Nico is finished. He’s done.”
“That’s…”
He’s looking at me, waiting.
“That’s good, Raffaele.”
It comes out like the voice of a woman saying that’s good at a dinner party about someone else’s promotion.
He doesn’t notice. Just like he doesn’t notice how swollen and red my face is.
“It took me all fucking day. I had to drive back through Newark to a meeting I wasn’t sure was clean.
I had two of Lorenzo’s guys on Nico’s people up north.
I had— Anyway, I had to make about thirty calls in about ninety minutes.
I know it’s been a long day. I know you were waiting.
But this—this changes everything. You get that, right? ”
I look at the paper in his hand.
“How long this time?”
“What?”
“How long until the next thing. The next call. The next person you’ve got to handle.
” I step back, out of the heat of him, because if I stay in it, I won’t say what I need to say.
“How long do I get, between this and the next?” My voice starts to break, but I work to keep it even.
“I really needed you today. They called to let me know that my Abuela is… that she’s gone.
And the one person I needed by my side was off fixing the next problem instead of being here to help fix,” I swallow, “me... Or at least hold me.”
His whole face drops, and he reaches for me.
“Bea. Oh baby, I’m so sorry.”
I move away, wrapping my arms around myself.
“I realized today that every time you walk in, Raffaele, every time, you’re holding something.
A war. A document. A man you have to go put in the ground.
There’s always something. And every time it ends, you tell me, When this is over.
When Nico’s over. When the next one’s over.
And I keep believing you, and the next one keeps coming. ”
“This is the last one.”
“You keep saying that.”
He doesn’t respond, just holds the paper up again, like it’s the answer. Maybe it is. Maybe I’m being unfair. I can feel the unfairness curling in my chest, but I keep talking anyway, because the alternative is being a quiet, pretty thing in a window for the rest of my life.
“There’ll always be a Nico, Raffaele. There’ll always be a thing in your hand. Something you need to achieve. You’re in this kind of life. Of course there will be.”
“After tonight, there’s no one. The will makes the case. Nico goes down. The families fall in line. And we—”
“And we what?”
I watch him hunt for the answer. He doesn’t find it.
So instead, he moves.
His palm goes to the back of my neck. His other arm comes around my waist, and he’s pulling me in. His mouth is on mine before I’ve decided whether I want it to be.
“Raffaele—”
“Stop talking.”
“That isn’t—”
“Yes, it is.”
He walks me backward. The wall finds my shoulder blades. His mouth’s at my throat now, and his hand is already inside the robe. I’m distantly aware that I’m still arguing in my head. But my hands have already come up to his shirt.
“This isn’t productive…” I sigh.
He pulls back an inch to look at me. His eyes are still bright. Still lit up from the will, from the day, from the win.
“Some things are more important than productivity.”
He kisses me again, the bargaining kiss, the come upstairs with me kiss.
“I don’t feel very important,” I murmur.
“Twenty minutes,” he growls back. “Give me twenty minutes to make you feel like the most important woman in the world. The only woman in my world. Then I’ll talk about anything you want. Anything.”
I should say no.
I know how this will end. He’s just using me again.
But sometimes a girl just wants to be used. It’s easier than fighting.
I let him take my hand and walk me through the dark of our new house, past the front room with the cup of cold tea, up the stairs neither of us has climbed together yet, into the bedroom we haven’t slept in.
He sets me down on the bed.
The room’s everything the brochure promised. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the ocean side. Moonlight on the duvet. The faint white sound of the surf coming through the cracked window. A king bed I haven’t lain in.
This is the beach house fantasy, I think. This is the picture on the cover of every dream I’ve ever let myself have about a man.
But it’s all wrong.
I sit on the edge of the mattress in my robe with my knees together, and I don’t start to undress. Raffaele’s undoing his cufflinks one at a time. He hasn’t noticed yet. He’s still riding his high.
I’ve never felt so low.
He gets one cufflink off. Then the other. He pulls his shirt out of his waistband without unbuttoning it and looks up at me.
“Fucking hell, Bea,” he says. “You never get old. You know that? You’re fucking gorgeous. You’re fucking mine.”
He kneels in front of me. His hands dip beneath my waistband and start to work my pants down my hips. He doesn’t go for anything else. Not the robe I’m wearing on top. Not the shirt. Just the pants.
“You wanna know why I do this?” His mouth’s at my hip.
“Why I go out there and make calls and drive across three counties and put a piece of paper in my pocket and come back here? It’s this.
It’s coming back to this. It’s opening a door and finding you in a fucking robe and a body my whole life’s been working toward, and it’s being the one who gets to put my hands on it, and it’s—”
He has my pants past my knees. He slides the underwear down with them. I let him. I don’t help him.
“It’s being the man who deserves it. I’m gonna be the man who deserves you. That’s the whole thing. That’s the only thing. That’s why.”
He looks up at me from the floor.
He sees me, finally, and his voice changes.
“Hey. Hey. Look at me.” His hand cups the inside of my knee. “Don’t worry about him.”
That isn’t what I’m worried about.
He doesn’t hear it because I don’t say it.
“He’s done. Lorenzo’s people are turning over every property the family has, every place that little prick has ever slept in. We’re going to dig him out of wherever he’s hiding, and I’m going to put one in him myself, and—”
His own sentence catches in his throat.
“Fuck this. Fuck Nico. I don’t want to be in this bedroom talking about Nico. I want to worship you. That’s all I want to do tonight.”
He doesn’t wait for a response.
He parts my thighs and plunges beneath them. My body instantly betrays me.
“Fuck,” I curse, pushing into him as his tongue works its magic.
This fucking man. I’m still angry. Pissed.
That’s the thing nobody warns you about. You can be angry, and you can still come apart on a man’s mouth. You can be cataloging every grievance you’ve ever had against him, and your hips can be moving against his face anyway.
Raffaele rumbles into me, his hand spreads flat against my belly, holding me down.
I’m a mess, tangled into deeper and tighter knots by his wicked tongue. I try my best to swallow my moans, to hide my pleasure. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction.
It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
When I come, I come quietly. I press a hand against my mouth, partly out of habit and partly because I don’t want him to hear how easy it was, after everything.
He works me through it without slowing down, kissing the inside of my thigh on the way back up.
He gently bites my hip and looks up at me with his mouth still wet.
He’s grinning.
The beautiful, twisted bastard.