Chapter 11
Lorenzo
I walk away from Elizabeth before I do something stupid.
Like kiss her.
The problem is, Elizabeth has always known exactly how to follow a wound until she finds the place it hurts most. She comes after me anyway, fast enough to catch my arm before I reach the front of the cabin, forcing me to turn back toward her.
“I want to go back to Bari.”
“No.”
Her eyes flash so brightly it almost looks like hatred has lit them from within. “There’s no way this ends with me going back to Chicago, Lorenzo.”
I pull my arm from her grip. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”
She gives a short, disbelieving laugh. “God, you really haven’t thought any of this through.”
Something in my chest tightens.
“Stop saying that.”
“Why?” she demands, taking a step closer.
“Because it’s true?” Her hands shake at her sides, but her voice only gets sharper.
“You don’t want me in Chicago. You can’t take me back to Bari.
You’re still married. Dante is going to come for me.
Your wife is going to want answers. His people are going to want blood.
But sure, Lorenzo, tell me again how this was all part of some grand plan. ”
I say nothing. Bad choice, because Elizabeth sees it. Her face changes—just a little—but it’s enough. Enough for me to know she found the crack.
“That’s what I thought,” she says, and her voice turns quieter then, which is somehow worse. “You came for me because you couldn’t bear seeing me belong to someone else. That’s it. That’s the whole truth.”
“It’s more than that.”
“No.” She steps into my space again, chin lifted, eyes bright with fury and hurt.
“It isn’t. Because if this were love, you would have thought about what happened after the church.
If this were love, Teresa wouldn’t have had a gun on her.
If this were love, you wouldn’t have ripped me away at the exact moment I was choosing peace. ”
The word hits like a knife.
Peace.
With him.
I feel my jaw go tight. “You call that peace?”
“Yes.” Her voice breaks, but she doesn’t stop. “I do. Because whatever Dante is, he gave me safety. He gave me a choice. He gave me room to breathe. And you—”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. Only pain.
“You make everything feel like survival.”
For a second, I can’t move. The words land too cleanly, too exactly, slicing straight through the rage I’ve been holding together by force. She sees it. Sees all of it. And because she’s angry enough not to care what it costs, she keeps going.
“You know what the worst part is?” she whispers.
“A part of me still wanted you to have a reason. A real one. Something bigger than jealousy or pride or obsession. But there isn’t one, is there?
You saw me with him, and it shattered your ego, so you came for me like I was some toy another man picked up off your floor. ”
I don’t remember crossing the space between us. One second she’s standing there, breathing hard, eyes full of fire. The next, I have her against the wall of the cabin, one hand braced beside her head, the other locked around her waist.
She gasps.
“Do not,” I say, my voice rough enough to barely sound like mine, “ever compare what I feel for you to wounded pride.”
Her pulse jumps wildly in her throat, but she doesn’t look away.
“Then what should I call it?” she asks, and there’s something reckless in her now, something that wants to wound me as badly as I’ve wounded her. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks a lot like a man who only wants what he can’t have.”
That does it. Whatever control I had left snaps.
I kiss her. Not softly. Not gently. I kiss her like I’ve been holding it back for months, for every second since I stepped into that church and saw her in white walking toward another man.
My hand tightens at her waist, hauling her flush against me as my mouth takes hers with all the fury, hunger, and ruin I’ve been choking on since I found out where she was.
For one terrible, glorious second, she goes still in shock.
Then she kisses me back. It’s not sweet or forgiving.
It’s furious. Her fingers knot in the front of my shirt as she rises onto her toes and kisses me like she hates me, like she wants to bite the breath out of my lungs and give it back bloodied.
The taste of her is familiar and devastating and enough to make the whole world tilt.
A broken sound leaves me as I deepen the kiss, my hand sliding up her back, her body warm and trembling against mine.
This.
This is what I crossed an ocean for.
This is why I stormed a church.
This is why nothing else mattered.
And then—
Crack.
Her palm connects with my face so hard my head turns.
Silence slams down between us and my cheek burns.
Elizabeth is breathing like she ran a mile, her eyes wide, her mouth swollen from my kiss. There’s fury there. Hurt. Confusion. And something else she’s trying to kill before it can live. She still wants me.
“Don’t,” she whispers.
I look back at her slowly.
“Don’t do that to me.” Her voice shakes now, and she seems to hate that it does. “You do not get to kiss me like that after what you’ve done.”
I say nothing because if I open my mouth right now, I’ll either say something unforgivable or drag her back into me and make this worse.
Tears gather in her eyes, which is somehow worse than the slap.
“You don’t get to act like there’s still something between us just because you decided to show up,” she says. “You don’t get to make me feel things and then expect that to erase the rest.”
“You felt it.”
It isn’t a question.
Her laugh is small and broken. “I hate that I did.”
My chest tightens so hard it feels like something tearing.
Elizabeth wipes at her face angrily, like she refuses to let me see even one tear. “That kiss changes nothing.”
“No,” I say hoarsely. “It changes everything.”
Another mistake. I know it the second the words leave my mouth. Her expression hardens all over again. She pushes off the wall and puts space between us, hugging herself like she can hold herself together by force.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Elizabeth—”
“No.” She draws in a shaky breath. “You kidnapped me. You threatened people I care about. You tore apart the one stable thing I had, and then you kissed me like that because what? Because I made you angry? Because I struck a nerve?”
Because you’re the only woman I have ever looked at and forgotten how to be a man anyone should trust.
Because hearing you say you found peace with him made something savage rise up in me.
Because I have loved you badly, selfishly, ruinously, and I don’t know how to stop.
But I say none of that. I just watch her. And she watches me right back, both of us breathing too hard.
Finally, she steps back again.
“Don’t touch me,” she says.
The words land like a sentence.
Then she turns and walks toward the rear of the cabin, leaving me standing there with the taste of her still on my mouth and the sting of her slap burning in my skin.
And somehow the slap is the easy part. It’s the kiss that’s going to kill me.
By the time we land in London, I’m running on fumes and fury.
Neither one is enough.
Elizabeth doesn’t look at me on the drive from the airport. She sits turned toward the window in the back of the car, swallowed by that oversized hoodie, her face pale in the wash of streetlights. She’s still wearing the clothes I forced her into on the jet. Still carrying the rage I earned.
Good.
Better that than indifference.
I bring her to the townhouse in Mayfair because it’s secure, discreet, and mine. No staff waiting up. No unnecessary eyes. No one to ask questions I don’t feel like answering.
The second we step inside, she stops in the foyer and folds her arms.
“Where are we?”
“My house.”
“In London?”
“Yes.”
Her laugh is soft and bitter. “Of course you have a house in London. Is there where you keep all your mistresses?”
I don’t answer and lead her upstairs. She follows because she’s exhausted, not because she trusts me. I can feel that much. When I open the bedroom door, she freezes.
There’s only one bed.
She turns her head slowly, and the look she gives me could strip paint. “No.”
“It’s late.”
“There are other rooms.”
“There are,” I say. “None of them are for you.”
Her eyes narrow. “Excuse me?”
I step inside and set my bag on the chair by the window. “You’re staying where I can see you.”
She laughs once, incredulous. “You cannot be serious.”
“I’m always serious.”
“Then sleep on the floor.”
I look at her over my shoulder. “Absolutely not.”
Her face hardens, beautiful and furious. “You dragged me across countries against my will, threatened half of Italy, and now you think I’m getting into bed with you?”
“I think you’re tired,” I say. “I think you’ve had a worse day than most people survive. And I think if you keep standing there glaring at me, you’re going to pass out.”
“I’d rather pass out.”
“That can be arranged in the bed.”
She makes a sound under her breath that would probably earn someone else a reprimand.
From her, it nearly earns a smile.
Nearly.
Instead, I walk to the wardrobe and pull out a spare blanket and pillow. “You take that side.”
Her brow furrows. “And you?”
“This side.”
“There is no world in which that’s happening.”
I turn then and hold her gaze until she stills.
“You are not sleeping alone in a foreign city the night I took you from a church at gunpoint. If Dante tries something, if anyone finds us here, if you decide to run in the middle of the night because you’re angry enough to make stupid choices, I want to know. ”
She stares at me.
Then she says, “You really think highly of yourself if you believe I’d stay here.”
I say nothing.
Her chin lifts. “I’d run from you.”
There it is.
The truth dressed as a blade.
I nod once. “Then it’s settled.”
Her mouth parts in disbelief. “That isn’t how settling works.”
“It is tonight.”
For a second, I think she’s going to keep fighting. God knows she has enough anger left for it. But exhaustion finally wins. I see it in the slight drop of her shoulders, in the way she looks past me at the bed like it personally offended her.
“Fine,” she says tightly. “But don’t touch me.”
The words come too easily now.
I should be used to them.
I’m not.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
That earns me another glare, which is fair.
She disappears into the bathroom with the hoodie still hanging to mid-thigh, and I give her privacy I don’t owe and maybe don’t deserve. When she comes back out a few minutes later, she’s still fully clothed. Hoodie. Leggings. Like she’s going to war, not bed.
I strip down to my briefs and leave it at that.
Her eyes flicker to me once and away so fast most men would miss it.
I don’t.
Then she crosses to the far side of the bed, lifts the blanket, and gets in without another word, rigid under the covers, her back to me, every line of her body broadcasting exactly how much she hates that I’m here.
I kill the lamp and lie down on top of the sheet on my side of the bed, one arm behind my head, staring up at the ceiling.
The room is too quiet.
I can hear the city beyond the windows, muted and distant. A siren somewhere far off. Tires on wet pavement. Elizabeth’s breathing, too uneven to be sleep for a long time.
I keep my eyes open and my hands to myself.
Because the truth is, she should be safe from me tonight.
Safer than she has ever been.
And still, all I can think about is the feel of her mouth when I kissed her on the plane.
The way she kissed me back before she slapped me for it.
The way she looked in that church in white, walking toward another man while something in me came apart in real time.
I tell myself I did the right thing. If I tell myself that enough times, maybe I’ll start believing it.
At some point, the anger in the room settles into something quieter. Heavier. Sleep finally drags me under without permission.
I don’t know how much later it is when I wake. Only that something is touching me.
My eyes open instantly.
The room is dark, the streetlamps outside casting a pale wash across the bed, and Elizabeth is no longer on her side.
She’s turned toward me in her sleep. One hand is fisted in my bare shoulder.
One leg is tangled with mine beneath the blanket.
For a second, I lie perfectly still, trying to understand what woke me—the touch, the heat of her body, or the sound she makes next.
A soft, broken whimper.
My name.
“Lorenzo...”
Every muscle in me locks.
She’s dreaming.
I know that immediately. Her breathing is shallow and uneven, her brow furrowed, her mouth parted on a plea that sounds dragged up from somewhere helpless and deep.
Her fingers tighten on me.
Then she presses closer.
“Please,” she whispers, barely audible. “Please... make me feel good.”
My entire body goes hard with shock.
And hunger.
And something far more dangerous.
I stare at her in the dark, every sane instinct in me screaming to move away, to wake her, to put distance between us before I do something I can’t take back.
But she buries her face against my chest like she belongs there.
Like she remembers.
“Please,” she whispers again, voice wrecked with sleep. “I just want to feel good.”
I close my eyes.
Because if I look at her right now, really look, I’m not sure I’ll survive it.
My hand lifts before I can stop it, hovering over her back.
Not touching.
Not yet.
I can feel the warmth of her through the stupid oversized hoodie, can feel the trust in this unconscious reach even if she’d rather die than offer it awake.
And that, somehow, is the cruelest part.
That even now, even after everything, some sleeping part of her still comes to me in the dark.
“Elizabeth,” I say, my voice rough enough to scrape. “You need to wake up.”
But she only presses closer and makes that small pleading sound again, fingers curling against my skin.
And lying there in the dark of my London house, with the woman I stole from another man half-wrapped around me and begging in her sleep, I realize I’m balanced on the thinnest edge of control I’ve had in years.