Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
Jax had suspected Odelia would go after Bree to get to him. She had been watching them all night and quickly followed Bree into the powder room.
At least Sofia was safely away from here. His driver had texted him after escorting her and Melissa into Melissa’s brownstone.
Jax was still furious, especially because the altercation had drawn fresh attention onto him. Not everyone would repeat his old scandal, but enough would give it air. His instinct was to take Bree out of here, rather than put up with the stares, but Dom was right. Leaving would have been a concession. Staying after the other couple had been ousted was a statement as to who was welcome here and who was not.
He waited while his brothers each danced with Bree, then Bree sat with Eve and Dom’s sisters for a while before Jax moved to collect her.
“You’re leaving?” Eve rose the moment he touched Bree’s shoulder. “You’ll have to excuse them slipping away,” she told the group. “They’re getting married tomorrow. Jax wants his beauty sleep.” She was teasing to keep the mood light.
“Your groom sets a high bar. I don’t want him outshining me at my own wedding.” Jax went along with the joke, even though he saw Bree’s expression stiffen at the mention of their wedding.
She didn’t say anything as they crossed the street and rode the elevator to the top floor, only exhaled a shaken breath as they entered the suite.
She started to twist the ring off.
“Don’t. Let me explain.” He moved to the bar. “Do you want wine or…?”
“Water.”
Smart.
He poured two from the filtered tap and brought the glasses to where she sat on the sofa, expression rigid, hands in her lap.
“Excavating my past is the last thing I want to do,” he said bluntly. “I had hoped Odelia would behave herself and I’d never have to speak of this again, but…” He scowled at the lack of bite in the sip he took from his glass. “I was engaged to her niece.”
“Paloma,” she said stiffly, refusing to look at him. “I heard.”
And thought he was lying about there being no one since her?
“It was long before you and I met. I was twenty-four. Her father was one of my father’s investment partners. We were neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard so we saw them every summer, growing up. I went to university with her brother, Tucker, and considered him one of my best friends. As soon as I got my degree, I was made head of marketing at Visconti. We both wanted children right away. Marriage made sense.”
“So it was a practical marriage? Or did you love her?” Now she looked at him. Her thick lashes emphasized the vulnerability in her blue-green eyes.
Your heart isn’t broken.
No, but it had been dented. Badly.
“It was young love.” Maybe it had been what he thought love should be. Closeness built on shared history. Fondness and sexual intimacy. “But this is how I know that marrying because you think you love someone isn’t enough.”
She rolled her lips together, looking to a corner as though being scolded for wanting love, but she didn’t understand how badly those emotions set you up for anguish.
“The morning after our engagement party, Tucker and I were nursing a hangover. I noticed scratches on his neck. He mentioned someone we both knew. Corinne. I won’t repeat what he said, but the implication was that she had acted like she didn’t want his attention, but came around in the end.”
“That’s horrible.” She recoiled in revulsion.
“It was. It was equally disturbing that he expected me to let it slide without calling him out for it.”
“Bro code?”
“I wouldn’t let either of my actual brothers get away with something like that, but yes. Tucker expected me to keep it to myself. All I could think was, What if it happened to Eve? To Paloma? In fact, I went to her first.”
“Paloma?”
“Yes. She was my fiancée. He was her brother.” He rubbed his jaw, still conflicted over how he’d handled it. “I warned her I was going to the police. She was upset, obviously. Corinne was one of our friends, but Paloma was equally—maybe more—worried about Tucker. She didn’t want me to get him into trouble.”
You can’t do that to him. What kind of man does that?
“She said that if Corinne wanted to do something—or nothing—that was up to her.” Now he ran his hand into his hair at the back of his skull, trying to release the old tension that gathered there. “I took her point. I hadn’t even heard Corinne’s side of it, but Paloma told me to drop it or she’d break our engagement. I called Corinne anyway. I told her what I knew and said that if she wanted to make a statement to the police, I would support her.”
“Did she?”
“Eventually. She was devastated, but hadn’t thought anyone would believe her. Or care. They’d both been drunk. She was blaming herself, but after a week or so, she spoke to the police. She hadn’t had one of those kits done, though. By then, Tucker’s scratches had faded. It turned into her word against his.”
“But you were able to corroborate. He confessed .”
“And I had told Paloma what he said, but she sided with her family. She told the police I was lying and hadn’t told her anything about it. She said I had sour grapes because she’d broken our engagement, which she had by then. Her entire family started smearing my reputation to drown out the gossip around what Tucker had done.”
“And Corinne?”
“Tuck’s father paid her to withdraw her statement. I don’t blame her, considering what they put me through. It was hell. At first, I didn’t care because I knew I was right.” He sneered at his youthful principles. “Then they joined the Blackwood camp and started including my family in the attacks. At that point, Dad sent me to Nonna and suggested I set up the Euro division.”
“He banished you?” Her expression was so empathetic, so filled with sorrow on his behalf, Jax thought he might remember it for the rest of his life—the crinkled brow, the soft, sad pout of her mouth. The blink of sheened eyes.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said, but his voice traveled over rough ground. It had felt exactly like that. Ostracized. Exiled.
He drew a breath, trying to ease the ache of being punished for doing the right thing. Of being separated from the people he loved most.
“Dad had the whole family to think of.” He cleared his throat. “Mom was getting blocked from social events. Nico and Christo were taking it on the chin, but Eve was only seventeen. When they went after her, saying some really filthy stuff, my temper was so short, I broke a man’s nose. Dad put me on a plane for my own good.”
This time when she fiddled with the ring, she was only centering it on her hand. “At least your grandmother was there for you.”
“She was. They all were, in their way. Dad wasn’t just getting me out of the city. He had his hands full with Dom and Dom’s father. Sending me to run Europe was a strategic move. I genuinely prefer Italy, and Eve was starting school in Switzerland. I saw her all the time. It was probably best that Dad split up us boys, too. We stand together against an enemy, but we’re competitive enough to break each other’s noses when we disagree. Best to keep large bodies of water between us.”
She only looked at the ring, somber. “I thought she was making sure I knew I didn’t belong there. She said I’d tricked you into marrying a nobody and that Sofia was a bastard.”
He couldn’t help the angry curse that burst out of him, or the way his hands curled into fists. It was a damned good thing Odelia was all the way across the city by now.
“It was me she wanted to hurt. She was using you to do it. Of course, you belong.”
“Uh, no,” she said on a humorless laugh. “Let’s be honest about that.”
“I am being honest. Aside from Odelia, did anyone else make you feel unwelcome?”
“No, but…” She gave him a pensive look. “You didn’t tell me who you were when we met. Yes, I could have looked at your card, but you weren’t up front about all of this.” She waved at the sumptuous comfort of the Presidential suite. “Was that because you thought I might have heard something about you? That I might be a gold digger?”
“I’ve had my share of encounters with people attracted to my wealth and name,” he admitted. “It was refreshing that you saw me as a person.”
“And you knew you’d never see me again, so what did your full identity matter?” Her voice husked and her brow pulled with injury.
“It wasn’t that cold-blooded, Bree. I had caused my family a lot of pain. I was still trying to make up for that. I was due in Naples that afternoon to close on a property that Nico and Dom were competing to purchase. I stayed with you. That felt very selfish.” He ran his hands on his thighs, conscience still pinched. “I could tell you were a bigger distraction than I could afford, especially when Nico texted that Dom was moving in on us. I was standing there realizing I’d failed my family by sleeping with you, so I didn’t ask for your number. But you could have looked at my damned card.”
She dropped her gaze, unrepentant, her jaw remaining set.
“I accept that you were hurt and angry tonight. And by my behavior that day. Fine. But I’m committing my life to you tomorrow and I need you to do the same. You can’t pull off that ring just because a stranger is rude to you.”
“I’m afraid to trust you,” she said in a low voice, twirling the ring.
“Same,” he said bluntly. “But we have to try.”
“How?” she asked with a pang of hopelessness in her voice. “Where do we even start? All we have between us is sex.”
“Then let’s start there.”
***
“W-what do you mean?” Bree asked with trepidation.
Jax tugged his bow tie open, then drew it from his collar and set it flat across her knees.
Her heart arrived in her throat, pounding hard. He couldn’t be serious.
“No?” He was watching her very closely. “You know I’d never hurt you. Don’t you?”
Not physically, no, but he had already turned her inside out over different things. His engagement for one. To a woman he had loved . What he’d been through was still making her ache for him, but it also heartened her. A man who had stood up for someone else wouldn’t want to force her to do anything she didn’t want to.
It was still terrifying to draw her hands down from where she’d instinctively tucked them into her neck and offer them.
“I don’t know how…” She tried pressing her inner wrists together, but he guided her into crossing them.
As he wrapped the silk and pulled it tight, binding them, her heart pounded harder.
When it was done, she gave a testing wiggle. He felt to ensure it wasn’t so tight it would leave marks. His fingers settled on the pulse in her wrist.
“You’re scared?”
“Yes.” Her mouth was dry.
“Really scared?” He stroked his touch up the sensitive underside of her bare arm. “Or nervous and turned on?”
How did he know? Her nipples were stinging behind the cups of her bodice. She bit her lip. “The second one.”
A slow, wicked smile formed across his lips.
He stood and drew her to her feet, then cupped her face and kissed her.
It started out slow, but deepened by degrees, as though he was reassuring her. As though he was rewarding her.
She flowered under that sweetness. It had been a fraught evening, from attending the party, feeling judged there, then learning more about him and how he had felt about their time in Como.
Now a white haze was filling her brain, taking over any awareness but the drugging sensation of long, lazy kisses. Arousal was detonating through her, and she started to bring her arms up only to discover her wrists were bound.
He lifted his head, eyes gleaming with lust and amused gratification.
He hooked his finger into the silk that bound her, leading her toward the bedroom.
Butterflies filled her stomach as her mind exploded with possibilities, trying to anticipate what he would ask of her. What he might do to her.
As they neared the door to the bedroom, however, he turned her toward the wall, lifting her joined arms toward the U of a tulip-shaped wall sconce. He hooked her bound wrists into it and her stomach plummeted into uncertainty.
“What, um…”
“You’re going to have to be very careful, Briella bella ,” he said as he stood behind her, trailing his seductive touch along her trembling arms and the backs of her shoulders. “Don’t move too much or you might knock that off the wall. Then we would have some embarrassing explanations to make, wouldn’t we?”
“You’re not serious,” she said on a shaken breath, trying to look over her shoulder at him.
“Do you want me to release you?” His tickling caress was sweeping across the top of her spine. His lips nuzzled at her nape, nearly taking out her knees. “Because what I really want to do, bellezza , is release you.”
“What if…” They were in the hall. “What if someone walks in?”
“Does that possibility excite you?” The zip of her gown lowered, relaxing across her chest. “Close your eyes and pretend I’m a bellboy if you want to.”
“Who are you pretending I am?” she asked with a sharp look over her shoulder again.
He chuckled.
“There is only one woman I want, bella . The alluring, elusive Bree I met in Como.” His hand went into her hair, dragging her head back so he could scrape his teeth against the side of her throat while his other hand delved into the front of her gown. “I want to chain her in a dungeon and keep for myself the rest of my life.”
He pinched her nipple just hard enough to make her jolt, but then he soothed her, rolling and teasing and sending rivulets of arousal from breast to belly to sink hotly into her loins.
“I’m glad you’re wearing such tall shoes. I can have you right here. I want that very badly. Do you feel that?” His hand rode down to the notch of her thighs. He cupped her mound, using the pressure to push her backside into the erection behind his fly.
“Be careful,” she gasped. “You’ll stain the dress.”
“We both will.” He rocked his hand, making her shudder with erotic joy, trapped in such a blatant way. “I’m going to make love to you right here. I want you to know that it’s safe to give yourself to me anywhere, anytime. To let me take control. And when you do, you’ll like it.”
Was it, though? Because despite being literally tethered to the wall, she felt adrift. As though pieces of her were falling away. Shields maybe.
She wanted to catch them back, but her arms were bound and her skirt was coming up. He ran his hands over her buttocks and hips and thighs, praising her in Italian while sliding her panties down her thighs. She didn’t understand all of it, but she understood a cherishing touch and words like bella and seducente and la mia donna .
My woman.
When he guided her to step out of them and his hot touch began to explore between her thighs, she leaned into the wall, turning her face against the cool wallpaper, closing her eyes as longing filled her, waiting for his caress to find the molten center of her.
Finally, he claimed her folds and the peak of her pleasure with a long reaching touch, making her shake. Making her sob with yearning.
More erotic words warmed her ear. “You’re as aroused as I am. I don’t want to stop touching you, but I want to be inside all this heat, bella .”
“Yes,” she moaned. “Please.”
His touch left her and she could have wept, but he was opening his trousers. The fabric brushed her skin. The satin of her skirt draped her thighs as he nudged her shoes apart and stood between them.
A distant part of her had a moment of clarity, realizing how flagrant this was. He’d barely kissed her! But the broad dome of his sex was seeking her entrance, pressing. He was filling her and she groaned in ragged abandon at how good it felt.
His breath hissed in and he gripped her hips. More Italian. Earthy noises of his hips slapping her buttocks.
She was pinned to the wall, arms tingling from being raised so long, but she didn’t care. She only wanted the friction of his thrusts. The animalistic noises from his throat that told her he was as wrapped up in this as she was.
And just when she feared he would lose control and leave her in a state of abject arousal, he slid his touch to rub and press and detonate her climax.
She screamed.