Epilogue
Gino slipped into his bedroom, moving stealthily so as not to wake his sleeping wife.
She was coming to the end of the first trimester of her third pregnancy, a period that always exhausted her.
It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before her energy levels returned and Francesca returned to being her usual wonderfully annoying and bouncy self.
After brushing his teeth, he stripped his clothes off and climbed beneath the duvet. His head had barely settled on the pillow before she rolled over and curled into him.
“Everything okay?” she mumbled. Gino had just made his monthly visit to his London club, the personal touch he made to them all with far less frequency than in his child-free days.
Francesca played an active part in the running of the clubs but disliked spending nights apart from the children, and as Gino disliked spending nights apart from his wife, that meant flying red-eye back to Naples after each solo visit.
“All good.” He hooked his arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head. “Go back to sleep.”
She yawned. “Did any of the women flirt with you?”
He stroked her cheek. “A few. I told them my wife carried a gun, and that scared them off.”
She giggled softly and glided her fingers down his stomach. “I love you.”
“I love you too…” Her fingers wrapped around his cock. “I thought you were asleep?”
“I was.” She tilted her head. Even in the dark, he could see the gleam in her eyes. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve only been gone for eleven hours.”
“Eleven hours too many.”
A sentiment he entirely agreed with.
Who the hell would have believed that a decade on from the most audacious gamble of his life, he would become tetchy after a few hours away from his hostage? Not him, that was for sure. And he would certainly never have believed that, a decade on, he would be more besotted with her than ever.
Having got him hard with her hand, which took little effort at all, the love of his life lifted the lower half of her body and straddled him.
“Someone’s energy’s coming back,” he commented thickly as she wriggled her backside until her opening was right where they both wanted it.
Her mouth hovered over his, and she flashed the mischievous grin he loved so much. “Best we don’t waste it, then, right?”
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Excerpt of Blackmailed Vows:
The silence in the tiny apartment would have been deafening if Tommaso’s ears weren’t filled with the hot, rabid pulse of his fury.
Gabriella Romano’s compassion had been fake like everything else about her. She was a rat, and there was only one price exacted for treason – life.
As if she could read his mind, she moistened her delicious, plump lips, lifted her pretty little chin, and cleared her throat. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here and waving that gun at me?”
He leaned forward and smiled cruelly. “Why don’t you tell me why you left my father’s wake so early?”
Her throat moved.
“Was it anything to do with the phone call you received when we were leaving for the funeral?” Her flinch at this was barely noticeable, but he noticed it.
When it came to Gabriella Romano, Tommaso noticed everything.
His smile widened as the rage barely contained to a simmer in his veins turned up a notch.
“Niccolo warning you he was about to sell you out?”
She moistened her lips a second time. “I don’t know what you’re…”
The cobra struck. In less time than it took to blink, he was on his feet with her face in his hand; thumb and fingers pressing into her cheeks.
“Don’t play games with me, you treacherous bitch,” he snarled.
“Today I laid my father to rest, and then I learned the woman he thought of as a second daughter is a rat who’s been working to destroy us all. ”
She tried to wrench her face from his hold. “You’re hurting me.”
Tightening his grip, he brought his face directly to hers. “Consider yourself lucky that it’s me who came to deal with you. If it had been Mattia, you’d be dead already.”
Her eyes blazed with fire and defiance, but fear was tinged in the mixture too, and it was a fear his rage fed on with a gluttonous greed. “At least if it was Mattia, my death would be clean,” she hissed. “If you’re going to kill me, get it over with.”
Aware that a little more pressure from his thumb and fingers would do some serious damage, he released her face with an oath, now furious with himself for even caring that he’d caused her pain. The hatred he felt for her was beyond anything. Anything.
“Get up.” When she didn’t move, he aimed the gun directly at her face. “I said get up.”
Her beautiful features a contortion of the same defiance and fear blazing from her eyes, she gripped the side of the armchair for support and hauled herself to her feet.
It sickened him to see her wearing the black of mourning.
A simple black shirtdress and smart black leather jacket with knee-high boots, she looked as sexy as sin, and he despised her for it.
Despised himself for all the years he’d fantasised about breaching her defences and possessing her.
Despised himself for having thought she could be his future.
“Do it,” she whispered shakily, lifting her chin.
“You want to die?”
Her head jerked in a shake. Her jutted chin was wobbling, her whole body trembling.
The pulse on the left side of her neck was visibly throbbing, and he imagined her heart and the strength of its beats, imagined it was pumping as hard as his own was.
How easily he could stop her heart from beating.
One pull of his finger, and the vivid, beautiful life standing before him would be no more.
Her lungs would never again fill with air.
Her clever brain would never think another thought or store another memory.
It would all be gone. Her body would be nothing but a rotting shell, just like his father’s body.
Only five days ago, Tommaso had watched the life leech from his father.
The bright eyes that never missed anything had become blank; the essence of life that had sparked in them extinguished, and as he gazed into the dark eyes of the woman so bravely refusing to turn her stare away from his and imagined the spark of life extinguishing from them, he felt everything inside him contract painfully.
“You know the rules, Gabriella,” he reminded her harshly. “The price for treason is life.”
Her lips were wobbling as frantically as her chin. A solitary tear rolled down her cheek.
One press of his finger and no tears would ever fall from those eyes again. One press of his finger on the trigger it rested on, and those eyes would never again fire her contempt at him. Her lips would never tell another lie.
“I have to take your life, you know that.”
Her eyes closed. She swayed, but didn’t fall. Even in the face of death, her bravery defined her.
Why did it have to be her, he thought with agonised fury.
Because she was right, if he’d let Mattia deal with her as Mattia had wanted, the essence of Gabriella’s life would already be extinguished.
She would be a corpse on the floor. It was the price she had to pay, the price of life that was demanded…
“But life doesn’t have to mean death.” He spoke the words slowly as they came to him.
Her beautiful dark brown eyes flew back open and locked on his. The essence of life still burned brightly in them.
“You can save yourself.”
She swallowed before choking out, “How?”
He stared at her, the alternate path revealing itself to him wrapped in such perfection he could laugh. “You told me once that you would rather die than come to bed with me… Now is the time to decide if that still holds true. I’ll spare you your life if you give me your life.”
This time, Tommaso could hear the deafening silence too.
“You…” Her throat moved, plump lips pulling in. “You want me to…have sex with you?”
Now he did laugh. Even to his own ears it sounded as if it had been dredged from the lowest circle of hell.
“I don’t want to fuck you, Gabriella. I want to own you.
If I’m going to spare your life, then I want your life – your whole life.
” He let his gaze drift up and down her delectable, hateful, treacherous body. “It will have to be marriage.”
He laughed again at the shocked widening of her eyes. “Marriage or nothing – and for you, that nothing is literal. For me to let you live, you will be my wife, and you will be mine; mine to do with as I see fit for the rest of your life.”