Chapter 7
Leo
It’s been two hours since I left Bianca at the Richmond Club. What’s taking her so long to get here?
Unless she’s reneged on our arrangement.
Really, why would she risk everything to come meet me?
A worse thought slithers into my mind, and I curse aloud, my fists closing as jealousy burns its destructive path in me.
Did that bastard take her to his place?
Is he having his way with her as we speak?
I’m imagining his hands on her, mapping the curve of her hips to her small waist, thumbs grazing the underside of her heavy breasts…his mouth on her nipples… When I think of him taking her, a roar tears itself out of me, and I crunch my right fist into a wood beam of the loft I’m waiting in.
“Leo!” Bianca gasps.
A second later, she’s by my side. A gentle hand settles on my right forearm, and with the other, she cradles the side of my head.
“What are you doing?” she murmurs. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
Her hand slips a little, resting on the naked skin of my forearm where I’ve rolled the cuffs to my elbows. Her heat diffuses into me, warming my skin, my blood. When she starts to run her fingers in my hair, short nails softly raking my scalp, a shudder wracks through me. I find myself angling my head to her palm, like a cat seeking pets. Her touch is so soothing, I want nothing else but to stay here, with her holding me like this.
“Leo.”
The sound of my name pours from her lips like a caress. It’s never sounded like this to me before. Like a prayer, a wish, a marvel all in one.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, cupping the side of my head, my ear, in her palm.
I open my eyes—didn’t realize I’d closed them. My gaze lands into hers. They’re dark, sultry, searching. And she’s worried, too. I can see it in the small frown creasing the spot between her eyebrows, in the tension at the outer corners of her wide eyes.
How do I begin to tell her what’s wrong?
“I can’t do this,” I mumble.
“Do what?”
She’s so close, her breath fans my chin. She must not have high heels on today, then. Feeling her so small before me, all I want to do is reach out and pull her to me, crush her to and with my body as I turn her against the wall, pull her legs up around my hips, and sink my cock into her.
It hurts. So much.
“I can’t bear the thought of you…”
“Shh. It’s alright.”
Her left hand is slowly traveling over my arm, coming to settle on my shoulder. Her warmth threads into me from here, too, warming me where I’d thought I’d gone to ice before. Warming, thawing, in my chest, the area around my heart…
“It’s not alright,” I say. “You with him, I can’t bear it, Bianca.”
“Oh, Leo,” she sighs.
“Leave him,” I hear myself saying. “Come with me.”
I think I hear a sob. It hitches in her throat, doesn’t tumble from her lips.
When Bianca lifts up on tiptoe and presses her forehead to my cheekbone, my own breath snags in my airways. I can’t breathe suddenly, can’t do anything but inhale in the sweet smell of her perfume that runs like a balm that soothes as much as it burns inside me.
This. Her. This woman. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I’ll ever need.
She’s mine.
“Marry me,” I say.
Bianca tenses against me, and I want to growl when she pulls away from me. She takes a few steps back, and the chasm that opens between us is wide and cold, a trench deeper than the ones that run at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Something inside me knows I’m losing her right now, but I ignore it. Fight it. Refuse to surrender.
“Marry you,” she says softly.
“Yes.”
I’m totally going to stand my ground here. If I can’t have her, no one else will. I’ll fight tooth and nail to make it happen.
She wraps her arms around her, which feels like her shutting me out further.
“How do you plan to make this happen?”
My jaw clamps, and I force the words out. “I’ll find a way.”
“When I’m already engaged to someone else.”
“You’re not engaged, Bianca. Engaged is when a man proposes to you. You’ve been sold off so your father can cull favors with the syndicate.”
Her face has gone white, her lips pursed.
“Thank you for painting me such a detailed picture,” she quips.
I close my eyes briefly. This woman, she’ll be the death of me.
“I went too far. I apologize.”
Silence thrums between us, until the moment her lower lip starts to tremble.
I’m over to her in a flash, pulling her into my arms, wrapping her in them.
“Don’t cry,” I mutter, then drop a kiss on top of her head. “Please don’t cry.”
“You’re not wrong,” she replies, words muffled against my chest.
I savor the feel of her against me, her warmth, the way her curves fit just right against the harder planes of my body, how her leg is tangling with mine as she burrows into me.
This is where she belongs. More so than in my bed with my cock buried inside her. I don’t want just the lover she is to me, I want all of her.
“Marry me,” I say again.
And it was the wrong thing to state. Again.
She pulls away, eyes fiery as she stares me down despite being a good six inches shorter.
“And what’s that going to do, huh?”
Reality douses me with a bucket of cold water. What was I thinking? As my wife, I can protect her, but what of the consequences around breaking the alliance between her and Abrashi?
“I could kill him.”
“And then what? The contract states I’m to marry into that family. There’s still another eligible brother. You want me to end up with The Butcher ?”
“I’ll kill him, too.”
Silence descends, then Bianca is laughing. But not at me. It’s a sad chuckle, and there are tears brimming in her eyes as she bites her lower lip.
“That’s just going to start a war, Leo. None of us can have that.”
She’s right.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” My right fist hits the beam in time with each swear.
“Leo, stop.”
Her soft murmur makes me want to cry. I’ve never felt the urge to bawl like this before, not even when my mother walked out on all of us when I was just eight, my youngest brother still a baby.
Her gentle hands cradle my right hand. When her thumb grazes the open cuts on my knuckles, I hiss in a breath.
Bianca. She calls out to the basest instincts in me—all I want is to fuck her and also kill for her, so she can be mine, so there’ll be no doubt to anyone about her belonging with me. But something in her also calms the rage inside, soothes the monster just waiting to come out the second I let my guard down.
“Why?” I ask her, voice low, almost inaudible. “Why couldn’t we have met before, you and I?”
If I hadn’t brushed Mattia off when he told me to accompany him to Paris for the New Year, I would’ve met the woman she’s become then. I would’ve been able to claim her before her father paired her off with that bastard of Abrashi.
“ Mon c?ur ,” she says, before dropping a soft kiss on a torn knuckle. “You know as well as I do our fathers would never agree to us getting married.”
She’s right, never mind how much I abhor this state of affairs. There’s a hierarchy in our organization, just like in the aristocracy. Dons are all the way up, the princes and dukes of our world. Borgatas —families or houses—they run the gamut in ranks below, all the way from prestigious marquess to lowly baron.
A baron’s daughter, despite still being an aristocrat, stands hardly a chance of being married off to a prince’s offspring, his heir, no less. And certainly not when there are plenty of eligible daughters of princes and dukes to contend with.
On days like this, I curse my origins.
“Your father has an enforcer, Leo. One day, you will, too.”
An enforcer is the one who, like the title suggests, enforces the will of his Don, the one who gets his hands dirty for him, literally. It’s a measure of the danger that riddles the world of a Don and his family.
One such as mine. Don Pellegrini is fearsome and feared—big shoes I’ll have to fill in when my time comes. No man aside from another Don wants his daughter entangled with the likes of us.
“What happened between us,” she continues. “We have to forget it ever did.”
I bristle. She shouldn’t have said this.
I stand up straighter, and Bianca gasps. Before she can move away, I reach out and clasp her shoulders, swivel her body to the right, and plaster her back to the wall. I don’t care that I’m being heavy-handed. She needs to understand this wasn’t a game to me. A mistake, it was not, because mistakes don’t burrow their way into your skin like a splinter, finding a way into your blood to keep you awake all night with your cock seeking release and never finding it.
A mistake doesn’t make a heart pound this much with yearning, with need.
A moment of lucidity strikes me.
What am I doing?
My eyes flick to hers. But instead of fear in these brown depths, all I can see are liquid pools of dark desire. Dilated pupils, parted lips, flushed cheeks. She’s aroused. I bet I can smell her arousal if I go looking.
I force a knee between her legs. No resistance from her as I part them open, as my hand lowers to then crawl up under the skirt of her wrap dress, from her knee to the apex of her thighs.
Her sex is warm, panties soaked already. I push them to the side with my middle finger, find her folds drenched, and sink it inside her hot channel. My eyes never leave hers all this time, and I can see desire, yearning, need bursting in her gaze, hear it in the soft pant from her lips, feel it in her chest rising and falling rapidly, her breasts brushing my torso, in the clenching of her pussy around my digit.
When she gasps, I smile and pull my finger out. It makes its way into my mouth, where I savor her taste.
Her body is now plastered against mine, and I slam her into the wall as much from desire as from the need to hold her as I brace my feet on the floor, my hands on either side of her head. Our heavy breaths mingle, and my mouth hears the call, crashing against hers to demand, seek, take, plunder.
Her lips and tongue are just as voracious, and her hands are gripping my sides, twisting the fabric of my shirt in her grip. Her hips arch into me, her sex pressing into my engorged cock in my pants, with too much clothing between us. I need to get us naked. Open my zipper, pull up her skirt, rip her panties.
I’m lost in a haze of sexual need when Bianca’s hands press onto my shoulders and she pushes me away.
“I can’t do this,” she cries before she grabs her bag and hightails it out of the loft.
I’m never going to force a woman to be with me, sexually or otherwise. The fact I let her go right now? It means I’ve lost her. For good.