Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DARIA
P apà’s in his office, and my ten-year-old skinny frame is sitting on his battered oak desk.
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a doctor.”
He laughs a loud, robust laugh like he always does. His complete attention unwavering on my little form. “Why is that, Ria?”
“So I can treat your men. When they get pow, pow, bang, bang, I can treat them.”
He ruffles my head. “You are a princess, Ria. You don’t need to be a doctor.”
I frown. “Can’t I be both?”
“No.” His tone rings unusually hard and final.
The dream blurs in front of me like the rustling of fabric, and I am pulled forward.
I am in his office again, and I am older. Older than seventeen. I am in front of his desk, pleading to study something. I’m not sure what. Antonio’s Papà is in the office with him. He’s in a wheelchair, but his face looks strong. “Just let the girl do what she wants, Carlo. I don’t see the harm in it.”
“I just said no, Ria. Now get out so I can talk business here.”
The door slams behind me, but it fails to close completely. I stand outside and listen.
“Don’t interfere with my business, Alberto. My girls will be wives to Dons one day.”
“I am only saying there’s no harm in educating them.” Antonio’s Papà’s voice floats through the gap to me.
“I don’t need them to put up a smart mouth. All they need to learn is to spread their legs when the time comes. That’s all.”
Fresh hurt washes through me at those words.
Everything swirls again, and I’m standing on the black and white tiled floor of the kitchen. It must be closer to his death because he looks like how I remember him. I am telling him something, I don’t know what, and his attention is all mine. Till his gaze shifts and moves past me to the door. I turn around and catch a new maid entering.
“Run off, Ria.”
His eyes are on the maid like he’d forgotten all about me. I grab his arm. “Don’t do it, Papà, per favore.”
He shrugs my hands off him roughly. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he snaps. “Now, get out.” When I don’t move, he yanks me by my hair, pushes me out, and slams the door on me. The lock turning sounds like a bolt on a heavy door. Still, I don’t move. I stand behind it and wait for the familiar grunts to pass through the door. Why? I don’t know. It’s as if there’s a sickness in me that needs that confirmation for it to be true. Yet again. It doesn’t take too long till it does.
I want to stop it. I am adamant that this time I will succeed in making him see sense. I pound on the door. “Papà, don’t do it. Per favore, Papà.”
Warm hands grabbed me and held me tight. “Shhh Principessa, it’s just a dream.”
I jerked away from an embrace that confined me and held no comfort. “No, Papà, per favore , please, no.” Panic was in my chest, and I gasped for my next breath. Rage and vulnerability throttled through my body.
A light flickered on and slit through my eyelids. A man’s face emerged in front of me. The memories were too close. Too suffocating and too painful. I put all the strength I had into my hand, and I slapped him across his face.
The moment the noise of bones hitting skin echoed in the room, I was jerked out of my sleep. Ice-cold sweat drenched me as I scrambled away from Lorenzo and curled up against the bedhead. No woman could survive hitting a made man. Why had I hit him when I should have known it was a dream? My chest burned from painful gasps. Fear crawled like an icy chill under my skin. My hands wrapped around my trembling body, and I dragged my gaze to find him.
He sat on his knees, arms and legs spread in surrender. My lips wobbled when my eyes skidded to the angry red mark on his cheek. I expected to see blind rage in his eyes. I didn’t understand what I saw in them. It touched me too deeply. It touched me too softly, and it rocked my wobbling nerves, and I burst out crying.
“Shh, Principessa ,” his voice rasped with sleep, but when he pulled me into his arms, his embrace was warm and tight and felt like comfort and home. “ Tutto bene . It was just a dream.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured in between sobs.
“Fuck, Principessa , there’s nothing to be sorry about.” He moved to the bedhead and took me with him. The only hum in the room was the sound of our combined breathing. His breath to mine. My breath to his. We sat like that until my heart stopped thundering in my pulse.
At some point, he switched off the light, and it was just me and him and the darkness of memories in between us.
“You want to talk about it?” His voice was gruff as it vibrated against the crown of my head.
I shook my head and snuggled closer. I don’t know how he did it, but he molded his body to mine, and I felt enraptured in it. That must be the reason my next words fell out of my mouth. “I miss him.”
“I know, Principessa , I know. Nothing wrong with that.”
I shivered in his arms and snuggled closer. “Do you want to lie down?”
I shook my head, my hair caught on his naked chest.
“What do you want then?”
“This,” I muttered.
He let out a rough laugh, like the idea pained him. But we stayed like that. I guess we stayed like that all night long because when I opened my eyes in the morning, I was still wrapped around him, against the bedhead.
Line upon line of information swam before my eyes on my flashy new laptop. Leaning against the kitchen counter I rocked my hips to Benedetta’s singing as my mind wrapped around the information Google was spewing out. All this research was fun, even if it would remain a dream. Because who was I kidding? No way was any made man allowing his wife to go to university and mingle among normal human beings. Let alone a man as brutish as my husband was.
He’d shoved a laptop under my nose a week ago. But the thing was, I knew these tricks. Papà had tried them all. Extend an olive branch, and just when you get your hopes up, yank it right back. Still, it didn’t hurt to dream a bit. If nothing else other than for the entertainment itself.
Another sort of entertainment brushed my back and wrapped around me. He’d been on a mission, and I felt it. There was a path he was carving, and it led straight to me. I was already wavering when I’d never been close to a man who wasn’t family. But he focused on me and only me with those laser beams that he called eyes and it was doing weird things to me. Large, tanned hands with a dusting of black hair came to rest on either side of me and caged me in against the cold slab of marble against the kitchen island. A rough scruff and a hot whisper of a man nuzzled my neck. Goosebumps hitched up my spine.
My head shot up to Benedetta rolling out pasta sheets. There wasn’t a hitch in her soft singing to give away she’d noticed the woman eater against my back.
Still, I tried to shake him off. It was hard. For one thing, a 200-and-something-pound man wasn’t a blanket. And my heart wasn’t really in it. He’d been wrapping himself around me like molten lava, dissolving my resolve one kiss, one touch, one look at a time. When he gave me the shiny laptop, which he had already used to research the ideal university for me, my body had dissolved like a hot puddle of jelly underneath his Valentino loafers. Even if it was only to remain a dream.
“Well….” His gruff voice caught the hollow in the back of my ear. A thrill of a spark zipped the length of my body, like I’d stuck my pinky in an electric socket.
I swallowed. “Well, what?”
“Have you decided?”
I couldn’t follow this line of conversation if I wanted to. And I really didn’t want to. I was in heat. I was needy. His constant looks and hot touches were getting to me. It must have been the mating season or something. That was it.
A loud slap landed on my ass. My head shot up embarrassingly at the same time as Benedetta’s singing stopped. Heat rushed to my cheeks. “ Bruto! ” I tried to shove the reluctant weight off my body, which only made him push his onto me. “Stop it,” I hissed.
“Benedetta, go do something else,” he rasped while running his teeth along the back of my neck.
“ Minchia.” I could just drill a hole through this stupid marble floor and bury myself in the cellar 129 floors down. Benedetta, God bless the woman, only shook her head and took off. “You’re so rude.”
He chuckled against my skin, and a ripple of warm pleasure rode out to every cell in my body. “I think you like me just the way I am, Principessa .”
Not . But it didn’t stop me from arching my back to his. There was something hard and solid against it.
“Have you decided?”
I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what this was about. The metallic surface of the kitchen cupboards drifted before my eyes, and I caught the warped shape of our reflection in them. If this wasn’t hot, I didn’t know what was. Stop it! I do not like my husband.
Another nip on my neck. “Or should I decide for you?”
I didn’t want him to do anything for me. Other than maybe rub himself against me like he was doing. I bit my lip to stop the moan that was climbing up my throat.
“No,” I muttered.
His warm hand slid up my legs, underneath my skirt, and wrapped around my core. The moan slipped out as easily as water through my open palm. My head rolled back to rest against his chest.
“You’re so wet, Principessa . It’s a fucking dam down here.” His finger traced the wet path on my silk panties. “You want me to make you come?” His words grated against my ear and sent a fresh thrill of sparks down my spine.
Isn’t it obvious? Yes. I nodded vigorously.
“Yeah?” he rasped.
Yes! God, yes! My head bobbed again.
He pushed my panties to the side, and hot air rushed to my core. I pushed against him, impatience riding every nerve in my body. Minchia! The memory of the last time his fingers were inside me wasn’t helping matters. Honestly, it was embarrassing. The thin line of wetness running along the seam of my thighs wasn’t helping.
His other hand grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled my head up. I closed my eyes instantly.
“Eyes open,” his tone was dark and tight, just like his face, I realized when my eyes opened reluctantly to his.
His finger traced my opening. “Who am I to you?”
Not this again. My eyes slid closed and his finger slipped away. No . I rocked in annoyance, and a dark chuckle touched my neck. “Who am I to you, Principessa, and before you pop that beautiful mouth of yours open, I’d think about it because my hands will do other things than you…” he bit my neck to my loud yelp, “if you give me the fucking wrong answer.”
He was my captor, my business partner, but all that came out of my stupid mouth was “My husband.”
He sucked the tender skin on my neck. How did he have the willpower? I didn’t know shit about sex, but I knew he couldn’t get any harder than he was on my back. Right?
“What do you call me?”
“Ugh….” Confusion marred me. “Lorenzo?” I mumbled. Please let it be the right answer.
“Good enough for now, Principessa but one day, you’re going to call me something else.”
I had no idea what he meant, but it evaporated from my mind the moment his thick fingers slipped inside me. My eyes flew open when he yanked my hair again. “Eyes on me.”
If it wasn’t the sexiest thing I’d ever known. He fucked me slowly. He fucked me rough. His calloused fingers went in and out of me as the sound of wet slickness pounded in my pulse. His hot gaze scorched me. Like I was the be-all and end-all of his world. Like he’d burn the whole damn world to satisfy a silly whim of mine. His eyes burned hot on the edges, and his face colored dark. And when I came, I came hard, shaking against the cold marble on the front and the hot lava on my back. He caught me when I flew off and brought me down slowly with a soft kiss on my lips like I was something precious that he’d never let go of. Dreams I’d thought before. They were only dreams. Because, in reality, made men were never so nice.