4. Honesty
four
In the interest of getting no less than one of her demands met, Felicity had turned off the television, moved the bulkier of the two chairs directly in front of the room’s entry point, and plopped herself down. In truth, the chair was heavier than Cristiano had made it look that morning, so she was grateful she had another couple of minutes to re-gather herself afterward before she heard the shower turn off. Then her heart rate kicked up again.
She hadn’t heard any orgasmic outcries. Not that she knew what he sounded like when he came, or what any adult male sounded like in that situation in real life for that matter, but she’d definitely not heard anything that could have been such a thing. Not over all her own noise and the faint backdrop of the running water in the walls. She tried to convince herself she wasn’t disappointed in what that might mean.
She sat up straight in the chair, suddenly wondering how she should position herself. Back ramrod straight, hands in her lap, eyes forward? Arms crossed and scowling? Whole body semi-curled onto the seat of the oversized chair? No, she was pretty sure she could eliminate that one.
It felt like an eternity of waiting and indecision, nerves like crashing waves in her ears, before Cristiano opened the bathroom door again.
Steam wafted out as he himself paused, obviously noticing she wasn’t on the bed. Slowly, his head turned, and he arched a brow when he spotted her. She thought she saw his lips kick up at the corners. “Cute.”
Felicity frowned. She definitely had not been going for ‘cute.’ She tucked her arms under her breasts without thought. “I lost focus this morning,” she said, “but I won’t this time. I’m going to make you understand that I don’t have anything to do with Tristán’s messes, whatever they even are, so you realize you have no reason to hold me captive. Because as nice as this room is, I’m still a prisoner here, and I don’t deserve that.” Her face was hot and her breath short by the time she finished, but she’d said the words. The most important words, at least. She’d even managed not to shout them. Props to her.
“And you think planting yourself between me and the door will convince me of that?”
She swallowed. “I couldn’t think of any other way to get you to stay put long enough to have the conversation.” Dang it, that sounded weaker out loud than she wanted it to.
Cristiano moved further into the room and lowered to sit on the foot of the bed, facing her. “Do you have a plan for what to do if I already believe you?”
Felicity felt her brow furrow. “I— No,” she said. “Why else would you not have let me go?”
“I’m pretty sure I mentioned that this morning, too.” He paused for just a moment, but didn’t look away. “I can’t.”
Embarrassment and frustration slammed into her in equal measure. He had, in fact, mentioned that he ‘couldn’t’ take her home, but she’d let that statement slip her mind in lieu of everything that had immediately followed over breakfast. She’d gotten hung up on the idea that her very bizarre kidnapping was her asshole half-brother’s fault. She’d convinced herself if she could prove she had nothing to do with him, she’d be fine. That was a little on her, and a lot on her abductor.
Finally angry enough to stop beating around the bush, Felicity pounded a fist on the armrest of the chair. “Well you never explained that, either! You can’t expect me to quietly acquiesce to being locked in the bedroom of a man whose name I didn’t even know before he kidnapped me! What’s the problem with taking me home? Just drop me off in the middle of the night and threaten to come back and slit my throat or something if I ever tell anyone where I was. I don’t care! This isn’t even my fault, why am I paying for it? You haven’t explained jack shit, okay? I have a—” The words finally caught in her throat, her eyes burning. She swallowed against the brick of emotion inside. “I have people who would look for me if I just up and disappeared.”
Technically one of those people was Tristán and she actually didn’t care how much she inconvenienced him, but somewhere in the back of her mind she figured it was better to make herself sound more important than she was. Telling the man who’d stolen her from her low-budget apartment in the middle of the night and thought nothing of locking her in what she presumed to be his own home that she had only one friend, and that that friend lived on the opposite side of the country, seemed rather stupid.
Cristiano exhaled and scrubbed a hand through his short-cut dark hair. The brown looked even darker since it was still damp. Then his eyes locked onto hers again, the blue somehow stormier than before, and he said, “I didn’t answer that earlier because I knew the answer would upset you more than just being stuck here. Are you prepared for that, sweet Felicity?”
She scrunched up her face. “I may be young, but I’m not a child. If you think my life has been roses and sparkles or something up to now, I’ve been giving you too much credit.”
“I’ve never considered you a child, Felicity.” Cristiano didn’t blink. “I brought you here to protect you, even if it’s hard for you to see it that way.”
Her mouth fell open. “Protect…” She was shaking her head before she realized it. “How is this protection? How is this anything other than plain, old-fashioned kidnapping?”
“It’s that, too.”
She jumped to her feet. “It can’t be both!”
Something lit in his eyes and it looked like he held back a smile. Just for a second. “It is. Because of how I got you here, and why I’m keeping you here.”
“Whywould I need protection? No one even cares about me; they certainly wouldn’t go out of their way to hurt me.” She realized her blunder only too late.
Cristiano caught it immediately, of course. This time his lips did lift, just a little. “Except for those ‘people’ who’ll be looking for you soon?”
Felicity deflated a bit. “Okay, maybe I exaggerated on that…” She sucked in a breath. “That shouldn’t mean my life matters less!”
Cristiano was on his feet in the span of a heartbeat, suddenly in her space, bending over her with his large hands cupping her cheeks. His skin was warm and rough, but his touch was as gentle as his nearness was intense. “Your life absolutely matters,” he said. His tone was aggressive, almost angry, and yet she wasn’t frightened. “That’s why I brought you here, Felicity. Because your half-brother fucked up and put a target on a lot of heads, including yours. Right now, hiding here is the only way you survive.”
Her hands landed on his chest as if increasing her amount of contact with him would provide her better stability, or better clarity of thought. Instead her head spun. Her fingers curled in his shirt. She didn’t understand. Visions of a different male—younger, slimmer, and angrier—crowding over her clouded her mind. “A-are you saying T-Tristán’s … finally coming after me?” Her question was weak to her own ears, but hearing it out loud, she heard something else, too. That didn’t feel like the message Cristiano was bringing her. But her brain was having a hard time processing.
Cristiano frowned. “Finally?” he repeated. His tone gentled to match his touch. “What just happened, baby?”
She dragged in a breath, his scent filling her lungs. She’d become quickly familiar with the scent of him that day, locked as she’d been inside his space. Already the subtle, somehow woodsy, aroma immediately conjured the sense of Cristiano in her mind. And she knew she shouldn’t have found comfort in it, or in him, considering everything. But she did. “That’s a different story,” she said quietly. “Let’s just say it’s … a long time coming.”
Cristiano extended one thumb beneath her chin and tipped her head up again, drawing her focus back to his gaze. “He’s not coming after you, Felicity. He’s not coming after anyone.”
She frowned. She wanted to believe him, as stupid as the rational part of her brain insisted that was, but she struggled to keep up with what he was saying. “Then, how…?”
Cristiano scooped her up, his hands running over her sides as his grip adjusted, and turned them back toward the bed. “How detailed of an explanation do you really want?”
Her whole face had to be red again, she was sure. Her head was practically up against his shoulder, her body tipped sideways into his strong chest as he carried her princess style. There was no way he couldn’t hear her heart hammering away as she tried to stay present and not lose herself in idiotic fantasies. She barely heard his question, and certainly didn’t process it before he was sitting again on the side of the bed and setting her down—in his lap.
She still hadn’t found her tongue when he moved a hand to her jaw. He tilted her head so she was facing him, his other arm wound around her and his perfectly proportionate but nonetheless massive hand clamped onto her outer thigh.
“Felicity,” he said, “either answer my question or tell me why touching you is a bad idea.”
The heat still burning her cheeks seared through her and it was all she could do not to squirm on his lap. Was it a bad idea? Yes. Yes, it’s a bad idea. The only thing she really knew about this devastatingly gorgeous beast of a man was that he was more than comfortable kidnapping innocent women and holding them for ridiculous reasons. She was shameful enough for having masturbated to him earlier, she could not do more than that. No kissing, no getting handsy, and absolutely—definitely—no giving him her hated virginity.
She told herself not to think about how much better it would probably be with a man like Cristiano than with one of the lame frat boys she’d thought were her better options in the not-so-distant past. Then she opened her mouth. “I want to know the truth,” she said, proud of herself for saying the right thing. “I can handle it.”
His eyes softened for a beat and his thumb brushed across the underside of her lower lip before he pulled his hand away. “Good girl.” He reached into his pocket. “Brace yourself, baby. It’s not a happy story.”
She nearly moaned. Men actually say that in real life? They were just two words, and they hit so much harder to hear than to read on a page. It wasn’t fair. Maybe she had made the wrong choice. Maybe she should change her mind. That was a woman’s prerogative, right?
Felicity dragged in a breath, her gaze moving to the phone now in the hand he’d previously used to touch her skin. She twisted her hands in his shirt again. “What am I about to see?”
“I told you about the gang your half-brother’s running with. And you know who I am.” Neither of those statements were questions, so she nodded and waited for him to continue. But she wasn’t, truly, prepared for the story that followed.
Cristiano told her of the terrible things Tristán was responsible for, the ones just associated with—against—the De Salvos. He told her how Tristán had cost an innocent woman and her young son their safety by capturing their nightwatchmen, as well as strung up and murdered those men, all the while laughing like it was some kind of game. How he’d filmed it. Felicity wanted to be sick simply hearing that story. She could barely force herself to listen to how it came out that he’d also authorized an assault on Dante De Salvo’s home in an attempted assassination of his fiancée. She wanted to scream at learning that when the assassination failed, Tristán himself had made a second attempt, in public.
Her moronic half-brother had personally gone up and put a knife to the Dragon’s fiancée’s throat. It didn’t matter at that point that the woman had escaped with barely a bump on the head. The damage was done.
Cristiano explained they’d identified him as the same man from the video—whose name they’d learned from the would-be assassin—thanks to the ridiculous and equally stupid spiderweb tattoos her half-brother so proudly wore on his hands. He hadn’t just gotten himself caught. He’d identified himself, all because he felt a need to brag.
It made her sick, and it broke her heart.
Cristiano laid his hand over the one she had half-curled on his chest and squeezed. “I have a copy of that video on my phone. I can show it to you, if you need proof. Or you can take me at my word. The choice is yours, but if you’ve never watched someone die in real time, it will change you.”
She dragged in a breath as that fractured feeling in her chest intensified.
Her heart broke for Cristiano, and the realization that crashed into her as she heard what else he was telling her. That he had seen people die in front of him. Possibly many times. And he hadn’t come out the same.
It broke for the families of the men who’d been slain, men she didn’t and would never know. Men who might not have been the greatest of people, but who hadn’t asked for or encouraged the deaths they’d received. She didn’t know their families or the situations they were in—didn’t know if their families included young wives and children or dependent elderlies or anywhere in between—but still she felt sadness for them.
It broke for the woman and son who’d suffered as a result of her fool sibling’s actions. Victims forced to bear a trauma they should never have endured, especially not a child as young as Cristiano described.
And it broke, just a little more, for her own family. Or the mess that went by such a label. One brother already behind bars for rage-killing his girlfriend, another brother who’d taken that example and apparently doubled down on it. Already Felicity could see how her mother and the man her mother had married would react to all this. If Tristán survived to see prison, she would be expected to visit him.
Immediately that thought filled her with dread and she pushed it down, as far away as possible. If she never saw her monster of a half-brother again, it would be too soon.
Felicity drew a shaky breath and swallowed a hard lump of conflicting emotion. She felt like she understood, though. As absolutely outrageous as it was. It wasn’t Tristán’s dumb gang that wanted her, or Tristán himself, it was Dante. The damn Dragon wanted her head severed from her body, for nothing more than emotional retaliation. “So you’re saying … my stupid, selfish, idiot half-brother got the entire family put on a death list?”
“Yes.”
Tears pricked her eyes for a second, but she pushed them back. In a lot of ways, she wouldn’t miss her family. That didn’t mean she wanted them dead. She just didn’t actively want them around. It was a complicated position to be in.
Cristiano moved his hand to her jaw again, as if holding her in place. “If there’s one thing you need to understand about men like us, it’s that no one threatens the people we love and walks away. At the end of the day, nothing else matters.”
She frowned, finding her breathing unsteady. Something else surprisingly unpleasant had occurred to her and she couldn’t keep the question—the concern—to herself. “Then, wouldn’t you get in trouble for hiding me away? For … protecting me?” When he’d told her he was protecting her, she hadn’t considered he meant he was protecting her from his own family. Even knowing the stories about how dangerous they could be, most of those stories came hand-in-hand with tales of loyalty and brotherhood.
Cristiano’s lips lifted in a visible, if not strained, smile. It softened his whole face and lit up his eyes. “Depending on when he finds out, it could get me killed.”
She curled her fist against his chest. “Why would you—”
“I have a plan,” he said, talking over her. “Or at least a goal.”
She could scarcely breathe, and it was his fault. One hand lifted to cover the back of his before he could pull it from her skin. “What goal could be worth that risk?”
His expression faded back to neutral. “That’s the other thing you should know. Your half-brother isn’t missing. I have him. I’ve had him since the day he pulled that knife. And I plan to break him, get him to tell me every damn thing. If I can find out who really sent the Ink Blots after us—who it is he was trying to impress when he put hands on Iris—Dante will probably let you live.”
Felicity frowned, her head once again spinning in an effort to keep up with his words.
She remembered getting a message from her mother recently, saying something about how no one knew where Tristán was. Asking if she’d heard from him, asking if she could help look for him. Felicity had thought it was another lure and deleted the voicemail without calling back, because even if it was true, she was hard-pressed to care. Apparently, it had been true. Apparently, he was in Cristiano’s custody.
She could follow that, but the rest confused her. “How will that save me? How will that save you?”
The warmth came back to his eyes, though he didn’t smile again. “Because you’re innocent,” he said. “Right now, Dante’s angry. He wants to hurt the ones who hurt his woman. But if I can give him a better target—show him the real enemy—his focus will shift. He won’t care about eliminating a woman who was never a threat to him, and when he understands that, he’ll forget about you.”
Felicity frowned.
“If I pull it off,” Cristiano said, “we’ll fight, on the principle of my lie. But he won’t kill me, because I’ll have given him what he ultimately needed. I’ll be able to show him that I wasn’t truly betraying him.”
It wasn’t hard to hear the flaws in that strategy. “You shouldn’t sacrifice your family and your life for me,” she said, speaking almost in a whisper. “I’m no one special. I’m just a mistake from a messed-up family.”
Cristiano frowned. “You are not a mistake. Why the fuck would you say that?”
The intensity in his voice caught her off-guard and Felicity’s mouth popped open as she gaped at him for a moment. “It’s— I mean, I am.” She looked away. “My mother had an affair with a white guy and here I am. He didn’t want anything to do with her or me after that, so I don’t even know his name. But the man who raised me, Tristán and Manny’s father, he refused to adopt me because he couldn’t stomach the thought of a half-white daughter.” She trailed off. Probably that was enough to get across the point that it hadn’t been the happiest of childhoods. Especially if he’d spent any length of time with Tristán.
Cristiano’s hand left her face, something hit the floor with a thud, and then they were rolling on the bed. His hands slid across her body, her front flattened to his, and when they stopped he was above her again and yet it was so much different than before. This time he was between her thighs and letting her take almost too much of his weight. Letting her feel his firmness, his strength—and his arousal.
The heat and lust from earlier returned with a frenzy and Felicity gasped, sure her head would combust as she all but panted beneath him.
“I brought you here because you are special,” Cristiano said, his voice rough. “If your family’s too fucking stupid to see that, then I’ll be your family from now on.” He moved a hand to the inward curve of her hip, his fingers slipping beneath the hemline of her shirt.
She couldn’t help her moan at the brush of his calloused fingertips against her skin. Never mind that her body wasn’t nearly good enough to be touched by his. She was innocent, not na?ve. She knew what the hard length pressing into her lower belly was. The excitement of which was only heightened by his words still rattling around in her brain.
Cristiano bent down and ran his nose up the length of her neck, inhaling deeply. She felt the vibration of his groan through every point of contact between them. “You’re so goddamn tempting.”
Wasn’t this exactly what she’d wanted ever since she’d escaped that house? Why was she resisting now? It certainly wasn’t their age difference. Half the time she couldn’t even see the lines around his eyes that indicated he’d lived a few more years than she had. Her arms lifted and she latched onto his bicep with one hand and slipped the other over his shoulder. No, she was done hesitating. She was done chickening out.
“Cristiano,” she whispered. “I believe you….” She swallowed, stomping on her nerves as he raised his head to meet her gaze. “I want you.” Her fingers dug into him as if she were afraid he’d recoil with her words, but all she saw was a blazing desire. So she forced out the rest of the words he needed to hear first. “But you should know that I, well I’ve never … been with anyone.”
His eyes widened and his nostrils flared with a sharp breath. “What?”
She rolled her lip between her teeth. “I’m a virgin.”
His hand tightened over her hip and he dropped his forehead to hers, his chest suddenly heaving. “Fuck. I had no idea.” He dragged in another breath. “Exactly what have you done before? How far have you gone?”
An awkward laugh escaped her and Felicity found herself playing with the collar of his shirt. “I mean, I made out a couple times, and a frat guy grabbed at my boobs once. It was awkward and kind of uncomfortable.”
He shifted his weight, his full palm settling on her skin beneath her shirt. “And you trust me to do better?”
She licked her lips. She hadn’t imagined telling him that, so she might as well tell him the other thing. It counted, kind of. “I’ve also masturbated.”
He let out a strained groan and dropped his forehead to her shoulder.
“In your tub, earlier today.”
“Fuck, baby,” he said without lifting his head. “It’s your first time. You don’t want me to hurt you.”
“No,” she agreed, “but I don’t want you to treat me like I’m fragile, either.” Her heart thundered in her chest with every word, but she refused to take them back. She was amazed at herself for saying all these things, and mostly without stammering. It was important he knew how she felt. It was important he believed her.
It was important they got naked and sweaty, very, very soon.
Cristiano shoved his arm around her waist and rolled them over again without warning, this time landing her in his lap. She let out an involuntary shriek, shock blending with excitement at the movement. Her pelvis ground down on his as they settled and both of them groaned. Then he threaded his hand into her hair and brought her face up to his. “Last chance to change your mind.”
This is definitely crazy.“I won’t.”
She thought he might have growled, but she ceased to care when he crashed his lips to hers.