6. Learning to Trust
six
Part of Cristiano had regretted answering Iris’s call the moment he’d felt Felicity tense at his side. He came to wholly regret it when he laid eyes on the brightly colored, overly feminine flower shop his soon-to-be surrogate sister-in-law stood in front of. She’d said she needed help with something, that it was a personal favor, and she’d given him the location of where to meet. But he had no goddamn clue what she could need from him at a place like this.
Still, he dutifully stepped up and listened while Iris explained what she wanted. He even managed not to glare at her or turn and stride away at what he heard. He’d known she was planning to open a new flower boutique on a piece of land Dante had recently acquired for her, just as he knew construction had begun the week prior. It was going to be her personal business, though Dante would be a silent investor to help get it off the ground and help her learn how to run a business, and undoubtedly most of the family’s women would wind up shopping there. The men, too, when they had the need. It would be expected.
What Cristiano had not expected was to get roped into touring some other random flower shop, so Iris could pick his brain on superfluous things. She said she wanted to get a man’s perspective, so she planned to drag Mikey and Romeo out over the next few days for the same torture, too. She wanted to know which sorts of displays caught their eyes, which kinds of flowers appealed the most or the least, and if there was any thought process behind the answers.
“I can get into a woman’s head,” she said while she was explaining, “but it’s harder to understand the way a man might look at this scene. And I want my store to be as inviting as possible, to everyone.”
Cristiano was tempted to tell her he was not the best suited to this job. He didn’t know jack shit about flowers. He knew roses came in at least three colors, and he knew that half the ones he personally thought looked decent other people wrote off as weeds. The only other thing that came to mind as he slowly walked through the store and pointed out his first impressions of various displays was that Felicity had a painting of some sort of pretty purple flowers on her living room wall.
That actually gave him an idea, so while he paused to let Iris jot down some notes on whatever he’d just said, he pulled out his phone. Like the stalker he’d turned into since he’d first laid eyes on the woman probably still soaking in his tub, he’d taken pictures of most of her apartment while he’d been there. For research purposes.
He found the picture of the painting quickly enough and zoomed it in to study the flower. He’d definitely not seen it so far, and they’d already gone through half the shop. So he opted for an image search.
The word Foxgloves popped up on his screen at the same time as Iris asked, “Did something come up?”
Cristiano put his phone away without closing out of the search, so he could read up on it later. “No. Just checking something.”
She smiled at him. “I’m sorry if this is totally crazy. I just didn’t know how else to get reliable input.”
He shook his head. “It’s fine. Though I’m not sure my answers will be very helpful.”
She laughed softly. “Maybe it can be a learning experience for both of us, then. You can share your initial impressions with me, and gain a little bit of a better eye for when you have a real reason to walk through aisles of flowers. Like if you have a fight with your girlfriend and need to apologize, or just want to get her something she’ll like for her birthday.” She held up a finger, her other hand holding her notebook close. “Not all women prefer roses, you know.”
Cristiano let his gaze drift down the back wall, in the direction of the sole remaining aisle. A crazy, insanely dangerous idea flitted through his mind. He knew he shouldn’t. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, anything and everything he said to Iris today would get back to Dante. The only smart thing was to keep his mouth tightly shut. On the other hand, it might not hurt to plant a seed. A very small, carefully worded seed.
He glanced down at Iris again. “What do you know about Foxgloves?”
She blinked up at him. “Foxgloves?” She drummed her fingers on the back of the notebook. “Oh! I remember. They’re beautiful, kind of bell-shaped, sometimes purple or pink or white, and grow on stalks. But they’re extremely toxic. The entire plant is poisonous, even deadly.” She made a pained face. “You weren’t thinking of gifting them to someone, I hope?”
“No,” he said slowly. The analogy rolled on repeat in his brain and he barely bit back his smile. Foxglove. A beautiful, unexpectedly deadly flower. Look, but don’t touch. Exactly like his Felicity. She was the beautiful, he was the deadly.
“Forgive me for being nosy,” Iris said, “but if you aren’t looking to give them to someone, why did you want to know?”
Her question sobered his strange excitement. He couldn’t just say he’d seen a picture of them at his lover’s place, because it was not out of the question that another man would be sent to her apartment in search of her. He had to be craftier than that, and as vague as possible. “There’s a woman—”
He was interrupted, for better or worse, by a shrill, insistent beeping from his pocket. A sound that could only mean one thing.
Iris jumped, startled by the intrusive noise.
Cristiano scowled and snatched his phone out again. The alarm cut off when he opened the attached notification. “Motherfucker.” There’d been a break-in at one of his storehouses. The one where he was holding Tristán Garcia.
“Cristiano…?” The hesitancy in Iris’s voice was hard to miss. Sort of like the alarm that had interrupted their conversation, and their flower-perusing.
Thumb moving over the screen of his phone, Cristiano turned to her and reached out, encouraging her to move with him toward the exit. They had half a store to get across, but fortunately, it wasn’t busy. He didn’t give a shit about the old lady behind the counter who’d been eyeing them since they walked in. “Sorry. Need to get you home,” he said to Iris.
“Oh. Can I—” She blew out a breath and set to work tucking her notebook away. “Right. Okay.” She glanced to the side as Ernesto stepped into view.
Cristiano met the older man’s stare. “I’ll follow you, make sure you get inside safely. But I won’t be able to stay.” He brought his phone to his ear.
Iris glanced between him and her usual escort. It was obvious she wanted to ask and just as clear she wasn’t sure she should.
Cristiano’s bigger concern was the delay. Having the boss’s fiancée vulnerable on the street when one of their undisclosed locations had been successfully hit was a fucking problem.
“Don’t bitch at me,” Mikey said when the line connected. “I just got the fucking alert. I’m looking into it.”
“I need to know what fucking happened, Mikey,” Cristiano snapped back. “You said that house was secure. Why did I not at least get an alert in real goddamn time? How long ago were we hit? How many other locations?”
Ahead of him, Iris stumbled and spun back around, barely past the store’s entry. Her eyes were wide with concern. “Dante, is he—”
Cristiano made a sharp gesture toward the black sedan at the curb, which he knew belonged to his cousin and therefore had to be the vehicle she’d arrived in. “Our first priority is getting you to a safe location. You can call him from the car.”
“Ma’am,” Ernesto said almost simultaneously.
In Cristiano’s ear, Mikey cursed and said, “No other locations. At least nothing showing yet. That was one of yours, right? Is that where you—”
“Yes, and that’s the motherfucking problem. How the goddamn hell did they know that, when I don’t even tell you that shit?” He stood, keeping his head on a swivel and glaring at the gawking pedestrian several yards down, until Iris was safely tucked into her car. When Ernesto in turn was locked behind the wheel, Cristiano pivoted and jogged two spaces down to his own car. He barely heard Mikey keep talking.
“Dammit, Cris, I don’t fucking know!” A keyboard rattled in the background. “You’re out with Iris, right? Call me back when she’s home, I should know more. Fuck.” The line went dead.
Cristiano dropped the phone into a cupholder in the center console and rolled the engine over, nearly forgetting to buckle in before he pulled into traffic. He wasn’t usually one for guard duty and playing second car escort was not his favorite game, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how. What he really hated was that he couldn’t call Felicity to let her know he was going to be a little later than he’d thought.
Felicity used the hidden button on the wall to close the drapes once it got dark. Even though they were so high up, she still felt too vulnerable being all by herself in a largely unknown environment to leave the lights on and the windows exposed. Closing the drapes, however, plunged her into the realization of how isolated she was.
Cristiano had already been gone for something like three hours or more. She hoped that didn’t mean something bad had happened to him. Because she didn’t want him to be hurt, yes, but also because if something had happened, she was fairly sure she would die in this room. How long did it take a person to die of dehydration? Or would she get so desperate she started drinking tap water from the bathroom sink? In which case, she’d die of starvation.
Then there were other risks. What if the building caught fire? What if a gas pipe broke? What if a waterline broke? What if a freaking plane flew into the building, even? How was she supposed to survive? How was she supposed to get help?
Felicity had no idea if the De Salvos owned the entire building, just this floor, or some combination in between. But if Cristiano thought hiding her here was safest, then the only person likely to search for anyone here was Cristiano himself. Great on the one hand, problematic on the other.
She paced the room, paying no attention whatsoever to the movie she’d pulled up on the television, her mind racing. She understood his argument about the danger of just going about her regular life. Her crazy, cliché-embracing family had put her on the hit-list of a powerful mafia boss. That was the kind of thing rational people hid from. But there needed to be a middle ground. She couldn’t spend the next however-long cooped up in a bedroom with no connection to the outside world stronger than Hulu. Although…
Felicity picked up the remote and quickly navigated out of the boring movie and over to another app altogether. Sure enough, her wealthy kidnapper-turned-lover had the live TV subscription. So she found a local news channel and left that on, hoping it would at least give her a warning of some kind. Something like ‘massive explosion at DS Industries’ or ‘multiple arrests made’ or anything that could potentially tell her she should panic.
She saw no streaming ticker tape with the De Salvo name, or her own, and let her mind wander again. Her gaze landed on the bed. She couldn’t do much about the things she was worried about until she had a chance to talk to Cristiano again, but she could at least tackle this. She’d seen the shelf in the closet with the fresh sheets.
It was late when he finally made it home. All he wanted to do was step out of his boots and drop into bed, with Felicity under his arm. But as soon as he made it past the foyer, he saw she hadn’t figured out that he’d left the bedroom door unlocked the last time. That meant she was probably starving.
He bit back a curse, mad mostly with himself for being in too much of a hurry to take a minute to explain all the thoughts that had been running through his head. He could have just told her she had free reign of any unlocked space and let what happened after determine whether or not it was too soon for that level of trust. In the moment he’d thought it required more of a conversation, more explanation, so he’d settled with simply not locking the door and seeing what happened. Which didn’t actually solve shit. It did answer the unspoken trust exercise, though, he supposed.
Cristiano set down the duffel and shopping bags he was carrying and detoured into the kitchen to see what he could throw together relatively quickly. Once he had some pasta started, he resumed his path to the bedroom, leaving the bags where they were for the time being. He’d probably have to wake her. No way she hadn’t gotten so bored she’d passed out.
He wasn’t wrong. When he cracked the door open, noticing immediately that the chair she’d used to block him in earlier was still where he’d left it on his way out, he saw the lights were dimmed and his sweet Felicity was curled up on her side on top of the comforter. The sheet had been ripped off and bunched up off to the side, and it looked like she’d found the spare set, too. He stepped properly into the room, the flickering lights telling him the TV was also on. The volume was so low he could hardly hear it, but one look confirmed she was watching a local channel. One that relayed news every few hours.
He smiled to himself and clicked off the television before moving further up to the bed. She was almost perfectly centered on the mattress and he wanted so badly to just slide in behind her. His cock twitched at the thought and he had to take a moment to will himself under control. They had a lot to talk about still. Kinks were on the list, but he couldn’t afford to make them the priority.
Cristiano knelt on the bed and reached for her, running his hand lightly over her side. “Need you to wake up, baby. I’m sorry I’m late.”
Felicity groaned and shifted, turning toward him. “Cristiano…?”
He leaned close and brushed his lips behind her ear, inhaling her scent and the way it had started to mix with his. “You better wake up before I try another tactic, Felicity.”
She pulled away, prompting him to sit up as she did the same. Her hair was a delightful mess around her head and she squinted just enough to indicate she still needed a moment to fully adjust. “I tried staying up.”
Something in his chest warmed and Cristiano hauled her closer, stealing a slow kiss before forcing himself to retreat. “Sorry for making you wait,” he said quietly. He pulled her to her feet and gave her hand a squeeze. “You were a very good girl while I was gone. Didn’t even try to run on me. How do you feel about pasta?”
Her stomach rumbled. “I am hungry.” Her eyes widened. “Wait, you have a camera in here?”
He chuckled. “No. I left the door unlocked, but you never left the room.” He watched her open her mouth, undoubtedly with an opinion on that, so he added, “I was in a hurry. We’ll go over everything while we eat.” He moved a hand to the small of her back, silently appreciating her choice of sleepwear. One of his plain black shirts.
“I mean, you could’ve said ‘hey, this’ll be unlocked. Don’t be dumb’ or something.” She grumbled the words, but nonetheless allowed him to lead her from the room at a calm pace.
He smiled. “I should have,” he said. “That’s on me.”
She finally stiffened, and he wasn’t sure if it was because she was getting her first look at the bulk of the penthouse or a reaction to what he’d said.
He tried to see the space for the first time, to see it how she might be. He knew she had struggled with money. He knew she was used to scrimping and sometimes bartering. He even knew that she could only afford her low-budget apartment on her own because she gave her employee discount at the grocery store to her sleezy landlord. Therefore, nothing about his high-end penthouse, furnished and designed with maximum masculine luxury in mind, would be normal or familiar to her.
The bulk of the main floor was open floorplan, with a large L-shaped kitchen separated from the living space by an island. He had an in-home office and a second bedroom, the former of which was securely locked and the latter hadn’t been used more than once. The laundry room was positioned in-between the bedrooms, and boasted a door which opened to a staircase that led down to the second half of the home. Downstairs he had a home gym, a small home theater, another full bathroom, and a section of space he was using as storage.
“What if something happened?”
Felicity’s question made him pause as they stepped into the living room. “What?”
She frowned up at him. “You said you’d only be a couple of hours, so I assumed something came up that kept you longer. And I figure that’ll happen again. But what if something happens to you and you can’t come back? Or what if something happens here, while you’re out? I was—or I thought I was—stuck in that room. I had no way to contact you or anyone else. What if the building caught fire or started flooding or something? Who would come to check on me if you got hurt?” She dragged in a breath. “I know it’s dangerous out there, but not at least having a way to reach out or be contacted in case of emergency seems really dumb. Especially considering the life I at least think you lead.”
He waited for her to get it all out of her system, watched her cheeks flush as her voice picked up and her breathing came faster. Guilt churned somewhere in the base of his stomach. Guilt because he should have let her know the damn door was unlocked. Guilt because she was right. And guilt because watching her get worked up the way she was only made him want to pin her to the nearest wall.
She chewed on her lip for a second before adding, “Please just, give me something other than another apology.”
He smiled, took her hand, and pulled her to the sofa. “I can do that.” When they were close enough, he lifted the shopping bag. “I bought you some things while I was out.”
She blinked at him; confusion evident on her face.
He extracted the boxed item first and handed it over. “Make sure to read the directions.”
Her focus dropped to the product in her hand and another flush built on her cheeks. “You actually bought it…”
“Of course. I got your pills and some other things from your apartment, too. You can go through all of that after we eat.” He motioned to the duffel still on the couch, then pulled the other set of items from the bag.
Felicity’s eyes widened and she adjusted her hands to accept the unboxed phone and packaged charge cord. “This is— but this isn’t mine.”
“It is now.” Her gaze snapped back up to him and Cristiano shoved the bag back onto the couch before explaining. “I’m not the only one who knew your number. Phones are traceable. So instead of having you go through burners on a regular basis, I just bought you a new one. Most of us have spare numbers and spare plans, all I did was activate one of my backups.”
Her fingers tightened over the device. “You trust me with a phone?”
He stepped into her personal space and cupped her jaw, angling her face up to his. “Real trust is something that has to build,” he said, “but I want to. And I want you to trust me, too. That has to start somewhere, so I’m choosing to start it here, now. I’m going to ask you to use it sparingly, but technically you’ll have free reign over what you do with it.” He leaned in, unable to fully resist, and pressed his lips to hers.
She opened for him immediately, moaning softly as his tongue tangled with hers.
The sound of boiling water drew him back to himself, and Cristiano straightened. “There are only three numbers programmed into your phone right now,” he said. “Mine, Ryōma’s in case something happens to me, and Taylor’s.”
Felicity gasped and the soft padding of her feet told him she followed when he started toward the kitchen. “You know about Taylor?”
He grinned. “Baby, I did my research. Also, she’s sent you at least half a dozen messages in the last twenty-four hours. I’m not sure if I find that mildly concerning or cute, but I figure cutting you off from your best friend won’t win me any favors.” He added some ingredients to a pan to enhance the last of the fresh-diced tomatoes he had on hand and set that on heat before draining the pasta.
A chair dragged across tile before Felicity spoke again. “Taylor’s really the only one who’ll look for me,” she said, almost too quietly to hear over the water pouring into the sink. “She’s still at Stanford and spends most of her time buried in notes and books, but she makes time for me every day. She’s the only friend I’ve had in years.”
Cristiano dribbled some tomato sauce to add substance to his base, gave it a stir, and set the lid on the pan. Then he moved for a pair of plates, set one in front of Felicity and one at the seat beside her, and said, “You have me now, sweet Felicity.”
She smiled at him. The expression was everything she was. Warm, beautiful, sweet, and fucking captivating. “But you’re saying I can still talk to her?”
Cristiano faced her, keeping his expression serious. “Yes, you can talk to her. But while you’re in hiding, it’s smarter to move your conversations to phone calls. I know those aren’t popular these days, but instant messenger can be hacked and traced.”
Felicity screwed up her face. “Yeah, she’ll totally find that suspicious. I’m definitely guilty of being on team no-phone-calls.”
He chuckled, tapped his finger on the island counter for a second, then turned back to add the pasta to the gently simmering sauce. “I already downloaded a secure text app onto your phone. If you can get her to download it, too, that should be all right. Regardless of how you communicate, it’s smart to be mindful of what information you put out there.” In general, because it had only taken a single social media search for him to know information about Felicity’s friend the woman should arguably not have made publicly available, and specifically in this situation, because Felicity’s safety was paramount.
“So I could, for example, text her in the morning and tell her a little fib about having lost my phone and had a super exhausting day and give some excuse why I’d prefer to jump off Messenger? And that would be okay?”
Cristiano switched off the stove, grabbed up a potholder, and returned to the island with a pan of hot pasta. He’d opted for meatless to save time, so it wasn’t his best showing, but he portioned out two platefuls anyway before setting the pan onto the potholder in case either of them wanted more. “Yes, baby. I’ll even help you iron out a story if you want.” He paused to drop a kiss to her temple before moving to the refrigerator to grab a couple of drinks, detoured for silverware, and rejoined her at the island.
Felicity laid her fingertips on his forearm as soon as he sat, looking at him with big eyes. “It really means a lot to me that you’re trusting me with this. Thank you.”
He caught her hand, bringing it to his lips. “It’s the least I could do, considering all I’m taking from you.”
She shook her head, a sad smile twisting her lips for a second. “What’s happening to my family isn’t your fault. I’m not saying I’m okay with it, or that I’ve even fully processed it, but I recognize you didn’t decide to … go there. And besides, they’re horrible.” She stared at the pasta and drew a deep breath. “They always have been.”