21. Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Dax
The way Lucy’s eyes lit up when I showed her the indoor pool made me forget for just a moment why we were here in the first place.
Her big, beautiful irises caught the light of the open windows.
They were mesmerizing. She stared up at the ornate columns surrounding the opulent pool, which looked over the side of the mountain upon the scintillating blues of the lake in the midafternoon sunlight.
The large windows there made the space feel like we were floating on a cloud, which was one of the main selling points for me when I bought the place.
“It reminds me of Hearst Castle,” she muttered under her breath.
“I can’t say I’ve ever been there,” I told her, following her gaze to the ceiling, which was adorned in dark blue with celestial patterns and sparkling lights that looked like stars in the night sky.
“Oh?” A look of calmness intertwined with wonder on her delicate features.
“I have that place to thank for getting me interested in architecture.” She twisted a strand of her hair and brushed it behind her ear as she turned to me.
That beautiful vanilla scent drifted its way to me, sending warmth to places in my body I tried to ignore.
“I think this might be even more beautiful, though.” She then let out a sharp laugh.
“What is it?” I asked.
Lucy’s face dropped solemnly. “I’m supposed to have an interview for an internship on Tuesday. That’s probably not gonna happen now. It’s for a very prestigious firm in the city. It would be a huge opportunity for me, my dream.”
I heard the heaviness in her breath, and it pulverized my heart into a chalky powder.
I knew what it was like having that kind of passion.
Years ago, when I started CIPHER with the rest of the team.
Then I’d abandoned it. I felt it again when I bought Bellissima.
The wrath felt the same now that it, too, had slipped from my grasp.
“You’ll be there for that interview,” I told her. “And you’re gonna get that internship, I don’t have a doubt in my mind.”
I was such a fucking idiot. Why the hell was I promising something I knew damn well wasn’t true? But I would sure as hell do everything I could to try to make it happen.
“Please”—she pinched the bridge of her nose—“you’ve never even seen my designs. And there’s a lot of competition. I probably don’t stand a chance anyway.”
My hand moved on its own accord, grasping her shoulder gently to turn her toward me.
Her soft skin was warm, and I shoved down a spark of anger as I counted the bandages trailing up her arm.
“I want to see what you create, but I don’t need to.
I already know they’re amazing. You have a fire in you, Lucy.
I see it every time I’m with you. That kind of passion is what builds empires. It’s what builds legacies.”
Her eyes didn’t meet mine again. With a final appraising look around the pool room, she turned toward the exit. My hand fell from her shoulder and dropped back to my side.
“Can you show me the library now?” Her voice was devoid of emotion.
After I left Lucy in the library, I went back to the kitchen to start cooking. I felt bad I didn’t wake her for breakfast or lunch, but I knew how badly she needed to get some rest.
Before I started on dinner, there was something I’d been wanting to make ever since I noticed the container of ice cream sitting on her nightstand.
I got to work on a recipe I knew by heart but hadn’t made in a long time. As my hands moved, my mind lapsed into a distant memory.
The steady buzz of the meat slicer rotating on the counter at my father’s deli hummed with supple veracity.
Songlike laughter carried through the brick walls, my mother’s long black hair fell in wisps, wrapped in a loose knot around a gold butterfly pin.
My father’s smile as he lifted stack after stack of meat down from the slicer, wrapping each layer in brown wax paper.
I was probably around seven at the time.
It was late in the morning on a Sunday, and my dad was prepping for the Monday lunch rush.
Just like many weekends growing up, I sat at an indoor table with a scoop of pistachio gelato—a recipe passed down from my mom’s family in Sicily.
Fresh cuttings of the red peonies my father grew for her outside sat in a small vase, fragrant and familiar.
I would just watch my parents together. So happy. So in love. My mom would bake fresh batches of pastries and cookies while he stocked the small aisles with snacks and sodas.
On this particular day, my mom was behind the counter with my dad, dancing behind him with a paint brush in her hand as she sang along with a melody playing on the radio.
She spun by dad and gave him a playful tap on his behind.
She’d been painting a mural on the brick wall, a streak of red smeared across her forehead and on her apron.
“Keep doing that and I’m gonna lose a finger.” He laughed. “How will you feel, then?”
“Then I’ll only let you touch me with that disfigured hand at night, when it’s too dark to see!” She swung back around to grab a paintbrush, dragging a long stroke against the brick wall.
“So cruel, my love,” he chattered. “It wouldn’t matter anyway because the light comes from within you.
It shines everywhere you go, onto every brick in this whole building.
” I watched my father turn off the deli slicer and turn around to grab her by the waist, snatching the brush from her hand and planting a kiss on her head.
Above them, the mural was nearly finished.
The bright feathers of a bird soaring through the burst of a flame like it had been borne from the sun. A phoenix.
The sudden memory left a deep ache in my chest. She died almost two years after that.
At the time, I didn’t understand why. My father tried his best to keep me from the horrors that existed in this world, but that wouldn’t stop me from figuring out the truth later.
He was never the same after she passed. He tried his best to be a good single parent to me, but he let the deli consume all his time.
It was always quiet. Gone was the lively banter.
The warmth. The light. He worked himself into the ground, and I set myself on getting away from it all.
I wanted to find my own path, one that allowed me to forget about the happy times that had been stripped away from me too young.
I was selfish but also driven. So that’s what I did, and it was something I would never stop regretting.
After I finished making the gelato, I sliced vegetables and arranged them into a smooth spiral around a casserole dish.
I braised short ribs in the oven, the savory balm of fresh herbs and wine reduction hovering in the air.
I cooked every day, but this was different from the commercial kitchen of Bellissima.
It had been a long time since I had someone to cook for beside myself at home.
I usually just ate whatever family meal I’d prepared with the rest of the staff.
Besides the breakfast I made for Lucy yesterday, I couldn’t remember the last time I cooked a real meal in my own home.
There was something peaceful about it. Natural. Comforting.
After I slid the ratatouille alongside the pan of short ribs in the oven, I sat back at my spot on the island and opened my laptop.
It was new, delivered to the house this morning along with the groceries and clothes for Lucy I ordered.
My old one burned with the rest of Bellissima after the attack last night.
Luckily, twenty-four hours of security camera footage was saved to the cloud each day.
I spent all morning reviewing it. Clay told me the first explosion had come from the kitchen, which was why it was already ablaze by the time the second one came blasting through the front windows.
The problem is there were only two cameras in the kitchen.
One faced the back door, and the other faced the other side of the galley which led to the front of the restaurant.
At no point did anyone come through the kitchen from either direction who wasn’t supposed to be there.
All the back-of-house staff had already left by the time the first bomb went off, and the cameras blacked out the second it detonated.
It was impossible to tell from the video where it had been planted or thrown from.
Emile’s team was having no luck tracking down any suspicious vehicles that passed the front of the building from the street cameras, and Clay told me he needed to wait for the police to leave the scene before his guys could go check out the damage on their own.
According to him, the authorities thought the fire was caused by a kitchen malfunction.
I knew better than that. I was there. We all saw it.
Lived in those harrowing moments. Ricky was still in the ICU, and if he didn’t pull through…
No. I couldn’t go there. He was going to wake up. He had to.
“Wow!” Lucy stood above the table I’d set, wearing the red dress I’d bought. The sight of her took the breath right out of my lungs. The martial hugged the curves at her hips, spilling down a slit at her thigh that bared a sliver of her smooth skin. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
The dinner I prepared lay on the table, steaming with the rich, savory aromas of red wine demi-glacé and the tang of garlic.
I’d set up two place settings across from one another.
I wasn’t looking at the table though. I had to clear my throat before I could speak.
“It’s nothing. You really need to eat.” I waved my hand nonchalantly, tearing my gaze from where her long hair curled around the curve of her breasts.
“You want a drink?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” She smiled lightly. “I didn’t take you for much of a drinker.” She eyed the glass of whiskey in my fist.
“I think we both earned it after the couple of days we’ve had.” I took the bottle of whiskey and cascaded a heavy pour into another glass and walked it over to her.
“I couldn’t agree more.” She took the glass and tapped the crystal lightly against mine with a gentle chime. “To living another day.”
“Salute.”
Dinner went by at a languid pace, the slightly stiff air between Lucy and I disintegrating as we worked our way down the liquid in our glasses and food on our plates.
My eyes couldn’t help but wander back to Lucy every few seconds.
Even after all of this. After surviving a huge explosion and fleeing from her home, she looked stunning.
The whiskey sent a warm glow across her cheeks, the most color I’d seen on her face in days.
It made me want so badly to see more of her like this.
“Can I ask you something?” Lucy’s voice was soft across the table. She took another bite from her fork, closing her eyes as she savored it.
“Shoot,” I told her, taking another sip from my glass, the whiskey burning deep like smooth fire down my throat.
“Why go through all the trouble?” She looked up at me through the dark fringe of her eyelashes with her caramel eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“All of this. Helping me. As far as you were concerned, I was just a dine-and-dasher who tried to screw over your restaurant. Now look where we are. I can’t be worth all this trouble to you.
I’ve been nothing but destruction in your life.
” She didn’t sound self-deprecating. She said it like this was a matter of fact.
My mind flashed back, like it frequently did, to her drenched in that tight black dress the night we met.
The way she looked wrapped in my coat as she stormed on the bus that night.
How I knew, deep in my soul, that my life was about to change forever the second I laid eyes on her.
She was nothing but trouble, and I was entranced by her like a moth to a flame.
I wanted to do whatever I could on this planet to keep that fire alive in her.
There was nothing I wouldn’t do to protect it.
To preserve it. To keep it burning so I’d never have to live another day without it.
“You are worth so much more to me than that, Luce.”
She stirred under the intensity of my stare.
Her cheeks deepened to that bright scarlet, nearly matching the color of her dress.
I would pay to see that blush steel across her face.
It sent heat shooting to every sinew of my body.
I felt my cock stiffen as I shifted in my seat, ripping my eyes away.
“Then why wouldn’t you fuck me the other night?” Her question came out rushed and my eyes whipped right back to her.
Fuck.
She looked so hot in that dress, the muscles at my stomach clenched when I watched her bite her lip like she wished she could take it back.
My pulse thudded in my ears. My throat felt like sandpaper. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Do you still want me to fuck you, Lucy?”