Chapter 6 #2
Not metaphorically. Literally. My lungs stopped cycling air for two full seconds while my body processed the visual information my eyes were delivering and arrived at conclusions my mind had been refusing to reach for a week.
The sweat on the line of his neck. The way his abdominals contracted when he drove forward, the muscles visible under a layer of skin that looked warm and alive and exactly the right texture to—
To—
He saw me.
The bag swung between us, still rocking from the last hit, and his eyes found me in the doorway with the accuracy of a man who was always aware of his surroundings even when he appeared consumed by something else.
He stopped. His hands dropped to his sides.
The wraps hung dark and damp from his knuckles.
He didn’t cover himself. Didn’t reach for a towel, didn’t turn away, didn’t perform the expected modesty of a man caught undressed.
He just stood there. Chest rising. Falling.
The sweat on his skin catching the overhead light.
The scar and the tattoo exposed and unexplained.
His eyes dark and direct and holding something that had nothing to do with the warm, curated, strategic warmth I’d been cataloging since Marchetti’s.
This was the face from the office. The one behind the mask. Except now it was attached to a body that was doing things to my nervous system that I had no professional framework for.
My mouth was dry. My skin was hot. The T-shirt I was wearing—his T-shirt—felt suddenly thin, suddenly insufficient, suddenly a reminder that I was standing in his doorway in his clothes with my hair down and my legs bare and my body responding to the sight of him with a clarity that left no room for analysis.
“You’re up early,” he said.
His voice was rougher than usual. Lower.
Stripped of the polish the way his body was stripped of the clothes—the raw material, unfinished, the voice that existed before the performance got to it.
It moved through me like the bass from Nero had moved through the floorboards—not a sound I heard but a vibration I felt, in my throat, in my chest, in the space between my hips.
“I heard a noise,” I said.
He wiped his forearm across his brow. The motion was casual. The forearm was not. I watched the tendons shift under his skin, the veins standing out from the exertion, the wrap around his hand pulling tight as his fist flexed and released.
“You came to check on me,” he said.
Not a question.
My face went hot.
“I did not. I heard a noise.”
“Mmhmm.”
“I—”
“I have business this morning. I’ll bring lunch. Then, this evening, the rules.”
For a moment, irritation flared. I thought about telling him that I hadn’t come to check on him, that I didn’t care about him, that I was here on work and for no other reason, that I didn’t even like his body, even when it was sweaty, even when it made me feel hot between my legs and—
I left without answering.
The hallway was cool after the gym. I walked back to the bedroom and closed the door and leaned against it. The image of him was seared into my retinas like a flashbulb. The sweat. The scar. The Latin I couldn’t read. The way his chest rose and fell while he looked at me and didn’t look away.
I pressed my palms flat against the door.
Marco Caruso is a negotiation, I told myself.
The lie was getting harder to sell.
He left at nine. I watched him go from the dining table where I’d already spread the first layer of documents—a strategic display of productivity that said I’ve been working for hours even though I’d been working for twelve minutes and spending the prior forty-seven trying to forget what his back looked like when he hit something.
He was dressed. Fully, to my disappointment.
Shirt dark, buttoned, the sleeves rolled to the forearm because apparently that was just how he wore them and apparently my nervous system would never recover from this information.
The fabric sat on his shoulders the way his clothes always sat—like they’d been told where to go and had obeyed.
He smelled like the cedar soap and something else, something warm underneath that was just him, the base note that no product could manufacture, and when he passed behind my chair on his way to the door the scent moved through the air and arrived at me like a hand brushing the back of my neck.
“I’ll be back by one,” he said. “There’s coffee on the counter.”
The door closed.
The suite settled into silence.
I turned back to the documents.
The Caruso financials were good. Not good in the way that suggested someone had scrubbed them before handing them over—good in the way that suggested someone competent had been running the books all along.
The real estate holdings were organized by acquisition date, cross-referenced with assessed values, liens, and outstanding mortgages.
The construction permits aligned with county records I’d pulled independently.
The hospitality revenue—Nero’s quarterly statements, the restaurant income, the catering arm Marco had launched eighteen months ago that I’d only discovered yesterday—was clean, documented, internally consistent.
The work was real. The numbers held up. The Caruso infrastructure was exactly what Marco had promised: a functional, profitable pipeline capable of absorbing and laundering significant capital without the kind of structural weaknesses that invited federal scrutiny.
I made a note. Then another.
Then I looked at his coffee cup in the sink.
He’d left it there. A white ceramic mug—the same heavy, unmatched kind from three in the morning—with a dark crescent of espresso at the bottom and a print from his lower lip on the rim. I could see it from the table.
His mouth had kissed that ceramic.
Fuck fuck fuck what was I, a schoolgirl?
I looked back at the spreadsheet.
The hospitality revenue showed a seven percent increase quarter over quarter, driven primarily by—
His jacket was on the back of the chair across from me.
Not the wet one from last night. A different one—lighter, unstructured, the kind of jacket he wore when the performance was casual rather than formal.
He’d draped it there before he left, or the night before, or three days ago.
It didn’t matter when. What mattered was that it was four feet away and the cedar scent was reaching me from it like a slow tide, and every time I inhaled I was breathing in the ghost of his body and every time I exhaled I was losing it and reaching for the next breath to get it back.
I picked up my pen. Stared at the construction permits.
The scar.
It arrived without warning—the image, sharp and detailed, of the thin pale line across his ribs.
The left side. Below the tattoo. The skin around it smooth and olive-toned, and the scar itself raised just enough to catch the light, a ridge that mapped the path of something sharp across the body of a man whose public identity contained no violence, no marks, no evidence of the life his brothers wore openly.
There was so much of him that was hidden. That was always the case with men like him.
I opened my laptop. My father’s report. I began to type.
The Caruso financial infrastructure is sound. The legitimate businesses are functional and profitable. The youngest brother—
Delete. Delete. Delete.
The youngest brother what? The youngest brother has a scar on his ribs and a tattoo in Latin and forearms that make me forget how to count?
The youngest brother told me to eat this morning in a voice that sounded like it came from the floor of him and my body responded before my brain could form an objection?
I closed the laptop. Pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. Breathed.
At one, the door opened.
He carried the bag in one hand—brown paper, oil-spotted at the bottom, the universal indicator of food that was going to be exceptional. I smelled it before he reached the kitchen. Cured meat. Something warm and yeasty. The green, bright note of basil or peaches or both.
He didn’t ask if I was hungry.
He set out plates. Two, from the cabinet above the sink—the same plain, heavy ceramics, unchosen, honest. He poured water into a glass and placed it beside my documents with the quiet precision I was beginning to understand was not casualness but the opposite.
Every gesture intentional. Every placement specific.
The food: bresaola, paper-thin and ruby-dark. Burrata so fresh it wept cream when he set it on the plate. Grilled peaches—caramelized, the char still warm, golden and soft. Bread that was still holding heat from the oven, the crust crackling when he tore it.
“Eat,” he said.
I ate.
The bresaola was silk. The burrata dissolved against the bread in a way that made me close my eyes without meaning to, and when I opened them he was leaning against the counter across from me with his arms crossed and watching my mouth.
He watched me so closely, like he was taking everything in.
When I answered his questions about the financials—the construction permits, the Moretti shipping data, a discrepancy I’d flagged in the catering revenue—his eyes stayed on my lips while I spoke, tracking the shape of each word, and the attention was a physical thing.
A pressure. A warmth on my skin that had no source.
I watched his hands.
He tore the bread for himself and I watched him do it—the long fingers gripping the crust, the controlled pull that split it cleanly.
The hands that had hit the bag at dawn. The hands that had wrapped in black cotton and driven forward with a force that shook the chain.
Those same hands now handling bread with a gentleness that looked, somehow, like the same thing.
Control. Precision. The understanding that force and care were not opposites but calibrations of the same instrument.
I set down my fork. Reached for my plate to carry it to the sink.
“No. You sit.”