Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The villa Siena and her new husband were driven to overlooked the Bay of Naples. It was only a few streets away from the villa where her brother Tommaso lived, which brought a tiny bit of comfort.
The security for Elio’s villa was every bit as tight as her brother’s. Armed men guarded the gates, and once they’d driven through and parked outside the main door, Siena got out of the car and was greeted by the sound of dogs barking.
Spinning around in alarm, she saw, only feet away, two huge, midnight black, glossy monsters on leashes controlled by men as proportionately big and menacing as the dogs baring their teeth.
“You said nothing about dogs,” she said tightly when Elio closed his door.
His smile was as menacing as the dogs’ bared teeth. “They only bite if given the order.” As if to make his point, he strolled to them, his hand out and said something she couldn’t hear. The dogs immediately dropped to their haunches.
“Do they live in the house?” she asked, trying not to let her panic sound in her voice. Displaying fear to her enemy would be beyond foolish. Whatever plans Elio had for her within their marriage, none of them would be good for her. She would not gift-wrap him any ammunition to use against her.
“They live in their kennel.” He stroked their heads then looked back at her. “Their place is outside, guarding us. You should be grateful for them. They will keep you safe.”
She barely controlled her shudder and resisted asking if he’d always had dogs or if this was a new thing. She wouldn’t put it past him to have learned of her phobia and got himself a pair of guard dogs to use as a weapon against her.
He straightened his back. “Come, wife.” His top lip curved in a sneer. “Let me show you around your new home.” His silver eyes glittered with irony. “I’m sure we will make many happy memories together here.”
She didn’t bother dignifying that with a response.
* * *
The interior of the villa was surprisingly tasteful, and as Siena was shown around the ground floor, she noted that everything, from the terracotta flooring to the kitchen appliances, was the best that money could buy.
Elio’s coffee machine was the identical model and colour as her own, and she made a mental note to bin hers the next time she went to her apartment.
From the French doors in the spacious living room, she saw the nightlights around his swimming pool. The moonlight reflecting off the water reminded her of Elio’s eyes.
They really were the most unsettling eyes.
When they fixed on you, you felt them, almost like a touch.
If vampires existed, they would have Elio’s eyes.
And probably his temperament as well, she thought as she followed him up the stairs.
Dogs excepted, Siena did not scare easily, but this man unnerved her more and more, and it wasn’t just his physicality or the vampiric gleam of his eyes.
Physically, he was much bigger than her, but she was used to that.
Her brothers were all well over six foot tall, whereas she barely topped five foot.
Elio wasn’t quite Tommaso’s mammoth height, but he was at least a foot taller than Siena, and twice her width, and all of it was muscle.
If he wanted to hurt her, he could, and without breaking the smallest of sweats.
It was his unsettling eyes and self-containment that unnerved her the most. After years of noticing him and feeling him watching her, meeting him formally for the first time had been one of the most nerve-wracking moments of her life.
That meeting had been for him to give his choice of which Esposito cousin he would make his wife. He’d insisted Siena be there for it.
He’d chosen a private room in a neutral bar for the meeting. It had been small and dark, the ineffectual lights casting menacing shadows she was certain had been deliberate in design. She’d walked into it and breathed in his cologne. Her heart had been pounding.
Elio had fixed those silver eyes on her and just stared.
A coil of something she could never explain had laced her spine, and that was before he’d calmly said, in the tone of someone discussing a menu in a restaurant, that he’d chosen Francesca to be his wife.
His stare still locked on Siena’s, he’d said, “She will be perfect for me – I’ve always thought virginity an underrated asset in a wife. ”
She’d not been able to restrain herself. “You want Francesca because she’s a virgin?”
Those were the first words they’d ever exchanged.
“If I can’t have my first choice, then I choose the one I can mould…” His eyes had glittered. “…or break into being exactly what I want her to be.”
She’d pushed her chair back and shot to her feet. “No.”
He’d not moved a muscle, not even to blink. “Then you wish for war?”
Siena had never suffered from nightmares, but that meeting had triggered them in her. Those silver eyes had haunted her dreams. The chiselled, handsome face with the black designer stubble. The black hair that flopped over his forehead. The contained menace he exuded.
Still waters ran deep, and she felt in her bones that Elio’s depths ran deeper and were far more dangerous than anything her family had encountered before.
She couldn’t let Francesca, her sweet, quirky, dreamy cousin, marry this man. He would destroy her in one night.
Siena had the sensation in her veins that her whole world was on the cusp of being destroyed.
Bit by bit, piece by piece, the Espositos’ empire was falling.
She could feel it. Her father’s iron grip had been total.
If he’d known he was likely to suffer a fatal cardiac arrest at any time, he would no doubt have loosened his grip enough to put his succession plans into place, but he hadn’t.
They’d been caught out, and the vultures had been circling ever since.
It was like playing whack-a-mole. Hit one and contain them, and up popped another.
This mole was the most dangerous of them all.
Siena’s father had murdered his closest friend and pointed the finger for it at Elio’s father, using it as the excuse he needed to slay the Ranieris in retribution, destroy the competition and take Naples for himself.
Everything the Espositos had built, all the riches they’d accumulated, had come from that one act.
Siena and her brothers had only learned of the murder recently, but instinct told her Elio had always known it. He’d spent over two decades dreaming of vengeance, biding his time, building his army, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
What would he have done if her father hadn’t died? Had he been waiting for something, a trigger to make his move? Or had he just been planning to ambush them and take them out in one fell swoop?
All these thoughts were flooding her mind as she followed him through an open door on the second floor, and then she found her thoughts coming to a juddering halt when he casually said, “This, my beautiful wife, is our bedroom.”
Elio observed his bride’s reaction to his words and suppressed a smile. “You don’t like our bedroom?” he mocked.
The soft blue eyes that had shown unexpected fear when his dogs appeared now rang with the loathing she’d never bothered to disguise. “I’m not sharing a bedroom with you.”
Her voice suited her. At first look, Siena was so small and doll-like that you expected her to have a high-pitched, almost childish voice.
Instead, it was soft and husky but pitched to be listened to.
He imagined the pitch had come through all the years she’d spent forcing her family to take her seriously.
Now it was time for her to learn to take him seriously.
“You are my wife,” he told her evenly. “As such, we share a bedroom and a bed.”
“My parents haven’t shared a bed since I was born.”
“Hadn’t,” he corrected, and suppressed another smile at her flinch at his reminder that her father was dead. “We are not your parents. You agreed to marry me, Siena. If you don’t want our marriage to be a real one, then say it now, and I will have you driven home and our marriage annulled.”
Her gorgeous, voluptuous lips pulled into a tight line. “Let me make this very clear – being your wife does not make me your possession.”
He stepped over to her and gently gathered a thick lock of her hair. “I think you’ll find it does,” he murmured. “This is what you agreed to. Til death do us part.” Lowering his face, he did what he’d spent years fantasising about doing and dipped his nose into Siena’s hair and inhaled.
She didn’t move. Didn’t react. Held herself with such stillness she could have taken lessons from a mannequin.
He breathed in again. Deeper.
Of all the Espositos, it was Siena that Elio had always felt an invisible yet intrinsic link to.
While Siena had been safely tucked in her mother’s womb, her father had been busy slaughtering Elio’s family.
The day her mother had given birth to her, Elio’s mother had been killed. His father had been killed days later.
While Elio, his two younger siblings and one solitary cousin had all been left orphaned, destitute and in the care of their grandmother, Siena was being born into a world of love and wealth.
For years, he’d known his vengeance, whatever form it took, would feature Siena forward and centre, and now that day had come.
She was his wife. The most beautiful woman in Italy belonged to him.
Her blonde hair smelled of marshmallows.
Dipping his face lower, he lightly traced his tongue down her neck and pinched the lapels of the hideous suit jacket she was wearing and tugged it down her arms.