Chapter 24 #2
She shrugs, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t know why or how, but this feels like home.” She pauses, wrapping her arms around herself. “I feel as if I could take root here, Gio. I feel safe. Warm. Happy. What a beautiful place to raise a family.”
She locks eyes with me, probing, searching for an answer that she probably wasn’t even aware she was looking for until we arrived.
I cross the room and wrap my arms around her from behind so that we’re facing the magnificent view through the window. “The summers are hot,” I whisper into her ear.
A shudder travels down her spine. “It’s an island. We’re surrounded by the sea.”
“The winters are cold.” I nibble her earlobe.
“That’s what sweaters and my hot-as-fuck lover are for.” I place my hand over his heart and feel the steady beat: da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
“You don’t even like olives.” I trace a line down her neck and nibble her soft flesh.
“I could get used to them.”
I turn her around so that our noses and lips are almost touching. “Do you want to live here, Meggie? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She chews her bottom lip.
“Yes. I want our babies to grow up here. And Amber. I want them to be free, Gio. I don’t want them to be driven to school by a bodyguard.
I don’t want to panic when they’re five minutes late coming home.
I don’t want them to think that they have to go to the rooftop to swim. ”
I pull her back into my arms, wind her hair around my fist, and crush her lips with mine.
When I release her, she is breathless, her lips already swollen. “I know that your business is in New York but—”
“We have the Internet in Sicily too.”
“We do? I mean, you do? Of course you do. This isn’t a deserted island in the middle of nowhere.” She moistens her lips with her tongue. “Does that mean that you’ll think about it?”
“Are you sure this is what you want, Meggie? Will you miss London? And what about your cakes?”
“There are ovens in Sicily too, you know.” She slants her eyes, her smile wide.
“I guess that’s settled then.”
She blinks as if she is trying to bring me into focus. “Are you serious?”
“Always.”
Meggie throws her arms around my neck and wraps her legs around my waist. Then she kisses me, and my heart is beating like a caged bird. “Thank you, Gio,” she breathes against my cheek.
“I have one condition though.”
I set her back down and unfold her arms from around my neck, while she watches me from beneath lowered brows. I reach into my pocket and pull out a tiny blue-velvet covered box. Then I drop down onto one knee and snap open the lid.
“Meggie, will you marry me?”
“Yes!” she squeals, her gaze flitting between me and the diamond ring winking at her from inside the box. “Of course I’ll marry you.”
I stand up and slide the ring onto her finger.
“I love you, fiore. I told you before that I would follow you to Antarctica if that’s where you wanted to be. But I’m glad you chose Sicily.”
Meggie turns her finger this way and that, her smile impossible to contain. “I think Sicily chose me, and I’m happy that it did. I love you too, Giovanni Sabatelli.”
“We should go downstairs and give everyone the good news.”
“What’s the rush?” She takes my hand and leads me to the bed. “You never did finish demonstrating how much you love me.”
I push the door shut with my foot and pull Meggie onto the bed beneath me. “Noted. I must try harder.”
Her hand finds my cock throbbing inside my pants. “Much harder…”
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Before the vows…
Before the war…
Before everything burned…
There was a Bratva king who never planned to fall.
SEXTING THE brATVA BEAST
One wrong text.
One dangerous man.
One obsession that refuses to let go.
Andrej Ivanov doesn’t chase.
He hunts.
When I became a target, he became my only protection.
The only problem?
The man protecting me is the one I should fear most.
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And here is a sneak Peek of Cartier and Andrej’s epic story.
Chapter One
Cartier
Holy fuck!
I’m gaping. Am I gaping? I force my brain to engage with my jaw and snap it shut, the sound causing the baby in my arms to startle.
A tiny hand wriggles free of the pink blanket the baby is swaddled in.
She opens her mouth to bawl, and the sound is so fragile, so utterly gut-wrenching that my demented heart goes into full-on maternal overdrive.
“Shh, shh. There, there.” Because babies only understand words in duplicate. “Naughty Auntie Cartier, making you jump.”
But the baby must pick up on my irregular heartbeat.
Or maybe she’s intuitive and she heard my silent cuss when the bad boy dressed all in black walked through the door.
Either way, she refuses to settle back in my arms, and I pray that I haven’t destroyed our future relationship by traumatizing her with my rampant thoughts within six hours of her arrival.
I hand her over to her mom, my friend Gianna, and she settles instantly.
The same can’t be said for me, however.
I was three years old when Hurricane Charley hit Florida.
Too young to make memories of vacations and trips to the Magic Kingdom and play dates at the park.
But I still remember the atmosphere before the hurricane reached land.
The tension in the air that you needed a paddle to wade through. The wary eyes. The heightened senses.
That’s how I feel right now. Like the storm is happening before I even realized that I should appreciate the calm first.
Without the baby in my arms, I have nothing to focus on, no one to hide behind, no reason not to make eye contact.
And when I finally psych myself up to glance at the man who just walked through the door, he’s staring straight at me like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. Or maybe he’s simply used to being stared at. I mean, I defy any woman to set eyes on him and walk away from the encounter unscathed.
Or undressed.
Or both.
I mentally shake myself. This kind of meet-cute only happens in steamy romantic novels and every romcom ever made in the history of time. It isn’t the stuff of real life. And even if it were, it doesn’t happen to people like me.
Not that I ever wanted it to.
I’ve seen first-hand how physical attraction can so easily slide from a planned happy-ever-after into a toxic relationship from which the escape route is often more dangerous and volatile than the situation itself.
Gianna, Mika, and I met in Montenegro where we all worked at a women’s refuge. We shared an apartment, which meant that we also ate, drank, and socialized together. We knew everything there was to know about one another…
Apart from the fact that Gianna’s family were so super-wealthy that she shouldn’t have been allowed outside the house without a bodyguard. And those thrift store bargains she wore: they were an act of rebellion.
Her life reads a little like a Godfather movie.
She was abducted during her flight home from Montenegro to Chicago by the man who is now her husband.
Leonid Ivanov. Because he obviously looked at Tinder and thought that kidnapping was the safer option.
Her sister’s husband kidnapped her a second time, and then, the story goes that Leonid threatened to burn Chicago down for the women he loved.
Yay for the amber-eyed Russian prince!
Leonid then bought Gianna a huge property which we’ve been helping her to renovate and transform into a women’s refuge here in Chicago. Today is the opening day. And Gianna has just given birth to beautiful twin girls.
So, I guess some people do find their happy ending.
And I don’t even know how my brain has connected the dots from setting eyes on the hottest man on earth to having babies.
Must be something to do with the mountain of romance novels I’ve read since I was old enough to understand how a hero should make me feel, and my ovaries choosing this exact moment to wind up the body clock and turn it up to full volume.
Or perhaps it’s simply down to the fact that my entire body has become untethered from my brain and is preparing itself to be well and truly enlightened by the bad boy in the corner.
“Car?” Gianna’s voice penetrates the drool-fest taking place inside my delusional brain.
I glance up to find everyone watching me as if I just declared out loud that I want to rip his clothes off and ride him till I can’t walk.
My face floods with heat. I feel my cheeks growing hot enough to fry an egg on and try to recall the conversation that I’m supposed to be responding to. Nope. Nothing. I’m a complete blank.
So, I wing it. “She just wanted her mommy.” They were talking about the baby, right?
Wrong.
Gianna furrows her brow just enough for me to realize that if my face gets any hotter it’ll explode. Then, “This is Andrej. Leonid’s brother.”
We’re doing introductions now? Did I miss the part where he said hi to me and Mika when he walked in?
My traitorous eyes instinctively follow Gianna’s to the sex god in black.