Chapter 6
COSIMO
A breeze ruffled through my hair as I stepped into Messero’s backyard.
Backyard seemed like an insufficient term to describe the space given its proportions.
There was a terrace, a pool, a maze of hedges, and flowers bursting out of every corner.
The work of his wife or just Messero overcompensating for something? I didn’t care enough to find out.
What I did care about was how quickly my gaze found Nettle—and how it seemed to get stuck there.
Beside me, Rom whistled. “Your fiancée looks angelic in white.”
My response was a dismissive grunt, the most I could manage without admitting he was right.
She stood by my father just to the right of the pool and looked annoyingly perfect.
Her sleeveless dress exposed swaths of smooth tan skin, her lips were painted a dark pink, and her hair fell around her shoulders in a mane of hypnotic waves.
My eyes moved lower despite myself—to the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips, the way the fabric clung to her thighs.
Fuck. Did she have to be so fucking pretty?
By now, I’d hoped Rosa would have found something useful.
Instead, she was still in Geneva, still spending my money, still calling every few days to report she’d found fuck all.
According to her, Fabiana had lived with her sister in downtown Geneva, had gone to hot yoga a few times a week after work, brought the doorman pastries on Fridays, and rarely went out on the weekend.
It was all so wholesome and sweet it made my teeth ache.
Maybe there were no skeletons after all.
Maybe Fabiana was just an innocent mafia princess whose years abroad hadn’t managed to undo the conditioning she’d grown up with—the kind that taught her marriage was her ultimate duty.
If she’d never had to go up against anyone in my mother’s league, she’d be an easy target for manipulation.
If that ended up being the truth, it was unfortunate she’d been swept up in all this, but that didn’t change my plan.
As I walked toward her, I watched Vita step in and hand Dad a drink. She said something to Fabiana that made her laugh. They were already rubbing elbows and looking way too fucking friendly.
“Cosimo, there you are,” Vita said as I came up. She placed her hand on my arm in a gesture of apparent affection, and I forced myself not to recoil. I couldn’t stand it when she touched me. “I was starting to worry you’d gotten lost on your way here.”
I pulled my arm away. “Our business interests don’t run themselves,” I drawled, giving her a bored look.
Her eyes narrowed.
She wanted me on my best behavior. It was shocking she hadn’t already confronted me about the total lack of interest I’d shown Fabiana over the last few weeks. After seeing how chummy the two of them looked together, I assumed my fiancée must have complained.
Dad patted my shoulder. “It’s my fault he’s late. He was working on a few things I asked of him this morning. All good, son?”
“Of course,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
Our cocaine supplier, Alvarez, was becoming a fucking thorn in my side.
He was refusing to sell us the quantity we wanted at the rates we’d agreed to last year because he said someone else in New York had offered him more.
Who? For now, Alvarez refused to tell me.
But I’d get on top of it. My father was relying on me. I hadn’t worked my ass off to prove to him I deserved to be his underboss at the age of twenty-eight only to disappoint him now that I’d finally gotten the position.
My gaze moved back to my fiancée. “Fabiana.”
“Good to see you again, Cosimo.” She rose on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to my cheek. Her scent—lavender and lemons—muddled with my next inhale and made heat crawl beneath my skin. “It’s been a while,” she said low enough so only I would hear.
“Not long enough,” I muttered back.
When she pulled back, I saw her expression and almost felt bad. She covered the flash of hurt quickly with a smile and greeted my brothers, but the look on her face stayed with me.
Collateral damage. It was what it was. If she was as innocent as she appeared, I didn’t relish breaking her down, but I also wasn’t going to stop until she pulled out of this marriage.
“Working the morning of your engagement party,” Vita laughed. “Cosimo hasn’t always been this disciplined,” she said lightly. “When he was younger, he had a tendency to be led by his impulses. It’s been so gratifying to help him grow into a more mature version of himself.”
My jaw clenched. Yes, she’d done her very best to teach me how to stay in control. I still had the scars to prove it.
The photographer approached us. “The light is perfect right now. We need to take advantage of it. Are you two ready for the engagement photos?”
Fuck me. I’d forgotten we were supposed to do that today. The thought of being forced to have Nettle in my arms for some unspecified amount of time made me itch all over. She was a safer quantity to deal with at a distance.
“Yeah. Let’s just get this over with,” I said roughly. Fabiana turned pale. The photographer just nodded and gestured for us to follow him.
We walked in silence toward an arch at the edge of the property where the photographer drew to a stop. “Here we are, could you two step up onto the platform?”
Fabiana tripped on her way up. My hands shot out and clamped around her waist. The second I touched her, something strange jolted through me, like static electricity sparking across my palms.
The fuck?
Her gaze flew to mine, and for one disorienting second, I wondered if she’d felt it too.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “My heel got caught in the grass.”
Our faces were only inches apart. Her skin was flawless, and her mouth was slightly parted. For one absurd moment, I had the urge to wrap her curls around my fist and find out if Nettle tasted as good as she looked.
Get a grip.
“Fabiana, put your hand on Cosimo’s chest so we can see the ring.”
“Is this okay?” She shot the photographer a nervous look.
“Great. Cosimo, pull her into you a bit more.”
I tugged her closer, moving her around with the efficiency of someone arranging furniture.
But as the photographer fiddled with his camera and told us to hold still, she definitely didn’t feel like an inanimate object as she pressed against my side.
She was soft and warm, and I was uncomfortably aware of every point where our bodies touched.
An irritating heat spread over the back of my neck.
“No, the lighting is hitting you all wrong,” the photographer said, frowning at the camera. “Can you turn a bit more eastward?”
I turned us. Fabiana was stiff as a board in my arms.
“Nope.” The photographer lowered the camera and looked at us the way a teacher might look at a group of badly behaving students. “Fabiana, you’re tense. The camera is picking up on it.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to relax,” she said in a shaky voice. Her temples shone with a thin layer of sweat.
I frowned at her. “What’s going on with you?”
Her throat bobbed on a swallow, and she lifted her eyes to meet mine. “Nothing.”
It didn’t look like nothing to me.
“It’s just some pictures,” I muttered. “What’s the big deal?”
“Let’s just try again,” she called out to the photographer, ignoring my question.
“Okay, look this way. Smile. No. Not like that. That’s a grimace, not a—”
Fabiana pushed away from me.
“We really need to get these done if we want to catch the golden hour,” the photographer said, sounding annoyed.
I shot him a glare. I was getting really fucking tired of him acting like he was the boss here. “Take a hike. Come back in five minutes.”
“But the light—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the light.”
He looked more than a little offended, but he was smart enough not to argue. I waited until he was out of earshot before I stalked over to my fiancée.
Her back was to me. She had one palm anchored against the column and another lifting the hair off her neck.
My gaze traced the delicate line of it. “What’s the issue?” I demanded.
Her shoulders rose. “I’m sorry—”
“Stop apologizing and tell me what’s going on.”
Slowly, she turned to face me, and there was so much apprehension in her expression that my annoyance disappeared in a blink. Something protective rose inside of me.
“I hate having my picture taken, okay?” she said in a small voice.
“Why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just do. I look terrible in them.”
I was pretty sure that was impossible. She was aggravatingly beautiful. “I guarantee you’ll look just fine,” I ground out.
“These are going out to so many people.” She wrung her hands. “I don’t want to get anything wrong.”
“It’s not that serious.”
Indignation flashed inside her gaze. “It is to me.”
I dragged my tongue over my teeth. I suppose I understood it. For her, this marriage was a performance she had to nail or risk disappointing her brother. She’d taken it to heart.
That didn’t bode well for me. How the fuck was I supposed to get her to call this off?
“What exactly are you worried about?”
“You heard him. I look stiff.” She rolled her lips and leaned against the column. “And I don’t feel comfortable with you.”
My mood darkened. Of course she didn’t. But wasn’t that the whole point of how I’d been acting toward her? Had I done my job so well that she couldn’t even get through a fucking photoshoot with me? The realization made something that felt suspiciously like guilt trickle into my bloodstream.
I held her emerald gaze and came to the unfortunate conclusion that I’d been hoping to avoid—this girl was a pawn in my mother’s game, not an active player.
That made what I had to do to her cruel, rather than warranted.
I raked my fingers through my hair, conflicted now. “All right, look, we’ve got to get through this. What would help?”
Her tongue darted out, swiping over her top lip. “Maybe tell me a bit about yourself.”
Fine. I settled on something innocuous. “I have twenty-five tattoos on my body. I got all of them in just one year.”
Her eyes skimmed over me, curious. “Where?”