Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Adriano reared back , confused. With one shouted command, he had the boardroom empty. But even the expansive space wasn’t enough to contain his shock.
The truth of it was written on her face.
She had leaked her background, invited a heap of scorn and disgust and judgment from not only the people in her life but across the internet.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve unleashed?” he demanded, fear for her making his words sharp.
“I do. The vitriol online is…as nasty as ever,” she said with a violent shiver. “I wish people would see that we were victims of his actions too. We lost both parents and any security we ever had.”
It was the most she’d betrayed about her family and that time. Adriano took her hand and pulled her to the sitting lounge. Her hand was clammy in his, the bright red of her lips emphasizing the paleness of her usually golden skin.
Needing something to do—other than just lifting her into his lap and holding her tight—he pulled out a bottle of water and handed it to her. With a murmured grazie , she finished it. His gaze lingered over the long column of her throat and the smooth expanse of skin below, revealing white lace below the cardigan.
A soft thread of desire, laced with something like longing, uncoiled in his stomach. But even the sight of her, here in his boardroom, couldn’t distract him for once.
“Why, Nyra?”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing the lipstick in the process. As if the new clothes and the makeup and the attitude were all nothing but a fragile mask. Her eyes wide, her shoulders bowed, she reminded him of the waitress he’d met in Vegas. All sharp angles and dark shadows, but with a brave innocence that shone through nonetheless.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said. The fact that she was bracing herself to face this with him made his chest tight. “This might take a while.”
He sat on the coffee table, caging her between his thighs. Her throat bobbed up and down.
Her eyes were wide in her face when she looked up. “I…I thought it was better this way. With the truth out in the open.”
“You intended to test me,” he said, with a growl. Not that he could blame her for her lack of trust.
In another surprising move, she took his hand in hers. Her fingers were long and slender around his thick ones. The splash of pink on her nails, instead of the usually bitten ones, was as much as a shock as all the rest of her. Neither could he remember the last time she’d actively sought his touch.
“Test us both, I think,” she said, squeezing his hand tight. As if afraid that he might pull away. Not just from her touch but her.
Dios mío , did she still have no grasp of the power she held over him? He didn’t understand it at all either, but it was there. As real as his heart pounding with concern and pride and lust for her.
“I didn’t want it hanging over us, over our future like some sword. So many years of my life, I spent them hiding, ashamed, as if it was my fault that he cheated so many innocent people out of their life savings. I ran so fast, so far that I buried myself in the bowels of Vegas when I was barely eighteen.”
He jerked his head up. “You started working in Vegas at eighteen?”
She shrugged.
“When did you start dancing?”
Another flush claimed her cheeks but she bravely held his gaze. “Nineteen. I got a fake ID. It paid way more than anything else.”
“But you were waitressing at the poker game,” he said, wondering at how late his questions, this discussion, was.
“Just for those few nights. There was a high-paying client that was…fond of me and he requested me personally. The floor manager didn’t give me a choice.”
“Is that why you pretended we were together that first night?”
She nodded. “You were the only one in the group who intimidated him.”
“And if I turned out to be worse than him? Madre del Mio , Nyra! What if I—”
“You weren’t anything like him, Adriano,” she said, a clarity to her voice he hadn’t heard before. “When you survive in a place like that, you learn to read people well. Especially powerful men. I knew I could trust you.”
He shook his head, the very thought of her caught in a dangerous situation with some power-drunk asshole sending fear skittering through him. Something almost like fate had brought them together, but he couldn’t stand how out of his control the entire concept was.
She’s here , he reminded himself. Healthy and swelling with his babies.
“I could say I’m sorry for doing this, but it would be a lie. I needed to…face this, Adriano. Not just for me, but for the babies.”
So that’s what the new resolve was about. He should be happy, even ecstatic, that Nyra was nothing like his mother. But he only felt a hollowness.
“And I needed to know that you’d stand by your word.”
“You didn’t trust me then?” The words felt disingenuous on his lips when her hand was in his. Touching her had always been less about logic and rationality and something more.
“We didn’t have any to begin with. It was all mind-blowing sex. Maybe now, we could build it, if not give it unconditionally.”
Pulling his hand from her clasp, he leaned back on the coffee table, allowing himself a wider look at her. Allowing her words to sink deep. Although he didn’t agree that it had just been sex. And if that wasn’t a reversal in his own head… “There’s a change in you.”
“Yes,” she said, biting into her lower lip.
“Do you plan to tell me what it is? Or am I going to discover all your little secrets through someone else, bella ?”
She looked down at her laced fingers. “Something Maria said struck a chord with me. It was my foolish pride that threatened you with leaving. It grated on me, still does—” a shiver went through her “—that you thought I was capable of… that. ” She swallowed. “Giving you an ultimatum gave me back a sense of control, but it was only false. What I want more than anything is to give these two a happy, secure future, to break away from all the insecurity that Nadia and I faced. I needed to wake up to the fact that I don’t have to be miserable, that I can still build a future with you.”
“You don’t intend to leave me anymore, then?” he said, his head still reeling from all she’d done, all she was saying.
It was like this was a new Nyra—confident, realistic and smart. Not the wraith who’d clung to him for protection or who had drowned in the pleasure he pulled from her. He didn’t know what it said about him that he wasn’t sure how much he liked this new version of her.
No, that was a lie. He knew and didn’t like how it reflected on him. It smacked too much of how his father’s ego would inflate based on how much power he could wield over innocent women.
“I plan to stick it out in the marriage, Adriano. I even came up with a promise to make to you. A belated vow, I guess. Since all we did was exchange signatures in that tacky chapel.”
Every cell in him stood to attention. But he refused to ask her for it. Christo, but she turned him into a churlish man-child.
She scooted closer to him on the sofa, a slight grimace crossing her expression at the movement. The outside of her thighs grazed the inside of his, sending a heated flush through him. She raised her eyes, a solemnity to them, and met his.
He kept his palms spread on the coffee table behind him, keeping them out of her reach.
Refusing to be put off, she cupped his knees. His muscles bunched tight at how her long fingers splayed. “I vow to be a better wife to you than I’ve been before and a good mother, hopefully, to our children.”
“I’m not sure what a better wife is, bella .”
If she was aware that he was mocking her, she didn’t betray her irritation. “I mean to take an active role in your life. Be the wife that the mighty Cavalieri bank chairman needs. Learn how to host dinners and talk about high fashion and art and whatever it is your people talk about. Dress in the height of fashion, as I’m expected to. Maybe join the board of a few charities.”
She quoted them like bullet points on a list, or like a formula to solve a problem. “I see,” he said, without knowing what to think at all.
A wide smile bloomed across her face. “I’m going to start by throwing a party to celebrate your birthday in two weeks. I’ve already brought your mother on board. Hopefully, that should stop all the rumors swirling about us. The pregnancy and now this scandal, I know it’s been a lot.”
“Mama?” he said, feeling as if he’d been punched in the head.
She gave another shrug, and a button holding the edges of the cardigan popped. “We had a talk this morning. Or rather I showed up at the villa, demanded she hear me out, and she did. Seeing me so visibly pregnant shook her, I think. She muttered something about you never giving me up now that I carry your children.”
“She knows that much about me, I guess,” he said dryly.
“Honestly, she gave me the perfect opening with that statement. I made it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere and the palazzo was my home. And that our children would be the next Cavalieri heirs. That it’s in her interest to be on my good side. I fibbed that I told you about everything she’d ever said to me and that you were mighty upset. The whole time, I nearly peed myself.”
“Go on,” he said, barely stopping his mouth from falling open.
“It was Fabi’s idea actually. You know that she feels guilty about snooping through my stuff, right? She’s been visiting me regularly and, wonder of wonders, I think we’ve become friends. Beneath all the fashionista hauteur, your sister is witty and just as full of insecurities as I am. Isn’t it great?”
“Si,” he said, barely digesting it all. But Nyra’s transformation was so…complete that it caught him too.
“Anyway, she gave me oodles of insight into how to handle your mother. I don’t know why I let her cow me. You just need to speak her language. Nigella’s nothing compared to some of the men I dealt with at the casino. And the fact that I wasn’t running away with my tail tucked between my legs at this new scandal seems to have raised me in her estimation. She’s one of those people who likes to know the order of things. And I let her know that I was on the top in this family. She admitted that the only way to weather this scandal will be to show a united front.”
His mouth twitched but he held back the smile. “But you’re seeking her help for this party?”
Nyra leaned in, smiling conspiratorially. “I actually have no interest in all the small details. She thrives on them. So I thought why not take advantage of the resources I do have.”
“All this because…”
“I’m sick of hiding from my own life,” she said, swallowing. When he continued to stare at her, she got to her feet. He refused to release her from between his legs though, feeling a juvenile fear that this Nyra was beyond his grasp already. “So, is this acceptable to you?”
“You have no demands of me,” he pointed out with a little bitterness.
“You’ve always given me more than I could imagine in my wildest dreams, Adriano. I’m trying to tell myself to enjoy it. It’s a long journey to believing that I’m worth it though,” she said, with a shrug. As if she hadn’t just revealed her vulnerability in such bald words. “I did have a question for you. Something I should have asked ages ago.”
“What is it?” he said, his mouth drying.
Fading sunlight limned her body in profile, tracing each curve with exquisite care. The leather skirt hugged her ass like he wanted to with his hands.
“Why did you marry me?”
He stared at her.
“I mean, I was head over heels for you. If you’d shipped me off to some posh flat in Milan and bade me to stay there on tap, I would have. If you put me on retainer for your visits to Vegas, I’d have happily complied.”
“I’m not in the habit of paying for pleasure,” he said, incensed beyond belief.
She snorted. “That’s morality only the rich can afford. And honestly, what we had so far is just dressed up to look like something else, no? It made you feel better to offer me a ring, and I jumped at the security that I haven’t known in so long.”
It sounded awful, but it was a realistic summary of their relationship so far. And yet it seared Adriano like nothing ever had. He hated to hear their relationship reduced to such stark terms. He’d far preferred the innocent Nyra to this pleasant brittleness she seemed to have acquired overnight. Just to sustain a relationship with him, he wondered with a keen sense of loss.
“The point is I’d have followed you wherever you bid me, until you got bored of me,” she said with a breeziness he loathed. “So why marry me?”
It was a question he’d asked himself with increasing frequency of late. He didn’t have an answer, only one that masqueraded as such. “I was thirty-four years old. You were twenty-two. The disparity in our ages, the power I had over you, the pull between us, it made me…uncomfortable. Smacked too much of the power my father wielded over innocent women. I told myself marrying you meant I was evening it out somehow. Just a bit.”
Her brow cleared. “Not uncomfortable enough to give me up though?”
“No,” he said, coming to his feet. He crowded her and she stepped back, her delicious bottom bumping against the glass wall. Her nervousness, for all she’d marched in here like a lioness, made the hunter in him calm. Which, he knew, was a weakness in itself. But until he could make sense of this, he would cling to the order of things. He was like his mother, apparently, however much he had tried to beat it.
He planted his arms on either side of her head and leaned in. Caging her, for she felt like a wisp of smoke to his senses in this new incarnation.
A soft gasp left her as his chest grazed her lush breasts. Despite his discomfort at this new her, the lust that punched through him was the same fierce, feral urge. “Some kind of madness consumed me,” he said, near her ear. Her harsh pants were like music to his ears. “It was only when I returned home, put you in the context of my life that I realized what I had done. You put me under a spell. Now shall we seal your vow with a kiss, wife ?”
He swooped in and caught her lips, needing her taste to anchor him as much as he wanted her desire for him to shake her newfound self-possession.
* * *
The kiss was rough, possessive, and Nyra responded like she was dry tinder to a match. Adriano filled her vision, her senses. Even her breath was his gift.
Fresh shivers filled her as his large hands spanned her back, fingertips digging into her. Fear finally leaving her body after thirty-six hours of wondering if he’d go back on his word.
It was the bravest thing she’d done—to leak her identity to the press. And yet she’d never been more scared. For the first time in her life, she’d taken a calculated risk with everything riding on the result.
Her decision.
Her life.
Her future with this compelling man.
Would he still want her when her past touched his prestige? had been a relentless chant in her head. Although the fact that he was too honorable to throw his pregnant wife, and his future heirs , on the street was a sad reassurance.
“Open up, bella . You’ve teased me enough,” Adriano demanded, nipping at her lower lip. His hands kneaded her hips, stroked over her back, touching her everywhere and anywhere with an urgency that was a sop to her fragile ego.
She groaned as he licked his tongue through her mouth, playing with her, thrusting it in a filthy parody of what she needed elsewhere. All the confusion of the last few days, the cracks he’d made in her heart over the last few months, the heat of his kiss melted it a little. His mouth, so soft for such a hard, inscrutable man, drifted down her jaw, leaving her shaking from her head to toe.
Clinging to his powerful shoulders, Nyra rubbed herself against him like a cat, needing the rough slide of the hard planes of him against her. It had been so long, too long, since she’d felt his need. His possession. His…fracture at her hands.
While it had hurt to reduce their relationship to sex, there was a powerful truth in their physical connection.
She let her hands drift down his chest, loving the tensile strength of him. From the first moment, it was his strength with an underbelly of kindness that had lured her in. A part of her, she thought, would always crave that from him, even as she tried to be stronger.
Strong enough to not need him in that way, to earn herself a place in his life that wasn’t based on sex or emotion or some vague feeling in her belly.
Her palms drifted farther down to the rock-hard slab of his abdomen. Her fingers sneaked in between the buttons on his shirt, eager to feel the rough swirls of his hair. Just as she reached the band of his trousers, Adriano turned her, with a deftness she always found surprising for a man of such bulk.
By the time she could catch her breath, she was pressed up against the cold glass, the edges of her cardigan pulled open. Her lace bra was no barrier, making her nipples pull tight.
In front of her, Milan shone against the night sky in all its splendor. The light from the skyscrapers was the only light inside the office. Her shuddering breath drew a smoky ring on the glass as Adrian roughly pulled the cups of her bra down and filled his hands with her breasts.
His mouth found that spot at the arch of her shoulder and neck where she was extra sensitive. He dragged his teeth down that spot at the exact moment that his fingers flicked at her nipple.
Nyra gave a low moan, pushing herself into him. The imprint of his hard shaft against her bottom made her panties damp.
“Christo, I’ve missed touching you,” he whispered, his lips pulling and tugging at her tender flesh. He kneaded and cupped her breasts, the rough calluses of his palms sending sparks of heat down to her core.
“Please, Adriano,” she said, arcing into him. “I need…”
“What, bella ?” he said, punctuating the question with a tug of her other nipple. Heated sparks arrowed down to her core. And the weight of his body against hers increased. His hands drifted down from her breasts, his long fingers splaying over her belly. Over the tautly stretched skin of her bump.
A sudden stillness enveloped him, the sound of his rough breaths harsh in the silence and he jerked back. A whimper escaped her. Without his claiming touch and his heat, her bare nipples scrunched against the sudden cold. She adjusted her bra, but left the flaps of her cardigan open.
It was the first time he’d touched her belly since she’d begun changing. And she knew it was a shock, as much as it was for her, every day.
Mustering her strength, she turned around to find him pushing a hand through his thick waves, something like panic touching his eyes.
Around her, automated lights came on, ruining the intimate moment with a bright glare. Only now did she see the deep grooves etched around his mouth, the dark circles cradling his eyes.
Guilt pricked her. She had pretty much unleashed the worst-case scenario on him, and he was the one dealing with the consequences. She’d always seen him as larger than life, this…unbending, powerful figure who needed nothing and no one. But that was a disservice to him, wasn’t it? To the real man he was, made of flesh and blood and emotions, just like her?
“Adriano?” she said, reaching out to touch him.
He pulled back. “I pushed you against the wall. Christo, Nyra!”
“You did, but your hand was on my belly when you flipped me. Of all the things you had me do in the last year, you never hurt me before. And you won’t now.”
“In this, you trust me?”
Heat streaked her cheeks. “Yes. Don’t ask me to explain it.”
“You’re truly not hurt?”
“Not in the way you think.”
He came to her then, all crackling hunger and magnetic energy, his hands clasping her cheeks. His gaze drilling into her as if he meant to see through to her soul. “How do you hurt, then?”
She leaned in and rubbed her lips over his jaw. His beard was rough against her sensitive skin and so deliciously tormenting. “I miss you in our bed, Adriano. And not just those perfect orgasms you dole out before sleep. I miss…being held by you. Most of my adult life, I’ve been alone. Until you got me addicted to you. Can we please return to that?”
Hands on her shoulders, he gently pushed her back, his gaze clinging to her breasts. She didn’t know whether to smile or sigh. “Your body has changed.”
“Apparently that’s what happens when you’re growing two humans.”
“I like it. You’re rounder, lusher. Too thin before,” he said with a sudden wicked upturn of his lips.
Nyra swatted his stomach with the back of her hand. “Hey! It’s bad enough I feel…different in my own skin. None of my old clothes fit and I’m hungry all the time. And horny,” she added.
His nostrils flared, and he pulled the thin bow of his upper lip with his teeth. “Now you know how I feel around you,” he said, biting his lower lip.
“Oh, please, your body’s like a finely honed sword. If anything, you’re aging like a fine wine,” she said, snorting.
He gathered her to him then, his arms tight around her. Nyra thought she might expire of this affection he showed her in rare moments. “Horny, bella . I’m always horny around you.” As if to underline his statement, he pressed closer, and the hard outline of his shaft against her belly made her breath falter.
Then he pulled away, but his mouth remained at her temple, and for a breathless moment, she felt utterly cherished. Wanted. Needed, even. “You’re…beautiful, mia cara . Even more so, swelling with my children inside you.”
His fingers sifted through her hair, the tops pressing into the base of her neck. “So why did we stop?” she said, burrowing into his neck.
His chuckle moved through her, filling her with a fizzy decadence. “Other than the fact that I’m too exhausted to satisfy you the way I want to? The whole board is still waiting for me outside the doors. I’m possessive enough to not want them listening to the sounds you make when you come. You’re very loud.”
“I don’t want to go back to the apartment anymore,” she said, clinging to his warmth. “I know you have security there to keep the hounding press away, but please don’t send me away.”
“It is the best place for you right now.”
“No, I want to be here. Wherever you are.”
“Nyra—”
“That day after he was sentenced, the crowd came at us outside the courthouse in London. I slipped and fell and someone stepped on my hand. It was the only reason I got away. Nadia…spent an hour looking for me.” She took a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to be alone, Adriano. Neither do I want to be around your family right now. Their discomfort at being hounded wherever they go because of me is completely justified.”
His arms tightened around her and his mouth lingered over her temple. “ Bene. I’ll have someone bring you to the penthouse here. Eat and rest. I’ll join you later.”
Looking up, she traced a finger gently over the dark circles cradling his eyes. “You’re the one who needs rest and sleep.”
“ Si. But after I deal with what you’ve unleashed.”
“You aren’t angry?”
He shrugged. “You’re right that secrets like that will come out eventually, and then our children might have been affected. I just…would have preferred less doubt and worry for you at this time.”
“That’s not something even you can arrange me for me though,” she said, smoothly pointing out that for all his power, there were some things beyond his reach. Like her heart. “But knowing you’re on my side makes all the difference, Adriano.”
Swallowing at how easily she unmade and remade him, he held her close for another minute.