CHAPTER 27
Roxanne
Warmth enveloped me. The kind that settled deep into your bones, like a cup of hot cocoa on a cold morning.
Like wrapping yourself in a thick, heavy blanket after a long, exhausting day. Grounding. Safe.
I sank into it without thinking, letting it pull me under. A familiar scent curled around me—smoke, leather… and a warmth that was uniquely masculine.
Santino.
And for a moment, I forgot where I was. With who I was.
Forgot the nightmare. The gallery. Him.
Everything that should have made this wrong.
And that was the true gamble—forgetting the rules I’d built to keep myself intact.
A firm, heavy hand tightened at my waist, pulling me closer. Another rested loosely at my neck. For a devastating moment, I didn’t move. Didn’t think nor question it.
My breath caught.
Everything came crashing back.
The kiss.
Julian.
The gallery.
Him.
The bar.
The blonde.
The nightmare.
My eyes flew open. And… Santino.
I was half on top of him, just in my t-shirt. My bare leg tangled between his, trapped there as if this wasn’t new. My face was close to his. Close enough to feel his breath on my lips.
And my body hadn’t tried to move away. Instead, it had settled comfortably deeper into him in its sleep.
He was still asleep, lips parted, breathing slow. Too calm. Too… unbothered.
How could someone look like that? Like sin wrapped in skin—and still manage to be the most infuriating man I’d ever met?
For a second—just a second—I wanted to touch him. Trace his jaw. Feel if he was real. But instead, I jerked back fast, losing my balance, nearly falling off the bed.
He caught me by my wrist instinctively, as though he hadn’t been asleep.
“Careful,” he murmured.
The rough, sleep-thick rasp of his voice dragged over my skin… down my spine… settling somewhere lower than it had any right to. And my body, traitor that it was, reacted.
I jerked like I’d been touched by fire. My heart was racing like I’d run a god damn marathon. And I guess he noticed because he rubbed the inside of my wrist in slow circles. Once. Twice.
“What are you doing?” I snapped defensively.
As if he had committed a crime, and hadn’t just caught me. His brows pulled together slightly.
“You were about to fall.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The silence sat between us, charged with everything we weren’t saying. I pushed off the bed completely this time, putting distance between us. Needing it.
A lot had happened in one night. The weight of it was piling up faster than I could sort through it.
I grabbed my jeans off the floor and pulled them on quickly.
Fuck.
He’d seen me in my underwear. Thank God they were simple cotton panties and not a pair of thongs. That would’ve made this even worse.
I fixed my clothes, my hair. Anything to avoid looking at him. The room felt crowded, though it was just the two of us. Walls closing in, making it too full of him and nothing else.
Because what the hell was that?
I had been holding him. All night, or maybe just since the nightmare broke. The strange part was how easy it felt.
No awkwardness. No hesitation. No quiet voice questioning me or telling me to pull away. It just felt—normal.
The realisation hit like a physical blow, sending a shudder straight through me. An uncomfortable feeling settled low in my stomach. I turned around and found him staring. At my ass.
“Are you done staring at my ass?”
He leaned back, arms behind his head, completely unbothered.
“Well, I wouldn’t mind—”
“Don’t finish that sentence.” I held up a hand. “Please.”
He smiled. Infuriatingly. God, this man was insufferable.
“I think we should get going,” I said, forcing my voice into a neutral and controlled tone. “Before the weather decides to act up again.”
His gaze didn’t move. Didn’t soften.
“If you had better sense,” he said lazily, “you would’ve called instead of getting yourself stranded.”
I rolled my eyes, turning away before the irritation on my face gave me away. I didn’t want to do this again. Not now. Not after everything.
After that.
Last night sat between us, unspoken but loud.
Fine, I should’ve called.
But in my defence, the world had flipped upside down in a matter of hours, completely running me over. Too much had happened in too little time, leaving no room for me to process everything that had gone down.
Julian. The gallery. Him.
A sharp knot clamped down in my gut.
And then—Marcello.
Shit.
I grabbed my phone, checking it quickly. No missed calls.
No unread texts. Relief came sharp. Immediate. Followed by a sickening wave of guilt. I typed out a quick message.
My thumb hovered over the screen for a second before I locked it. Because I didn’t even know what I would say when I did.
I just needed this day to end.
No—
I needed this entire week to end. This project.
This place. This… chaos. I wanted to go back to my life.
Back to stability. Predictability. Back to Marcello.
To my children. To the version of me that made sense.
A reality that didn’t feel like it was slipping through my fingers every time I looked at Santino.
Because what was this? Between Santino and me? What had we crossed into?
My thoughts shifted, uninvited.
Would he leave again after all this?
The question hit harder than I expected. Would he just walk away? Like he had before?
He said he wouldn’t. But how could I trust that?
How could I trust him again?
My chest tightened again—deeper this time, heavier, like an instinct inside me knew the answer and didn’t like it. Because the truth was, even if he stayed, our dynamic had already changed into something we couldn’t undo.
The kiss.
It lingered there—unspoken, unresolved, like a blade suspended above us, waiting to fall.
Every time our eyes met, it would be sitting between us, making it impossible to pretend. There was no going back to before. Not after that.
Now, before was a myth. It burned the second his mouth touched mine.
My fingers curled into my palms. Because a part of me, the part I didn’t want to look at too closely—wasn’t afraid of him leaving. It was afraid he wouldn’t.
“Ready?”
His voice cut through the haze. I blinked, the thoughts shattering mid-fall, like I’d been pulled out of a place I shouldn’t have gone that deep into.
“Yeah,” I said quickly, not looking at him, unsure what he’d see if I did.
The air outside was colder now, the storm dissolving into a steady drizzle while the heavy sky hung low, refusing to let go completely. As my gaze drifted over the parking lot, I stalled. A familiar black SUV sat idling across the road.
A strange flicker of recognition brushed my mind—had I seen it near the cottage, or back at the site? I frowned, instantly talking myself down. There was no way. I was just imagining things because my brain was running on overdrive, looking for patterns where there weren’t any.
I looked away, wrapping my arms around myself as we walked toward the car, the damp air clinging to my skin.
Everything felt wrong. Slightly off. Like the world had shifted a few degrees and I was the only one who noticed.
Reality frayed at the edges, and everything was being pulled apart. Everything I’d spent years keeping buried was rising at once.
The kiss. My uncle. The nightmare. The questions I didn’t want to ask.
And standing in the middle of all of it was Santino. And worse of all, I no longer knew which thing I was afraid of losing.Or which one would destroy me first.