Chapter 5
Enzo
This bride—my bride—was not a woman to trifle with.
The anger that blazed in her magnificent blue eyes would have singed a lesser man.
Still, there was no use pretending this was a normal courtship.
Finesse was for real relationships when I wanted to take an eager woman to bed and keep her eager.
It wasn’t for this sham marriage to a woman I despised.
Valentine glared daggers at me. “I’m not consummating anything with you.”
Since she insisted on being unreasonable, it was up to me to be the logical part of this equation. “Be realistic. If we’re going to be bonded for life, we are going to have a physical relationship.”
“In hell I will,” she snapped, baring her teeth at me.
“How does before sound?” I asked, ignoring her outburst. She’d been frustratingly calm for most of our encounter, even when she was trying to goad me with insults.
That cold demeanor hadn’t been an exaggeration.
Her reputation for being an ice queen had turned out to be true.
Except that had all changed the moment I had brought up sex.
“It would be a good way to discover if we are compatible.”
“We’re not.”
“So you’d rather wait until our wedding night,” I said. “Fine with me. I can be a patient man.”
“There will be no consummation,” she repeated, venom in her tone.
I hated seeing that look of disgust on her face.
Typically, women threw themselves at me.
Begged me to take them to bed. Not Valentina.
Clearly, she couldn’t get away from me fast enough.
Some of it was understandable considering how much she hated me, but I hated her, and I certainly wouldn’t kick a woman as beautiful and arousing as Valentina Romano out of bed.
If anything, the hatred between us made her all the more alluring.
What would she be like in bed? Would she surrender herself to me? Or was she the type to punish a man? That made my heartrate quicken, my cock stirring to life at the thought of finding out what sort of lover she would be.
“I won’t force you, obviously, but you’d be making the whole marriage fucking pointless,” I said. “We’ll need to have children, and you can’t do that without physical contact.”
I prepared myself for another one of her insults. Instead, she stared at me, a haunted glaze in her eyes. She actually looked grief-stricken.
A weakness I could use against her. Though, the truth was, after glimpsing how shattered she looked, it was a weakness I didn’t want to use.
When it came to business, I was a cold-hearted bastard because I needed to be.
But even I wasn’t that cold-hearted. The topic of children was a sore spot for her. I’d leave it alone. For now.
“There’s always in-vitro,” she finally shot back, but from the tremble of her chin, I could tell that her heart wasn’t in it.
Still, no man wanted to be told that his future wife would choose artificial insemination over going to bed with him.
My pride didn’t handle rejection because, frankly, it had never happened.
There were happily married women who went to bed with me for fuck’s sake.
Yet here I was, trying to convince this frigid ice queen that having sex with me was in her interest. The resentment that had been eating away at me intensified.
I didn’t fucking need this. Things would have been much easier if I’d signed a contract and then met her as she walked down the aisle on the wedding day.
But her father had insisted that we meet beforehand and get to know each other.
Don Romano seemed to think of it as a favor to his daughter.
I already thought of it as being more trouble than it was worth.
If we kept having encounters like this, we would end up hating each other even more than we did right now.
“Your loss,” I tossed back at her.
“Is that why you want to marry me?” she demanded. “To get me into bed with you?”
That she thought I needed to dangle a marriage to get her or any woman to spread her legs spoke to her haughty self-regard.
“You think I would go through all this trouble just to have sex with you?” I let out a humorless bark of laughter. “You’re beautiful, but there are several million women in New York alone.”
“So why are going through with this?” she asked. “What reason could you possibly have to marry into a family you hate?”
I had my reasons, though they were none of her concern.
“I do as my father orders,” I said. “The same as you.”
“Did you know?” she asked bluntly.
I raised a questioning eyebrow. “Did I know what?”
“Did you know about the engagement before you came here tonight?” she asked me.
Ah, she still resented being the last to know.
“I did,” I responded.
She crossed her arms, her mouth forming a thin line. “When were you told?”
“I’ve known for a few months—”
“Months?” she repeated, cutting me off.
I grimaced, knowing that my honesty was only going to make my life that much harder. “I went over the initial contract while our fathers negotiated.”
Her glare was cold enough to freeze the blood in my veins. “Everyone was told except me. Why do you think that is?”
“They didn’t want to encounter your wrath?” I offered.
“Mocking me will get you nowhere,” she warned, her tone flinty. “If this arrangement is so important to your father, why isn’t he here with you? Was he not invited?”
“My father’s presence would have been a needless provocation tonight,” I explained. “Neither of them met while they were negotiating the terms for the engagement. They hate each other too much to be in the same room. So they spoke indirectly.”
“You know there used to be weddings like that,” Valentina said, her face thoughtful. “Proxy weddings where there were stand-ins so that the bride and groom didn’t have to meet until a later date. Do you think they would let us do that?”
Though I didn’t want to acknowledge it, her intelligence impressed me.
Not only was she perceptive, she was clearly a highly educated and articulate woman.
The ease with which she spoke and her breeding indicated that despite her family’s violent origins, the Romanos expected their women to carry themselves like queens.
It was probably to get them to blend in with the upper classes.
A criminal could do business under the table with East Coast blue bloods if that criminal spoke their language.
A language that seemed to come naturally to her, while it was the complete opposite for me.
My education had come from the streets. I hadn’t gone to college like some of my brothers.
Life had taught me, making me noticeably rough around the edges.
To sand down those edges, my father had encouraged me to study the upper class.
Learn their manners, imitate the way they spoke.
Most of it I managed to learn from reading.
Something about the classics and poetry had managed to civilize me enough for certain doors to open.
But I still had to think through every word.
Still had to deliberately carry myself as if I belonged in high society.
As if I was tamed, instead of the uncivilized brute that Valentina clearly thought I was.
Somehow, she had managed to see right through me.
There was no fooling her on that front. Her ability to see me just made the engagement feel even more like a noose tightening around my neck.
Valentina’s perception of me was, to be honest, unsettling.
It meant that I was being seen and I didn’t want to be fucking seen. Least of all by her.
“Perhaps you should recommend a proxy wedding to your father,” I said. “You could add it to the contract.”
“That was you in the hallway,” she said, ignoring my sarcastic suggestion.
I arched a questioning eyebrow again. She was so direct that sometimes it was hard to see where her line of thought was going. A trait I liked, in spite of how much I should have despised it.
“Outside my family’s opera box,” she went on. “There was a man dressed just like you in the hallway. I guessed he was a De Luca because of the medallion around his neck. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t miss anything, do you?”
“Nothing at all,” she said in a tone that sounded more like a subtle warning than a confirmation.
“Tell me, are you armed?” I asked her, glancing down at the handbag slung across her shoulder.
Her eyes widened in surprise, which she quickly covered.
Bringing up the topic of weapons was very dangerous, mostly because I was secretly armed.
If her father’s guards knew, they wouldn’t hesitate to train their guns on me.
Not only was being armed in Don Romano’s house a sign of disrespect, it also meant that I was untrustworthy.
It made me a threat to be eliminated. But despite the violent hatred burning inside me, the Romanos had nothing to fear from me tonight.
I would only draw my weapon if the Romanos betrayed me.
My father’s command was clear. I had to go through with this wedding no matter what.
I could only use violence in self-defense.
Which was contrary to what I usually did.
Life in the mob had taught me that it was better to strike at your enemies before they came after you.
Yet my father was expecting me to put aside everything I had ever learned so that I would bring our worst enemies into the fold.
Tamping down my resentment over this arranged marriage was getting increasingly difficult. Meeting Valentina drove home just how much animosity I harbored toward the Romanos. How much I had been holding back during the negotiations all these months.
“What gives you that idea?” she asked.