Valentine Vendetta (14 Days of Love and Lust Bikers & Mobsters)

Chapter One

Isabella

The pool at La Sirena looks like it belongs to someone else’s life, a sheet of melted sapphire stretched taut beneath the Italian sun. The water is warm where the light lingers and cooler where the palms cast their long shadows. Even paradise has places it prefers to keep hidden.

The island itself feels barely tethered to reality.

A rumor in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a speck of rock and money, a helicopter hop from Capri.

It’s the kind of place men like my father buy out for a weekend.

The kind of place where the ma?tre d’ knows which vintage you’ll drink before you ask, and the security cameras are there to be seen so you know they have better ones you’ll never find.

I didn’t come here to hide.

I came to breathe.

I came with a name that isn’t mine. Sera Vale. I practiced it on the flight until it felt like a silk dress that fits too well. Sera smiles at waiters. Sera tips in crisp bills. Sera swims in a white one-piece with a slit at her hip and doesn’t look over her shoulder.

Isabella always knows who is watching.

My real name has a gravity that pulls every eye.

There’s a ring on my finger that weighs more than the diamond.

The truce is coming next week, which means the city is hungry now.

My father calls, my fiancé calls, and the consigliere calls, and I send every call to voicemail.

I throw my phone in the room safe and set the code to a date I will never forget.

Then I come down to the infinity pool that spills into the Mediterranean sky and order a Hugo spritz. In thin crystal, I taste summer. Prosecco laced with elderflower, mint bruised just so, lime’s clean bite. While it snows back home, I pretend I’m someone I invented.

Someone who’s unbothered enough to notice the delicious man swimming up in the ripple of his own shadow, his broad shoulders cutting the blue. He has the kind of face you notice for the angles first, and then the eyes come for you after, dark and steady as if he’s already made up his mind.

I'm on his mind.

He braces his forearms on the marble lip beside my chaise and water runs in clean lines down the tendons of his wrists.

“You look like you’re making a run for it,” he says. His accent travels. There’s Italy in it. There’s something else I can’t place but sounds faintly familiar. Familiar enough to unsettle me.

Unsettle Isabella.

Sera tells Isabella to shut it.

“Run is a strong word,” I say. “I prefer swim.”

“Is that your plan or your preference, Bella?” he asks.

“Bella?” I ask as Sera. Isabella starts to panic because the name is too similar. I wonder if he recognizes me.

“Beautiful, in Italian,” he explains.

“I know,” I reply, relieved.

“You know you’re beautiful?” One exquisite corner of his mouth curves, small and private, like we share a joke no one else can hear.

He smiles, only a bit.

And I melt anyway.

“My Italian is okay. I prefer English,” I’m lying, my Italian is flawless.

“So, beautiful, is swimming away your plan or your preference?” he asks.

“Preference,” I say, getting his meaning. I’d like to run away. I won’t. “Sera is my name.”

The lie slides out easily, delivered with the kind of confidence people don’t challenge.

His eyes stay on my face, studying without urgency, without blinking, and I sense the attention like fingers on bare skin.

“I do not want your name,” he says at last, like he can see right through me. “I only want your yes.”

I’ve heard a thousand lines in a hundred rooms. The men I know perform charm like it’s business. This lands like a promise in the dark, uncomplicated, sincere. I can’t explain why that makes me want to trust him.

“My yes for what?” I ask.

“For the next drink,” he says. “For the next hour. For a day where you’re only a woman on an island and I am only a man at a pool.”

The spritz drips cold on my fingers. The sun catches a drop and throws it like a diamond reminding me of the one I locked away. My life at home is mapped and measured, always watched. Yes, is a small word that could punch a hole in all that. Maybe I want to punch something.

“Yes,” I say, hiding my breathlessness.

He climbs out of the pool, and the world narrows to the breadth of his well-developed shoulders. Water sheets off olive skin, runs over the cut of his carved chest and the tight ladder of his perfect abs like a sexy waterfall. His trunks are dark and sit low on narrow hips.

Eye level with his belly button, I catch myself cataloging details I shouldn’t be collecting like the adonis belt and dark hair leading lower.

He takes a white linen towel, wraps it once around his waist, the fabric clinging where it meets his skin and blocking my view.

Blinking like the sun’s in my eyes, I let them travel elsewhere.

There’s more to notice. Dark hair slicked back by water. A mouth I can’t stop watching. Day-old stubble along a jaw that looks capable of damage. Veins raised on his wrists from the swim. A pale crescent-shaped scar on one shoulder that I file away for later.

His smirk growing, he offers me his hand like a gentleman, like a sinner, like both at once. When I stand, it’s like he is made of heat and salt, magnetic. I keep my eyes on his mouth because the rest of him is too much.

“What should I call you?” I ask.

He considers the question for only a heartbeat.

“Call me Luca,” he says.

It’s a lie that fits him. He wears it the way I wear Sera. We nod to each other like we’ve shaken hands inside the deception.

We don’t leave the pool for an hour. We float under the lazy ceiling fans while the sea sighs beyond the glass. He tells a story about a fisherman who swears La Sirena is haunted by a mermaid who drowned a hundred lovers.

Sirens drown oath-breakers. Rivers keep their bodies. I’ve seen both.

I tell a story about a woman who never learned to swim until she was twenty because the city she lived in made risk seem like a luxury. The truth hides inside the stories and peeks out with teeth. We laugh. We say nothing real.

It feels like everything.

Luca grabs my left hand. “Say yes?”

“To what?”

“Getting out of here for the day.”

I never leave the resort. Isabella would be instantly on guard. Sera smiles and says yes.

We go walking. La Sirena has a terrace that wraps the cliff like a bracelet. He insists we go barefoot, carrying my sandals. Hot stone under bare feet brings me to life. I’m rewarded with limoncello in tiny cold glasses.

He points out a gleam on the horizon and names the boats by their shape. I make up names for the people on them. Stories. An heiress on her third husband. A cheating politician. A man who stole a fortune and ran for the sun.

“You’re good at this,” Luca says.

“At what?”

“Not being where you are.”

I let the wind take my hair. “Practice,” I say. “And need.”

He looks at my left hand, empty for once. I took off the ring before I came down from the room. The ghost of it still marks my skin. He notices the pale band and looks away, kind enough to pretend he didn’t.

A bell rings from the chapel on the hill.

Noon.

Luca finds the Vespa without asking, as if the island is already mapped inside him. He’s left the resort before. He may be from here. Sera doesn’t ask.

We rent our ride from a young boy with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip and a tattoo. I hold on to Luca as he takes the switchbacks up through pines to the ridge road.

The island is a brochure for excess. White houses with blue shutters. Bougainvillea like pink fire. Every driveway hides a car costing more than a house in neighborhoods back home. Every gate hides a guard who can handle a rifle.

Guns don’t unsettle me.

Being unarmed does.

Sera Vale rides the Vespa like she belongs nowhere and everywhere at once, her arms loose, her chin lifted to the wind. Isabella watches the mirrors, cataloging exits that are not there.

We find a tiny trattoria with string lights hung even though it’s bright noon.

The owner greets Luca with familiarity that could mean anything and brings us grilled prawns that taste like the sea.

The bread’s so hot it hurts my fingers. A lemon salad shocks my mouth awake.

Luca eats like a man who works and earns his hunger.

The way he listens matches it, attentive without intrusion, patient without distance.

He doesn’t ask where I’m from. He asks where I’d go if I could wake up anywhere. I say Palermo without thinking, almost giving myself away. And then I quickly change it to Paris. His smile tells me he heard both answers and decided not to press.

After lunch, he finds a path that leads down into the teeth of the cliffs, narrow and half-hidden, opening onto a cove where the water turns darker, deeper, a coin dropped into shadow.

We undress without ceremony, without commentary, as if speech would break the spell.

The sea lifts me, lowers me, rocks me back into a body I abandoned long ago in favor of control.

He keeps his distance until I close it.

When his hand skims my waist beneath the water, the touch is light enough to feel like a question. Permission offered rather than taken. The sun makes my shoulders ache pleasantly. Salt clings to my lips. I dive under, letting the water erase sound and thought alike.

When I surface, he is there, close enough that I feel his heat through the water before his mouth finds mine.

I know how kisses work. In my world, they are currency, punctuation, performance.

This one is none of those things. It isn’t polite.

It isn’t brutal. It is a door opening inward.

He kisses me like a man who has gone hungry and been offered something sacred, careful and relentless at the same time, his mouth coaxing rather than claiming, his hands steady at my back as if he is anchoring me to something real.

I forget names. Titles. Expectations. The way men eye me when they want something I'm unable to give.

Time softens around us, blurring at the edges.

When the shadows lengthen and the sun begins to slant, we climb out of the cove, drunk on salt and light.

He wraps me in his towel and carries my sandals again, a small gesture that proves intimate in a way I’m unprepared for.

The scar on his shoulder catches my eye again, pale and crescent-shaped, a reminder that his ease has sharp edges.

Isabella worries about that.

“Have dinner with me,” he says.

“Yes,” I let Sera answer, because I don’t want this day to end.