Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Amanda
He's going to kiss me.
That's the only thought my brain can manage, looping on repeat like a song I can't skip. Valentino leans in and his eyes drop to my mouth. I'm sure of it. I watch them do that slow slide from my eyes to my lips, and my whole body lights up like a struck match.
I tilt my chin up. His hand moves. This is finally happening.
Then I feel nylon stretch over my hips and hear the soft click of metal.
He buckled my seatbelt.
I freeze with my mouth half-open like an idiot. He pulls back into his own seat and faces forward. Like I didn't just offer myself up on a silver platter.
A seatbelt. He leaned in for a seatbelt.
I press my thighs together hard, because my body has not gotten the memo that nothing happened. My body thinks something very much did.
I'm soaked through, embarrassingly so. I'm going to think about this for the rest of my life.
The wipers drag across the windshield. Thunk. Thunk. I stare at them so I don't have to look at him.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Your hotel." He doesn't look at me when he says it. His hands just grip the wheel.
I roll my eyes and sigh. "That’s not what I meant and you know it." I turn to the window. "Just—you took Elio's car. You sent him off in a cab and took his car. For what? So you could drive me back to the hotel he was supposed to take me to?"
He says nothing. Talking to Valentino is like talking to a very attractive wall, except this wall occasionally threatens to kill people.
I cross my arms over my chest, which does absolutely nothing to fix the situation happening lower down. Somewhere on the floor there's a coffee cup rolling around. Elio's, probably, and I almost feel bad for him before I remember the fiancée and the lying.
And he starts driving as if I said nothing at all.
I don't know why I expected him to talk. He's not the kind of man to fill the silence. He just exists inside it, completely at ease. Meanwhile my brain does cartwheels with both of us trapped inside this little box of heat and the tapping of rain on the roof.
I didn't imagine the way his eyes lingered on my mouth. I know what a man looks like when he wants to kiss me. He wanted to. I'd put money on it. I'd put the whole Casa Aurelia campaign on it.
So why didn't he?
Because you don't deserve it, babe, an annoying voice whispers.
Nope. I'm not doing this. It can shut up.
He just… Changed his mind. Maybe has a fiancée too.
God, I'm pathetic.
A car horn blares somewhere behind us. Valentino doesn't flinch. His hands stay steady on the wheel. And because I apparently notice everything about him now, I observe how carefully he drives.
I look away before he can catch me staring at him in the glass.
Valentino
She shifts in the seat next to me, crosses one long leg over the other, making the hem of her skirt slide higher.
I try to keep my eyes on the road because that’s the only safe place for them.
It doesn’t work.
I already watched her tongue slip out to wet her lips back at the curb. It was only a second, but now I’m hard in a way that makes me dizzy.
I think about her mouth. About what that tongue would do to me. I hate myself for it, because I’ve got no right to any of these thoughts.
I tell myself to stop, but my body doesn’t listen.
"You never answered me," she says. Her voice is light, but there’s an edge to it. "Why are you driving me to my hotel? You have your own work, Conti. Whatever it is."
I have no answer.
None I can say out loud.
So I say nothing.
The truth is, I can’t stand it.
Elio is here to protect her now, and months ago, he had his hands on her like she was his to touch.
I don’t care that it ended. I care that it happened, and that he’s still close enough to want what he already had. If she crooked one finger, he’d forget the job. Forget Vittoria. Forget every rule that put him ten steps behind her instead of beside her.
Protection be damned.
I want to put my fist through his face for it.
"How long?" I say.
She turns her head. "What?"
"You and Mancini." My jaw is tight, but the words come out flat. "How long were you fucking him?"
For a moment, she just looks at me. Then she laughs. "Wow. Okay. That is absolutely none of your business."
I stop the car.
It wasn't planned, but my foot just comes down on the brake hard enough that her seatbelt locks across her chest. She gasps, one hand flying to the dash. The engine idles. Her breath comes fast with fear. Real fear. That should make me let go.
It does not.
I reach over and catch her chin between my fingers, tilting her face up to mine. Her skin is soft, warmer than I expect, and I feel the small tremble that runs through her.
"How long," I say again. Lower this time. Closer.
Her eyes search my face.
Something in my expression must convince her I mean it.
"Months," she says, and the laugh vanishes into a whisper. "We were... it was months. But it’s over. It’s been over a long time."
Months.
My grip tightens on the wheel.
Months of him touching her. Seeing her. Knowing what she sounds like when she—
Fuck.
"Do you want him back?" I ask.
I don't know why I ask it. It's out before I can choke it down. Her chin is still caught between my fingers, and I feel the second she understands. The shift in her. The slow curve that pulls at the corner of her mouth.
She smiles. Slow. Mocking. Pleased.
She thinks I care.
I mentally curse myself because she is right. She read it perfectly. "Why," she says, and that smile widens, all teeth, "are you jealous, Conti?"
I should let go of her, put the car in gear, drive to the hotel and walk away. Then pray about all of it later.
Instead my hand slides down. My palm finds the long line of her throat, and I close my fingers around it, not hard, just enough that her pulse jumps against my thumb like a frightened thing.
Her smile drops, and her lips part. Bright eyes go wide and dark, but she does not pull away.
I feel her throat constrict against my hand.
"I asked you a question," I say. "Do you want him back?"
Her chest rises and falls. Her hand has come up to rest on my wrist, but she does not push me off. Her fingers just curl, holding on.
Amanda
His hand stays wrapped around my throat, warm and heavy, and I hate that it isn't choking me. That it feels like the opposite of a threat. His thumb rests against the soft spot under my jaw, not pressing, just… there, like he's holding something fragile he hasn't decided whether to break.
Some sensible part of my brain is waving a little red flag in the back of my skull, reminding me that this man kills people for a living. But that part of my brain is being drown out by every other part because this is the most alive I've felt in months.
Great. Wonderful. I am going to combust in the front seat of this car.
"That," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect, "is not actually a question I owe you an answer to."
His dark eyes don't move from mine. "No?"
"No." I lift my chin. "You're Vittoria's cousin. We've met what? A dozen times? At parties. Dinners."
His jaw tightens."We talk sometimes. We hang out, in the loosest possible sense of the word, because you don't actually hang, you loom.
But who I sleep with, who I want, who I don't want—" I drag in a breath, and his thumb shifts with the movement of my throat.
I have to fight to keep my thoughts in a line.
"That is not your business, Valentino. It is so far from your business it's on another continent. "
For a long second he says nothing.
Then he presses.
And I MOAN.
I fucking moan.
The spell breaks. His hand leaves my throat all at once. The air feels cold where his palm was, and I hate myself for missing the weight of it.
He faces forward. His fingers wrap around the gearstick. The wipers shudder back to life as the engine turns over.
He clears his throat.
"I don't want Elio distracted from his job," he says. His voice has gone flat and clipped, sanded down to nothing. "That's all. Whatever happened between you, it stays in the past. He watches the street. He keeps you safe. He can't do that if he's looking at you instead."
"Wow," I say. "You really thought that through, didn't you?"
He keeps his eyes on the windshield.
"It's a security concern—"
"It's a security concern," I echo, and I make my voice as flat and bored as his. "Right. So when you wrapped your hand around my throat just now, that was you protecting Sartori's investment. Got it. Very professional. Should I send you an invoice?"
"Careful–"
"You want to know the funniest part? You're actually wrong. About Elio. If he's distracted because he had feelings for me, that doesn't make him a worse bodyguard. It makes him a better one."
"You don't know what you're talking about. You don’t know how our world works." he says.
And that is the part that does it.
"Oh my God." I laugh. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you talk to me like I'm a sweet, dumb little girl who wandered into the grown-up room.
" I shove a strand of hair out of my face.
"Newsflash, Conti. I read a situation better than you think I do.
So you can sit there and call it a 'security concern' all you want, but don't you dare talk to me like I can't tell when a man is lying with a straight face.
" I look out my window so he can't see my face.
The streetlights blur and run together through the wet glass.
He doesn't answer. He pulls back into traffic. I sit there with my heart slamming and absolutely no idea why it hurts so much