What He Called a Debt

1. Liana

— ? —

Liana

My back hit the wall and I stopped thinking.

Dominic’s mouth was on my throat, his teeth grazing the spot below my ear that made me lose my mind. His hand was already up my dress, fingers sliding through the slick heat between my thighs.

I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and held on because my legs had forgotten how to work.

“God, yes.” I arched into his hand. “Right there, don’t stop.”

He pushed two fingers inside me and curled them forward and I made a sound that probably carried through the whole house. I didn’t care. Bianca was asleep down the hall and the staff had been sent home hours ago.

I had been waiting all week for this, for him, for the way his hands felt on me when he wasn’t thinking about anything else.

Ten years of this man and I still got wet the second he looked at me.

His thumb found my clit and pressed in slow circles and my head fell back against the wall. I could feel him hard against my hip, straining against his dress pants, and I wanted to touch him but I couldn’t bother to move my hands. All I could do was hold on and let him ruin me.

“You’re soaked.” His voice was low and rough against my ear. “Been thinking about this?”

My voice came out broken, breathless. “You’ve been busy.”

“I’m not busy now.” He twisted his fingers inside me and I gasped. “Now I’m right here.”

“Then stop teasing and make me come.”

He laughed and picked up his pace. His fingers pumped steadily now, his thumb working my clit, and the pressure was building at the base of my spine, coiling tighter with every stroke.

My nipples were aching, pressing against the thin silk of my dress, and when he looked down at my chest his eyes went dark.

“Look at you.” He rubbed his thumb over one stiff peak through the fabric and I whimpered. “So fucking desperate for it.”

“Your fault.” I was panting now, my hips rocking against his hand. “You made me wait.”

“I’m not making you wait now.” He pulled down the strap of my dress and closed his mouth over my bare nipple and sucked hard. I cried out and fisted my hand in his hair and held him there.

“Come for me.” He lifted his head and looked at me, those deep eyes boring into mine. “I want to feel you.”

My whole body clenched around his fingers and I shook against the wall, and he watched me fall apart with a satisfied look on his face that I wanted to slap off and kiss at the same time.

He worked me through it, gentling his touch as I came down, and when I could breathe again I was limp against the wall and he was smiling at me with pure male smugness.

“Proud of yourself?” I managed.

“Extremely.”

I reached for his belt. He caught my wrist.

“Patience,” he said.

“I don’t have patience.” I pressed my palm against the hard length of him through his pants and watched his jaw clench. “I have needs.”

“You just came all over my hand.”

“And now I want you inside me.” I stroked him through the fabric and he made a low sound in his throat. “Fair’s fair, Dominic.”

“Later.” He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my palm, his lips warm and soft against my skin. “We have all night. I want to take my time with you.”

“You keep saying we have all night and then your phone rings.”

He smoothed my dress back into place, gentle now, tucking my breast back into the silk and sliding the strap up my shoulder. “Tonight there’s no phone. Just you and me and that bottle of wine I’ve been saving.”

I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to believe him.

He crossed to the sideboard and picked up the wine bottle. I watched him pour with my back still against the wall and my pulse still racing between my legs.

His sleeves were shoved up to his elbows. His tie was gone, somewhere on the living room floor where I’d thrown it when he first put his hands on me.

The silver at his temples caught the candlelight. The muscles in his forearms flexed as he tilted the bottle. There was a red mark on his neck from my teeth.

Fuck, he was beautiful. Thirty-five years old and he still made my mouth water.

“Enjoying the view?” he said without looking up.

“I’m deciding whether to let you keep the rest of the suit on.” I pushed off the wall and walked toward him on shaky legs. “Since I already got half of it off you.”

“Behave.” He handed me the glass, his fingers brushing mine, sending a little shock up my arm. “Bianca’s down the hall.”

“Bianca’s been out cold for hours.” I took a sip of wine, letting it sit on my tongue before swallowing. “I had plans for tonight and I wasn’t letting a five-year-old interrupt them.”

“Plans.” His mouth curved, that slow dangerous smile. “Tell me more about these plans.”

“The plans involve that couch.” I nodded toward the living room. “And then the rug in front of the fireplace. And then the terrace if you can keep up.”

“If I can keep up.” He set down his own glass and stepped into my space, his hands finding my hips. “I’ve kept up with you for ten years.”

“You’ve tried to keep up with me for ten years.” I slid my free hand up his chest. “Big difference.”

He kissed me tasting like wine. I melted into him the way I always did, my body going soft against his, and for a moment there was nothing else.

Small bare feet slapped against the hardwood in the hallway.

We broke apart. Dominic closed his eyes and exhaled slowly through his nose.

“She was asleep,” I said.

“She was definitely asleep.”

“I checked twice.”

“So did I.” He turned toward the doorway just as Bianca appeared in it, and I watched his face change. All the heat and hunger drained out of it, replaced by a softness that only existed for her. “Hey, little one.”

She was wearing her moon nightgown. The plastic crown she’d found at a birthday party was perched crookedly on her dark curls.

“I heard laughing,” she announced. “Are you having a party without me?”

I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.

Dominic crouched down to her level. All six feet of him, all that muscle and menace, folding down small in front of a five-year-old with a crooked crown and a dragging blanket. The man who made this whole coast hold its breath, kneeling on the hardwood for his daughter.

“It is a party,” he said, his voice soft. “For Mama and Papa. Ten years.”

“Ten’s a lot,” she finally declared.

“It is.”

“Is that why you’re being so nice to her?” She pointed at me over his shoulder, one small finger aimed at my chest. “In the car you call her names.”

Dominic went very still. “What names?”

“Bad ones.” Bianca was warming to her subject now, sensing blood in the water. “At the roundabout. You said a really bad one and then you said Mama’s name and then you hit the steering wheel with your hand and said another one that was even worse.”

I had to turn away. My shoulders were shaking with the effort of not laughing out loud.

“Those,” Dominic informed his daughter with tremendous dignity, “are love names.”

Bianca looked unconvinced. “Love names should sound nicer than that.”

“You would think so.”

“I think you should apologize to Mama.”

“I apologize to Mama constantly.”

“Rina says your apologies aren’t good enough.” Bianca crossed her arms over her chest, the effect somewhat undermined by the blanket still clutched in one fist. “She says that’s why Mama has the wrinkle now.”

I choked on nothing.

“What wrinkle?” Dominic asked, his voice carefully controlled.

“The one right here.” Bianca pointed to the space between her own eyebrows. “Rina says Mama didn’t use to have it and now she does and it’s because you’re a piece of work.”

“Did Rina say that?”

“She said it in Italian but I know what it means because she’s teaching me all the words.” Bianca yawned hugely, her whole face scrunching up. “She says I’m a natural.”

“I’m going to have a conversation with Rina about what words she’s teaching you.”

“She said you’d say that too.” Another yawn, bigger than the first. “She said to tell you that you can fire her when you learn how to make your own coffee, and not before.”

“Bianca.”

“Can I have water now?”

Dominic scooped her up off the floor in one smooth motion, settling her on his hip with her blanket trailing behind her. She wrapped her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder immediately, like that was where she belonged, which it was.

“Say goodnight to Mama,” he said.

“Night, Mama.” Her voice was already going drowsy, her eyelids drooping. “Tell Papa to be nicer to you in the car.”

“I will, baby.”

“And tell Rina I said the words right.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Dominic carried her down the hall toward her bedroom, her blanket trailing behind them on the hardwood, her crown glinting in the low light.

I listened to their voices fade. Listened to her demand the story, the one about the wolf and the small brave girl, the one he’d been telling her since she was too young to understand the words.

In the story, the girl wasn’t the one who needed saving. She was the one who saved the wolf. She fed him when he was starving and hid him when the hunters came and stood in front of him with her small hands raised when the other wolves tried to tear him apart.

I leaned against the doorframe and listened to my husband tell our daughter a story about being saved by someone who wasn’t afraid of you, and I felt my throat get tight.

This was what I’d never let myself imagine, back when I was twenty-one and walking into a monster’s house. I’d had a plan. Learn everything, rob him blind, disappear before he could use me up and throw me away.

I hadn’t planned on falling in love with the monster.

But here I was. Standing in a house that used to terrify me, wearing a dress that cost more than my father made in a year, listening to my husband tell our daughter a bedtime story.

This was everything.

Dominic appeared in the doorway with his hair messed up from Bianca’s grabbing hands. There was a small purple stain on his collar now, probably from the popsicle she’d definitely snuck after dinner, and his shirt was fully untucked.

“She’s out,” he said.

“For real this time?”

“I did the whole story twice. She made me do all the voices.” He crossed the room to me and slid his hands around my waist. “She’s not waking up until morning.”

He pulled me against him and walked me backward through the glass doors onto the terrace. “Now where were we?”

The harbor stretched out below us, black water dotted with lights from the boats moored at the docks.

“Dance with me,” he said.

“There’s no music.”

“I don’t need music.” He pulled me close, one hand at the small of my back, the other holding mine against his chest. “I just need you.”

We swayed in the silence. My cheek rested against his chest and I could hear his heart beating steady under my ear, the heart of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be. His thumb traced circles on my lower back. His breath was warm in my hair.

“I love you.” He said it quiet, into my hair, almost like he wasn’t sure he was allowed. “You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“I don’t say it enough.”

“You don’t.”

He pressed his mouth to the top of my head.

“I love you, Liana Costa. I loved you when you were a twenty-one-year-old brat who told me I was shorter than you expected. I loved you when you married me even though you had every reason not to. I loved you when you gave me Bianca and I didn’t know it was possible to love someone that much. ”

My throat was tight. My eyes were burning.

“I love you,” he said again, “and I’m going to love you until they put me in the ground, and probably after that too, because I don’t think death is enough to make me stop wanting you.”

“Dominic.”

“Let me finish.” His arms tightened around me. “I know I’ve been busy. I know I’ve been distracted. I know there have been too many nights when I came home late and you were already asleep and I just stood in the doorway watching you breathe because I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I wasn’t asleep.” My voice came out rough. “I was waiting for you. I was always waiting for you.”

He sounded pained. “I know you were. And I’m sorry. I’m going to do better.”

I lifted my head from his chest and looked at him. His eyes were dark in the candlelight, and he was looking at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.

“Promise me,” I said.

“I promise.”

“Promise me that tonight is ours. No phone, no docks, no emergencies. Just us.”

“I promise.” He cupped my face in his hands. “Tonight there’s nothing but you. The rest of the world can burn.”

“Say it so I understand it,” I whispered.

“You’ve understood it for ten years.” He pressed his lips to my temple. “You’ve never needed the translation.”

“Maybe I want to hear it anyway.”

“Greedy.”

“Always.”

The phone lit up on the sideboard inside.

I felt him change before I saw the screen.

His hand went still at the small of my back.

His chest stopped moving under my cheek.

The warmth drained out of his body and the cold slid in to replace it, that shift I had felt a thousand times before, the one that meant my husband was leaving and the Don was arriving.

“No,” I said, quiet but firm. “You promised.”

He didn’t answer. He pulled away from me and walked inside and picked up the phone.

I watched him through the glass doors.

He put the phone down and came back to the terrace doorway. He didn’t step outside.

“One hour,” he said.

“Dominic.”

“I know. I know what I promised, and I’m sorry, but this is the shipment, the one we’ve been waiting on, and if I don’t-”

“There’s always a shipment.” I wrapped my arms around myself. “There’s always something.”

“This is different.”

“It’s always different. And it’s never me.”

He flinched. Just barely, just for a second, but I saw it.

“One hour,” he said again. “I swear to you on Bianca’s head. One hour and I’m back and the phone goes in the ocean and I spend the rest of the night making this up to you.”

“You can’t make it up to me.” My voice was flat. “That’s not how it works.”

“Liana.”

“Go.” I turned away from him, facing the water. “Do what you have to do.”

He crossed the terrace to me and turned me around and cupped my face in his hands. His eyes were pained, guilty, and I hated that I could see how much he meant it even as he was leaving me again.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ll be back.”