When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love Duet #1)

by Giana Darling

“You remind me of my wife. It was nothing to do.” “What’s she like?” I asked as we took the elevator down to the street level. He shot me a sidelong glance. “She’s a real bitch.” I laughed the entire ride down.

I sucked a sharp breath through my teeth when his neck strained, his tempo went erratic, and he called out, “Elena!” a second before he climaxed.

Then, eyes still puncturing straight through mine into the dark, calamitous heart of me, he brushed one hand down his chest, his thumb dipping into a cooling streak of cum he’d missed while cleaning up. My heart beat so hard my ribs ached from the impact as he slowly raised it to my lips and smeared just the tiniest deposit on my mouth, a smudge like lip gloss.

“Sogni d’oro,” he murmured just before closing the door in my face with a slight, secret smile. “Have sweet dreams of me, Elena.”

“You need me, you call me, si?” Dante demanded, still scowling. “I don’t like this. You should tell me what it is you are having done so I can be prepared to care for you.”

“I don’t need looking after, and I can hardly picture you as a nursemaid. Don’t worry about me, Dante. I’ll be fine. I always am. Now, I have to rush, but have a nice day.”

“Only she would wear heels to surgery,” then a shouted, “In boca al lupa!” before I got in the elevator. Good luck. Literally translated as “into the wolf’s mouth.”

After the tragedy of Christopher and Daniel, I didn’t have anything more in me to give. I’d felt so much all my life I’d resolved to feel nothing at all. For years, I’d kept my heart black, my lips red, and my personality ice cold.

Whoever said women were terrible gossips clearly had never met an Italian man.

She was sleeping when I finally got the time to check in on her. I almost laughed at the image she made in the mammoth pale gray bed with a black silk face mask over her eyes and black foam plugs in her ears. Only Elena Lombardi would look like she was preparing for war just to take a simple nap.

I found I wanted to lean down to savor it with my own, exploring the small white teeth beneath those bow-shaped lips, sliding my tongue alongside hers to taste her dreams.

Survivors came in all shapes and sizes, and not all of them came out on the other side of their trauma shiny and bright with hope and renewed optimism.

I fell in love with her before I even touched her.”

It’s the…I don’t know. The passion, the possession, the animalistic tendencies.” “Noted,” Dante drawled again from his place in the doorway. The look on his face was pure hunger, the dark in his eyes expansive enough to drown in.

“Move over,” he demanded before reaching into his pocket and tossing my cell into my lap. “You should really change the passcode on that. Your mother’s birthday isn’t exactly original.” “Hey,” I protested, hugging my phone to my chest. “Rule number two, no snooping.” “When you keep things from me, I have no choice,” he said in that agreeable tone that made me see red. “You are the most frustrating man on the planet,” I muttered.

Dante sat on the edge of the bed even though I hadn’t moved over and gently reached over to reposition the pillow at my back and neck so I was close to the middle of the bed and cozier than I had been before. If I closed my eyes to breathe in his lemon and pepper scent while he leaned over my torso, he didn’t notice. “You are the most infuriating woman,” he countered, but his eyes glittered like the New York City nightscape outside my windows. “What a pair,” Sebastian interjected in a long drawl.

Four weeks of little touches, a hand wrapped around my neck when he wanted me to focus on him, a stroke of my hair when he passed me in the kitchen, a squeeze of my hip when I stood beside him at the island making dinner, late nights spent watching movies in my room or on the couch with our shoulders pressed tight.

A few times when I’d fallen asleep on the couch following my surgery, Dante had even picked me up, all five-foot-ten inches of me, and carried me to my bedroom. I’d pretended to be asleep, too embarrassed to do otherwise when I was so close to his heart beating through the hard wall of his chest.

Four weeks of little touches while I recovered from my procedure and nothing else. It was death by a thousand caresses, slowly sh...

Slowly and irrevocably spending time around Dante’s heat had thawed my icy demeanor toward him. I found myself bantering with him instead of trying to cut him to pieces with the sharp edge of my tongue. After going back to work from my surgery, I spent my late working hours at the living room desk or coffee table instead of the office because I liked the company. His company.

I wanted him so badly even my teeth ached with it.

“You seem…agitated this morning, Elena,” Dante noted in that smooth, accented drawl he used when he was teasing me. I glared at him, irritated with us both for the interminable dance we were locked together in. “I slept badly.” “Bad dreams?” he asked with a quirk of a black brow. I pursed my lips and arched one of mine. “About a bad man.” “Oh.” He folded his paper in his lap and leaned forward with a wolfish grin. “Do share with the class.” I snorted. “Not likely.”

“I dreamed that I was with a beautiful woman,” he began,

“She was naked but nervous. I gentled her, stroking down all that creamy skin with just the tips of my fingers, the edge of my rough knuckles until I made her tremble.”

“She didn’t want to get on her knees for me when I asked…” He pulled a few seeds of pomegranate onto his fingers and then inclined forward slowly to raise them in offering to me as he said, “So, I got on my knees for her. And when I put my mouth on her pussy, do you know what she tasted like, Elena?”

“Like pomegranates and red wine,” he finished,

“Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table. “Will you hit me if I say yes?” His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and nodded somberly. “Yes.” “Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I like it rough.”

“I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.

“Don’t say I should do it more often.” “No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather possessive of the sound.”

He stood too, dropping the pomegranate to his plate and wiping his hands before he came around the stone table to corner me against the door. One hand went to my hip and the other braced on the door beside my head as he crowded me. The sheer size of him shouldn’t have excited me as it did, but all the things I had once found horribly savage now seemed to light me up like kerosene-soaked tinder.

“One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“No, lottatrice,” he murmured as he angled his nose over the shell of my right ear. “I’ll hold yours when I finally fuck you. Eat it off your tongue when I kiss you as you beg me for more.”

“You’re everything fire, and I’m solid ice,” I protested because nothing about us made sense, and he needed to remember that. If I couldn’t make things work with Daniel, a man seemingly perfect for me, nothing could ever amount to anything between Dante and I. “Si,” he agreed gruffly. “That’s why I know I’m the one who will finally make you melt.”

“Let me show you passion, Elena. Let me teach you how to love again.”

There was no way I could love a man like him, a mafioso, a criminal like the kind who had played the villain in my life for so long. It was impossible.

I’d promised myself I would never love again.

“Not all love is romantic,” he pointed out rationally, staring into my fearful eyes. “I don’t think you’ve had enough of it to know that, but I’m offering the love of a friend and the love of my body. The love of a man who can see you are not hateful. You are not villainous. You are misunderstood. And Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m fucking undone by the beauty of you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I insisted. “You don’t know half of the bad things I’ve done.” “And you don’t know mine,” he agreed. “But we are more than our flaws and our mistakes. Who told you that you were hard to love? Give me a chance to prove them wrong.”

“I don’t want to be loved,” I asserted, almost baring my teeth at him because I’d never felt so threatened in my entire life. Not when I’d hidden under the sink and watched mafiosos beat my father. Not when Christopher forced me to do unholy things with my body. Not when he showed up at Giselle’s art show and assaulted her, and I’d stepped in to fight him myself. None of the boogeymen in my lif...

One month of constant contact and I was in danger of throwing away everything I knew just for one single kiss. “Let me love you anyway,” he suggested. And then he was moving. They say there is a thin line between love and hate. The moment Dante Salvatore twisted his hand in my hair and yanked me in for a savage kiss, I knew he had jus...

But all I could do as thoughts swirled into one furious tornado of sensation in my head was curl my hands into his silky cotton shirt and hang on for dear life. The kiss tasted like the smoke, but not because of my anger. It tasted like the ashes of my once solid self-control. Because I knew this would...

At that moment, every single atom in my body was owned by him. One kiss. For one kiss, I risked it all. My career, my family, my freedom. And my life. But, Dio mio, I’d do it again and again if it meant feeling like this. So alive I burned.

“This is on pause,” he growled, his thumb stroking possessively over my thudding pulse point as if each beat spoke his name. “Now that I’ve had that red mouth, I’ll need it again.”

“What is this?” “Any Italian girl worth her salt knows what that is.” “Yes,” I agreed. “But why did you just give me the key to your Ferrari?”

“Addie told me you’ve been eyeing her. Why don’t you take her for that drive to Staten Island?”

“Thank you,” I muttered, my focus on putting my coat on so I wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of his megawatt grin. “That sounds almost as good as please,” he told me in that smoky voice that made me high. “Not quite as good as your laughter, though.”

I hadn’t lied. I was done with men. Unfortunately, Dante Salvatore was so much more than a man. He was a beast and, the truth was, he was the only one to ever make me feel like a beauty.

“Ciao lottatrice mia,” Dante’s deep rumble, so similar to the smooth purr of the car around me, settled some of the panic lingering like lactic acid in my tissues. Somewhere along the line, I’d stopped being annoyed when he spoke to me in my mother tongue. “How are you enjoying my beauty?” I rubbed my hands over the buttery leather steering wheel with glee. “She’s exquisite.” “Say it in Italian for me,” he coaxed. Humor and giddiness bubbled up my throat at his flirtation. It had been so long since I enjoyed such simple banter with anyone. “Lei è squisita.” “Molto bene, Elena,” he praised darkly. “Next time I kiss that gorgeous red mouth, I’m going to make you so crazy that all you know is Italian.”

“Elena,” he murmured in that way he had of making my name an Italian song. “If I didn’t trust you, would I let you inside my home? Would I tell my men to buy every season of that god-awful vampire show and send Bambi to get that expensive French chocolate you like? Would I train you with my inner circle every morning and laugh with you over good Italian wine?” He paused, letting that sink in, knowing better than most that it could take a while for things to seep under my thick skin. “Come home, Elena,” he ordered gently. “We will talk when you return.”