More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Stay.” It’s not a suggestion. Despite turning his back on the Cosa Nostra, Angelo Visconti doesn’t strike me as the type of man that merely suggests.
“I don’t know. You’re almost as old as him anyway.” Annoyance coasts across the planes of his face, but he rearranges his features immediately. “I’m thirty-six.” “Almost twice my age.”
“only silly little girls would think grown men would want to kiss them.” “And only dirty old men would ask their uncle’s fiancee about her kissing preferences.”
“You can’t respect him that much. I saw you key his car.” “When?” he asks, without missing a beat. “On Wednesday, when you dropped me off.” “Wednesday…” he murmurs, scratching his jaw as he pretends to think. “You mean the day you kissed him in front of me? ”
He keyed his uncle’s car because of that kiss.
He looms over me like an incoming storm, placing one hand next to my shoulder, using the other to grind the butt into the wall, just inches from my ear.
“Is this what it’s going to be like now?” I rasp. “Me drip-feeding you sins so you don’t listen to the ones I dialed in?” He licks his teeth. Slowly nods.
“Every time he makes me kiss him like that, I spit in his whiskey.”
I’m utterly, madly, unacceptably obsessed with Angelo Visconti.
Jesus Christ, she’s everywhere. I crossed the line earlier, and now I’m forcing myself to keep my distance. Which is near-impossible, because tonight she’s a walking, dancing, disco ball with legs. It’s like she put on that damn dress to irritate me. The sequins shimmer and flash every time she moves, commanding my gaze like a magnet. And then I find myself watching her. Watching her sway her hips and flip her hair to cheesy ballads. Watching the hem of her dress ride up her ass as she leans over the bar to talk to the server. Even when she sits in the shadows, twirling the straw in her gin
...more
Yet, I’m so pathetic, I can’t help but hope she’ll follow me out.
“I haven’t seen you smoke this much since the funeral.”
“An intern put sugar in my Americano and my first thought was to dislocate his jaw.”
“Like the time Dante told dad you missed a drop-off, so you fucked Dante’s prom date. You’re vicious.” I bite back a smirk. “So that’s why. I couldn’t remember.”
“The kids at the poker game. What were you playing at, man?” I steel my jaw and slide my hands into my pocket. “They were shit-talking family.” “They were shit-talking Uncle Alberto’s plaything.” “She’ll be family soon enough.”
“Yeah. That’s why you’ve been staring at her all night? You’re just checking out the latest addition to the Cove clan?”
You want to burn this fucking coast down, I’ll lend you my lighter. But please, for the love of God, don’t make me go to war with our cousins over a piece of pussy.”
My orgasm is so close, and I look up at Angelo through blurry, half-lidded eyes, rubbing harder, faster. I’m frantic. God, I want him. I want him on me. I want to know what he feels like.
One more stolen glance at Angelo’s indifferent expression and I come, hard, the lust washing over me like a wave. I ride it in delirium, throwing my head back and crying out in the wind. The adrenaline zaps through my spine like a lightning bolt, and I realize—this is what I live for. I chase this high. It’s why I continue to do bad things; why I want to fly planes thousands of feet in the air. Why I find myself balancing on the edge of a cliff, one sneaker hovering over nothingness.
Why I’m fingering myself at the thought of Alberto’s nephew, while he’s a mere few feet away, oblivious. I live for living dangerously in a place that barely lets me live at all.
But then I feel a strong tug on the side tie of my bikini bottoms and come to an abrupt stop next to him. What the hell? Confused, I look down to see his forefinger is hooked under the thin bow tying my bikini bottoms together.
“If you belonged to me and dressed like that around other men, I’d pull down those skimpy bottoms and spank your ass until it was raw.”
“This is the third car I’ve seen you in. Why do you have so many cars?” “Same reason you can’t keep your sticky fingers off the family jewels, Magpie.”
“I like the thrill.” “I don’t steal for the thrill,” I snap.
“Is it ‘cause you like getting your pussy pounded by dirty old men?” What the hell is his problem? I’m about to ask him, but something else slips through my lips instead. “Is that wishful thinking? Do you think you'd have a chance if I did?”
I’m an idiot if I thought he was jealous. If I thought he actually wanted to kiss me. There’s a sudden itch under my skin: a familiar one. It makes me want to do something spiteful and revengeful to him, like scrape the alloys of his fancy car, or, you know, lace his stupid cigarettes with cyanide. Okay, maybe not that, but the urge to be bad tingles inside me, and I feel the same frustration I woke up with. I can’t do anything awful, because now I have no way to confess anymore.
One minute he’s teaching me to smoke in a dark walkway, the next he’s back to calling me a gold-digger and a thief.
Cute.” Cute. For some reason, that word stings. I’d rather be annoying than be cute. Being cute puts me in a different box altogether, one a man like Angelo Visconti wouldn’t bother to open.
I bet the women he dates back in England look like supermodels. I bet they are super successful—lawyers, doctors, accountants—and they wear heels all the time and not just because they’re forced to. I bet they never wear fluffy stocks. Only garters and sexy stockings.
“What the hell did you do when you were a kid?” His expression sours, a sneer forming on his cupid’s bow. “Counted the days until I could get the fuck out.”
He’s holding me like I weigh less than a feather, and when he drops me into the passenger seat all too soon, he does so surprisingly gently.
“How old are you, Aurora?” I swallow. “Twenty-one.” His jaw locks. “Twenty-one. Christ.”
And then when I realize what he’s doing, my blood runs cold. “Angelo—” “Stay in the car.”
As he unclicks his seat belt and lunges for the door, my hand shoots out and grabs a fistful of his suit jacket. He stops in his tracks. His eyes skid down to my fist and then they harden, like he can’t believe I have the nerve to touch him. But he doesn’t bark, nor does he bite.
He puts his hand over mine and lifts it to his face. Grazes his lips over it. “Stay in the car, Aurora,” he murmurs into my knuckles, making every nerve ending in my body buzz.
I’ve never craved Angelo Visconti more than I do right now.
It’s a personality trait. It’s how he can flick it on and off like a light switch.
He’s a cold-blooded killer.
“I’d say thank you for the ride home but—” His hand clamping my thigh ends my sentence like a full stop.
“You know the drill.” “I—” “A sin,” he rasps. “Tell me a sin.”
He remains still. “Tell me a real one.” I blink. “That was a real one.” A gasp escapes me as he squeezes my thigh, hard. Holy crow. I hate how my mind is so far in the gutter that I wonder what it’d feel like if he squeezed even higher up. I curl my fingers over the curve of the seat to stop myself from pushing against him, and concentrate on the house ahead.
Another squeeze. It sparks up to my pussy, making it pulsate. This time, the anticipation is too much, and I can’t help but throw my head back onto the seat and moan. “Stop, please.” “Not until you give me a real sin.”
“This morning, in the sea. I was fingering myself thinking about you.” It tumbles from my lips thick and fast, sucking out all the oxygen in the tiny space between us. Angelo turns his head and stares at me. The tiniest flicker of something passes through his gaze. Shock, maybe. Anger? I don’t know and I don’t have time to decipher it, because Alberto’s stooping to peer through the window.
“Aurora.” I come to a reluctant stop and tilt my head to the sky. “I don’t care what Alberto says. Wear your hair curly.”
My uncle’s twenty-one-year-old fiancee emerging from the sea in a tiny black bikini is temptation personified. But her telling me she fingered herself while watching me on the shore? A death sentence.
I’m glad I hadn’t found it out then and there, because the sight of her alone had wound me up tighter than a drum. If she’d told me her pussy was still fresh from an orgasm, there’s not a chance I would have been able to resist picking her up and dragging her back into the fucking sea and giving her the real deal. Family etiquette be damned.
Gabe’s different. He’s sadistic. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t kill the sinner, he’d find new and exciting ways to torture them for as long as possible. He’d use them like a guinea pig, testing out new additions to his toolbox on them, and wouldn’t put them out of their misery until they’d literally gone insane from his psychotic wrath.
Gabe’s our brother, after all. One of us. Our own flesh and blood. And yet, we don’t even know where he lives, or what he does on the three Sundays a month he’s not with us. He never answers his cell. We just text him and he turns up.
I bet Aurora would know exactly what fucking bird it was. She probably uses its name as a curse word. “What are you smiling about?”
“No. You won’t leave her here, not with him.” I spin on my heel to face him. “What? Who?” He doesn’t move a muscle. “Uncle Al’s fiancee. You can’t take your eyes off her. Staring at her like a lion spotting his prey in the bush. I know you better than you know yourself.
