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To fighting for who you love—including yourself
One, Dante was going to be my fiancé. Two, we might kill each other before we ever made it to the altar.
“No one will believe I’m marrying someone with such short notice unless something was wrong.” For example, your daughter is pregnant, and this is a shotgun wedding. The insinuation had everyone shifting in their seats while I kept my face blank and my voice bored. Restraint didn’t come naturally to me. If I didn’t like someone, I made damn sure they knew it, but extraordinary circumstances called for extraordinary measures.
She was beautiful and surprisingly witty, with intelligent brown eyes and the type of naturally refined bone structure no amount of money could buy. But with her pearls and Chanel tweed, she looked like a carbon copy of her mother and every other uptight heiress who only cared about their social status. Plus, she was Francis’s daughter. It wasn’t her fault she was born to the bastard, but I didn’t give a damn. No degree of beauty could erase that stain on her record.
Vivian’s eyes glowed with anger. “You’re an asshole.” “Yes, I am. Better get used to it, mia cara, because I’m also your future husband. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
The last guy who’d touched a woman in Romano’s family without his permission ended up with his dick cut off and his brains blown out in his bedroom.
“And Luca?” I stopped him before he opened the door. “If I find out you’ve violated my rules and contacted Maria again, I’ll kill you myself.”
A week later, the image of that black dress clinging to her curves was still ingrained in my mind, as was the fire in her eyes when she’d laid into me.
“Separate rooms until marriage. I didn’t realize you were such a traditionalist.” “I didn’t realize you were so eager to share a bed with me.”
you’ll find her number, a black Amex, and your engagement ring. Wear it.”
“A ring on my bedside table. How romantic.” Vivian touched the sapphire bracelet on her wrist. “You truly know how to make a woman feel special.”
“Don’t expect dinner dates or sweet nothings at home, mia cara,” I said, my words as soft and lazy as my touch. “You won’t get either.”
“Non osare farmi una ramanzina quando sono stata io ha pulirti il culo da piccolo.” Don’t lecture someone who changed your diapers.
I was a law-abiding citizen, but if anyone could drive me to mariticide, it was my future husband. I hated his arrogance, his rudeness, and the mocking way he called me mia cara.
It was clear, all right. It was clear Dante Russo was Satan in a nice suit.
“An arranged marriage is the only way you could get someone to marry you. You are so…so…” I struggled to find the right word. “Horrible.”
My father’s anger. My mother’s criticism. The failure if I didn’t go through with the wedding… I couldn’t do it.
Translation: You were an asshole before you left, and I took it out on your bank account.
In the fourteen years I’d known Christian Harper, not a single one had passed without him inciting me to near murder. It was almost impressive on his part.
“Missed me?” Amusement lengthened his drawl. “As much as a sailor misses scurvy.”
“Next time you want to mark your ‘territory,’ you might as well urinate in a circle around me,” Vivian said after Kai left. “It’ll be more subtle.” “I was not ‘marking my territory.’” The idea was absurd. I wasn’t a fucking dog. “I was saving you from Kai. Be careful around him. He’s not as gentlemanly as he appears.” “Compared to you, who bulldozed into the middle of our conversation like a bull in a china shop?”
“You’re my fiancée. Not Kai’s. Not anyone else’s. I don’t give a fuck how handsome they are or what type of accent they have. You’re mine, and no one…” I dipped my head, my lips brushing hers with each word. “Touches what’s mine.”
“I’m not yours. Our engagement is, as you’ve told me many times, just business. Or are you the one who’s forgotten?”
“I’m an asshole, yet you’re dripping all over my hand.” I kept my thumb on her clit while I slipped a finger inside her. “What does that say about you?”
“If you won’t say it, I will.” I slowly withdrew both fingers, then thrust them inside her again. “It says you’re mine. Puoi negarlo quanto vuoi, ma è la verità.”
“That’s it.” My velvety murmur glided between us. “Give into it, sweetheart. Let me feel you come all over my hand.” “Fuck you.” I let out a soft laugh. “That’s the idea.”
“Make no mistake, mia cara.” I grasped her chin and tilted it up. I pulled her bottom lip down with my thumb, letting her taste her own arousal. “This is business. And if there’s one thing I take seriously, it’s my investments.”
I dreamt of Dante three nights in a row. I couldn’t recall what happened in the dreams, but I woke up each morning with the phantom touch of his hands between my thighs and a tight ball of need in my stomach.
“Did you not hear me the first time?” The man’s hot, wet breath fanned across my face. My stomach turned. “I said get on the fucking floor, bitch.”
I pressed my face against his chest, my shoulders heaving while he rubbed a hand over my back. He murmured something in Italian, but I couldn’t decipher what he said. All I knew was, in the icy aftermath of the robbery, his voice and embrace were the only things keeping me warm.
She wasn’t my wife yet, but she was mine. No one threatened what was mine.
“My parents took off around the world soon after Luca was born. They couldn’t bring two children on their travels, given how much they moved around, so they left us in our grandfather’s care. They said it was for the best.”
“Did they visit often?” “Once a year at most. They sent postcards on Christmas and our birthdays.” He spoke in a dry, detached tone. “Luca kept his in a special box. I threw mine out.” “I’m sorry,” I said, my throat tight. “You must’ve missed them very much.”
Dante was one of the most successful CEOs in the Fortune 500. He’d tripled the company’s profits since taking over, but at what cost?
I’d teased him about loving Kai’s British accent at Valhalla, but it was his I couldn’t get enough of. Not just the voice, but the intelligence, loyalty, vulnerability and humor that lurked deep, deep beneath his grumpy surface.
Somewhere along the way, Dante Russo had morphed from a caricature of a rich, arrogant CEO into an actual human. One I liked, for the most part. It was awful.
This is just business, I reminded myself. If I said it enough times, maybe I’d believe it.
Dante was thirty-six, working a high-stress job with a high-stress family. He had little to no downtime. If he kept this up… My stomach tightened. The thought of anything happening to him bothered me more than it should’ve, and not just because he was my fiancé.
“How does he look at me?” Janis smiled. “Like he never wants to look away.”
My teeth clenched. Why was everyone so obsessed with my feelings toward her? “What we do in our private time is none of your business.”
“Be careful, Dante. You can either have Vivian or you can have her father’s head on a platter—figuratively speaking, of course. You can’t have both.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. You should start a Dear Dante column in the local newspaper.” “Were you born with a smart mouth, or did your parents buy it for you after their first million?”
“The older I got, the more I realized how much money changed us. Not just materially, but spiritually, for lack of a better word. We were new money, but my parents were desperate to prove we were just as good as Boston’s old-money elite. There’s a difference, you know.”
“The desire for validation consumed them, especially my father,”
“Dante.” Her soft cry when I cupped her breast almost undid me. “Keep screaming my name, sweetheart.”
I smelled Vivian’s arousal before I tugged her shorts and underwear down, but the sight of her pussy, so wet and ready and fucking perfect, hit me like a shot of pure heroin.
“Please eat out this pretty little cunt of yours?” I taunted, my voice soft but the words rough. “Tongue fuck you until you beg me to let you come? You have such a smart mouth, mia cara. Use it.”
“I need your mouth on me. Dante, please.”
She was dripping all over my face, and I couldn’t get enough. I was addicted to the taste of her, to the way she sounded when I buried my tongue inside her and the way her back arched off the bed when she finally came with a full-body shudder.
Of all the people in my life, she was the only one who could make me lose control.
