Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 83814 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83814 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Not the night before I’m supposed to marry someone else…
I was playing piano completely naked when my brother’s best friend Alexander walked in on me.
But instead of turning away—he told me to keep going.
Which is how one song turned into an extremely stupid night of passion.
I’ve known Alex most of my life, and I’ve hated him forever.
He’s a vicious killer, a gorgeous beast, and an arrogant monster.
And now I’m pregnant with his baby.
But my father wants me to marry someone else, and the head of our Bratva crime family personally picked out my arranged husband.
There’s no way I can get out of this—so why am I standing on Alexander’s doorstep with a positive pregnancy test in my hands?I thought I could keep my secrets buried.
Then he walked back into my life.
Benny Falconari.
Dangerous, untouchable, and sinfully irresistible.
The ruthless head of the Falconari crime family.
He’s everything I ran from—and everything I can’t resist.
I promised myself I’d never fall for him again.
But one night changes everything, and now I’m carrying another of his secrets.
When my son is kidnapped, Benny is the only one who can save him.
Even if it means facing the truth that could tear us apart forever.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter 1
Natalya
Playing piano naked is weirdly liberating.
I didn’t start the day thinking I’d strip and start hammering at the keys. No, I woke up, desperate for a little optimism. It’s been a really hard, isolating year, and I told myself I was going to finally get my shit together instead of moping around inside. This morning, I stared at the ceiling of my tiny Paris apartment and thought: now’s the time to get out into the world and to stop being so depressed.
Then I made breakfast on my tiny single burner and fell into my old routines instead.
Running away to Paris sounds glamorous. At least, it did when I bought the plane ticket, desperate to escape from the man I was supposed to marry.
Valentin Zeitsev, the pakhan of the Zeisev Bratva, isn’t such a bad guy if you can get past the whole vicious mobster and emotionally stunted psychopath thing.
However, I couldn’t, and so I made a very stupid choice.
I disappeared to Europe. I rented out a little flat from an old Parisian man that rolls his eyes whenever I speak English, which is all the time since I don’t know much French, and begged him to leave the ancient upright piano in the living room. I spent a week wandering the city feeling lonelier than I’ve ever felt before in my life, on my own for the first time ever, disconnected from family, friends, any semblance of normalcy, adrift and terrified that I’d be discovered at any second.
Then a week turned into a month, which turned into six months, and now I’ve been here for over a year with nothing to show for it except a slightly better grasp on the local language and a serious addiction to espresso.
I have no friends. I talk with Jacque, my landlord, maybe twice a week at most. Sometimes the old woman that lives below me bangs on the ceiling and shouts at me in French to stop playing the piano so loudly and so poorly.
Otherwise, my days are the same. I wake up, tell myself I’m going to get out and do something with my life, only to fall deep into the same gray-and-numb depression I’ve been trapped in for a while now.
Which is how I find myself here, naked, unless the panties make me somehow dressed which I think is debatable, playing a song I’ve been working on for the last week.
It’s a slow, pretty melody, the sounds that come into my head whenever I force myself to walk down the street to get some coffee.
The music of deep isolation, even surrounded by people.
Sweat rolls down my back. It’s summer in Paris and my apartment is on the third floor, which means it’s brutally hot in here during the day. I spent all my extra money on a window AC unit, but that broke down last week, and until I work up the nerve and the energy to earn some money to replace it, I’ve just been spending the sunlight hours without any clothes.
I’m so intent on my playing, and so deeply wrapped up in my own misery and my crippling loneliness, that I don’t even notice when a man enters my apartment.
Playing piano is the only pleasure I have these days, and the funny thing is, this piano sounds like crap. I don’t think it has ever been tuned, not like the gorgeous little baby grand in my father’s house, the one my mother bought for my older brothers. But they never played much, too busy with their boy things, and so the piano was passed to me.