Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83776 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83776 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
“Next time, communicate.” She comes closer and puts a hand on my chest. My heart’s beating hard, but steady. “If someone you care about got hurt, tell me about it. I’ll understand.”
I put my hand over hers and pull her forward until she’s pressed against me. Her mouth opens and she licks her lips, and I can’t take my eyes off her little pink tongue. I’ve been so fucking hungry for her ever since she refused to come back to my bed last night, and that’s a problem right there, but it’s a problem I can’t solve with guns and knives and blood. It’s a problem I’m not equipped to handle.
“I thought if I brought you here and showed you the mess, you’d understand better. This thing with Uncle Luciano, it’s real, and it’s getting worse. That’s why I don’t want you outside of the oasis’s protection right now. Our block is the only safe place in this whole damn city, and if you’re at home, I don’t have to worry about you. But if you’re in some office—” I leave that unspoken. I don’t want to imagine her getting killed on her fucking commute.
“I understand.” She lets out a long breath. “I hate it, but I understand. I remember what things were like when my family was at war.”
I almost forgot that her brothers spent the last few years battling for control of Philadelphia. That’d been one of the most brutal and violent mafia conflicts in the entire country in the last decade, and that’s why my father wanted to create this alliance. We’re about to enter into our own street fight, and it’s smart to have competent and experienced men in our corner.
“What can I do to make this up to you?” I ask very softly, and I find that I mean it. I don’t want her to sit around the house feeling miserable, but I also know I can’t let her out of my family’s protections for hours every day.
“You can kill your Uncle Luciano or whoever he is and let me get a job.” She smiles sweetly and I like her vicious little mouth. She’s a violent kitten with razor-sharp claws. “Short of that, I don’t know.”
“I can pay you more attention, dolcezza.” I touch her chin, finger brushing toward her mouth. “Have you been feeling neglected?”
“No, not really,” she says, cheeks turning pink. I’m willing to bet she’s thinking about all the time we’ve been spending together. Very vigorous, very intimate time. “I just want to feel useful. Back home, I was always—” She stops herself and looks away.
But I pull her face back toward mine. We’re entwined now and my body’s pulsing to grab her and bury her mouth with my lips, but there’s something she wants to say, only she hasn’t been able to find the words. I want to help.
“Tell me. You were always, what?”
“I was the baby.” She laughs lightly, but there’s a bitterness in her expression that tells me exactly how unfunny it feels to her. “My parents barely wanted me when I was born and by the time I was growing up, they were all but checked out. Renzo raised me, and my brothers helped out, but they weren’t equipped to be anything more than really bad stand-ins for actual authority figures. I was mostly forgotten and left on my own, and I always felt like I was the cast-off, the least important member of my family, and practically forgotten about half the time. I think they let me go to college mostly to keep me out from under foot.”
I try to picture how that must feel. In my family, everyone is equally important, though we’ve always been in a quiet competition for my father’s attention. But my mother’s the kind of woman who can spread herself thin and still seems so vibrant and alive. None of my siblings are forgotten, although I’d bet Laura wishes she could be, but it must’ve been agony for Stefania to go through life feeling like she wasn’t wanted by her own family.
The thought breaks my heart. Poor little Stefania, my dolcezza, trying to find her way in life, only to be stolen away by a creature like me. Nothing is fair.
“I can’t speak to how things were in your family,” I tell her as my hand moves back into her luscious hair. “But with me, you are a priority.”
“Priority enough to let me work?”
I grunt and lean down to kiss the shell of her ear. “Find a job you can do from our house and I’ll consider it.”
She stiffens in my arms and I realize she’s perking up. “Really? You’d let me work from home?”
I press my lips together. I hadn’t actually meant it—but if that’s an option, why not? “There’d be layers of security. But—” I kiss toward her jawline. “We could make that happen.”