She slapped my head playfully, making my hair stand up, and I smiled at her. She blinked at me, then sat up in bed, giving me a glorious view of her sculpted back. She reached for a glass of chianti on her bedside table and drank it down, its contents shimmering like dark blood in the crystal.
“As hardhead as his Papà,” she murmured into the glass. She set it down and turned to me some. “You are right, Rocco Fausti. You should not regret a breath. She should be regretting every one of hers that was not taken falling in love with you.”
“You say this because we are friends.”
She laughed. “You are digging for compliments, Rocco Fausti!” She laughed even harder. “Every eye that turns to you in a room—which isall of them—should be compliment enough. And to think! Most of them will never get the pleasure of speaking to you or feeling your touch—as long as it is a woman. I would prefer not to be a man and feel your touch. I know this only means one thing.” She made a slicing motion across her throat.
Monica was right. I had always been searching for something—the stranger, love. And I had thought perhaps Rosaria and Icould find it together. She left me alone and lonelier than I had ever been before.
Even though I felt Monica’s feline eyes on me, I did not meet her stare for a long moment. She saw too much. Knew too much. She was the kind of woman who could reduce a man down to his lies. She would never find one in me, but she found my truth, which could be just as disturbing for a man such as myself.
She took my chin and lifted it. “I know you, Rocco Fausti. You have the same blood in your veins as your father. He is a romantic. I had never met a man so…passionate in my life, and I have mostly been with Italians, so I should know. Your passion runs as deep as his, but where he has found a home to place it—that wretched woman in America, whoever she is—you do not have one.”
“I am homeless,” I said.
“Do not say that to me.” She turned away from me, and she sniffed before she took another long drink of her wine. “Or else time in this bed with you will not be good enough for me. You will have to marry me.”
I grinned and traced the lines of her back with my fingertip. She shivered.
“We both know a union between us would be a lie, and I am not a man who tells those, not even when I do not have to say a word.”
She laughed, but it was mirthless. “Your damn father! He…ruined me, and then left me.” She sighed, and it held weight. “I suppose there are women out there right now saying the same about you!”
I could not claim she was wrong. More women wanted to kill me than men.
“You need to be ruined, Rocco Fausti. You need a woman who runs hotter than the sun, with eyes different from mine, to ruin the heart in your chest. Ruin it for all others. Reduce it to her size—the size that fits her perfectly. And when youthink of me, and think of the times we shared, you will go—who was that woman again?Then you will remember, because I am nother, and you will go…I know the difference.I know now!
“A body is a body but the heart ofyourlover…it will beat only for her. You deserve a woman who would cut your balls off for even thinking about my bed again. You deserve a woman who would tear another woman’s hair out if she dared to touch you. And you? You would kill in her honor. Live in her honor. Never touch another in her honor. You deserve that, Rocco Fausti. You are too good of a man to waste your breath onPuttana. What was your father thinking even suggesting her?”
“Rosaria,” I corrected.
She waved a hand, like she could not care less. “Where is the piranha?”
“Perhaps getting her bed warmed,” I said. “But location wise, she is in Paris.”
“Cha!She should move there—permanently. Perhaps the Seine will rise and drown her with the rats.”
“She is my wife,” I whispered.
Even though our arrangement was nothing more than an arrangement, something happening to my wife did not sit right in my soul. Perhaps because I had sworn to protect her, if nothing else. And the only reason I allowed Monica to speak of her in such a way…Monica was a trusted friend. I would never allow a woman I bedded to even speak my wife’s name. In that aspect of my life, my wife did not exist.
“And my name is well known in homes all over Italy, so what?”
She drained the last sip of her wine, and after she put the crystal down, I brought her back to bed and made love to her until morning.
She watched me dress as new light filtered through her oversized windows, and after breakfast, she walked me to the door.
“Here,” she said, slipping a piece of paper in my hand. “It isyours to do what you like with it. If it is too much for you…burn it.” And standing on her toes, she kissed my cheek and shut the door as I walked away.
Chapter 8
Shh...A Secret Between Us...How Delicious
My husband was probably getting his bed warmed by that bitch, Monica Attigliano. I knew he was fond of her and whatever magic she seemed to be peddling between her legs. She was astrega, a witch, who probably put droplets of her menstrual blood in her tomato sauce. Rocco had many women, but not many whose beds he would return to.
She was one of them.
One of his “beds.”
