Her hair falling over her shoulders, clinging to her naked body as she stood in knee-high water, then started walking toward me.
A low growl vibrated in my throat.
She was going to be the test of my existence. And for the first time, I had a taste of what my father had felt for my mother.
Not in the beginning.
Not in the middle.
Not even in the end.
For the entirety of their relationship.
He was a man possessed. Obsessed. He ate, slept, lived and breathed Scarlett Rose Fausti. He lived to love her.
She lived to love him.
The thought stopped me in my tracks, but only for a second. In the next breath, my feet pushed me to the room where Sistine was humming a song while she took inventory of the stock room. It almost felt like I couldn’t breathe suddenly, and she was my oxygen. I needed to be near her for my health.
Fuck me sideways.
The sight of her, though, made me dismiss any disparaging thoughts from my mind. She sang quietly, an old country song, “Your Bartender.”Her voice echoed while she checked the shelves and marked things off on the paper secured on her clipboard. She wore the same kind of dress she’d had on the first time I’d seen her, but in brown this time. A gold belt was fastened around her waist, and it only reinforced how tiny it was. How small she was.
My heart, the smart fucker, reminded me how sneaky her build was. She’d commandeered my heart the moment I’d seen her.
Fucking trickery.
A grin I couldn’t control came to my face when she turned her face some, the set of it a woman who was really into a song, and then she started to move her shoulders a bit. Then she became still, and I noticed how hard her nostrils flared.
She scented me in the room.
She knew me as well as I already knew her.
Her eyes connected with mine, and a second later, she grabbed a small hammer from the shelf and flung it at me. It was a delayed reaction. She had registered me, but it didn’t seem like she expected me.
After the hammer came flying at me, she made a distressed noise and turned in a circle. I would’ve expected a scream or a hand to the chest, or both, but not that. It made me laugh, even though, when I’d dodged the hammer, I felt one of my stitchespop.
“It isyou!” She scrunched up her nose at me.
I took my hat off and held it over my chest. Maybe it would stop my traitorous heart from fucking flying out of my chest and directly to hers. Though I couldn’t even blame my heart for the double cross. She was that fucking sweet.
“You called me,” I said.
Her mouth opened and closed. “It was a mistake.”
“Was it?” I lifted my eyebrow at her.
“Yes! I was working late and realized…I wasn’t sure about the design, so I was just checking to make sure you were okay with the change.”
“You were in control of the design,” I said. “I had no clue what it was going to turn into. So, there was no reason to update me on any change. I wouldn’t have been any wiser if you made it.”
She stared at me and then scrunched up her face again before she sighed. “What do you want, Casanova Prince?”
“You tell me.”
She held the clipboard closer to her chest and lifted her chin. “Your jewelry. It is done. However, you owe me. I want my clip back. My clip for your necklace. Since—” she motioned to me with her hand wildly “—you clearly made it out alive from whatever battle you spoke of.” Her eyes refused to hold my stare, and when they ran down my body, they stilled on my ribs. “You are bleeding.”
I glanced down. A bloom of red had made it to the white fabric. The popped stitch. I shrugged. “One of my sutures popped when you flung the hammer at me.”
