How could he even consider bringing an innocent life into this cesspit of hate?
Tommaso had outmanoeuvred her. Worse. He’d checkmated her.
She would never be able to escape. This really was it. This really was her life for now and forever.
Burrowing deeper into the covers and hugging herself tightly for warmth, she thought of her mother and how brave and beautiful she’d been right to the very end.
“It’s up to you now, Gabba,” she’d whispered days before her death, her eyes suddenly alight with a strength Gabriella had thought gone forever. “One day, when the time is right, you will take vengeance for your father and send them all to hell.”
“Do you always fidget so much?” Tommaso snapped through the darkness. Every time he felt himself drifting off, Gabriella made a movement that pulled him out of sleep.
He had never, in the whole of his adult life, been so attuned to someone. He could hear her every breath. He could still feel himself inside her and the pull in his loins from his climax.
He kept telling himself it was because he’d screwed her bare that it had felt so damned incredible. It was for the same reason his heart was still thumping so hard. There could be no other explanation for it.
“Do you always make your bedroom feel like Siberia?” she retorted bitterly.
He inhaled deeply through his nose. “You’re cold?”
“Yes. Well done. You’ve found another way to punish me.”
Swearing under his breath, he clenched his jaw. Tommaso was naturally hot-blooded, in temperament and temperature. He rarely felt the cold and liked a cool room to sleep in.
He thought back to that morning, when he’d let himself into his mother’s house and found her eating breakfast with Siena and Gabriella. His mother and sister had been wearing silk robes over silk negligee-type nightdresses. Gabriella had worn a thick hoodie over flannelette pyjamas.
He thought, too, of how it had always amused him that Gabriella wore knitwear to the office even in the height of summer…
But thinking that only served to remind him that he’d only been able to observe this quirk because she’d been his father’s right-hand woman. That’s how much his father had trusted her.
They’d all trusted her. Each Esposito offspring ran different divisions of the Esposito Group – Tommaso ran the media side – but they worked closely together. Gabriella attended all the private business meetings father and offspring held. She was privy to all their secrets. If she hadn’t been proven a rat, her voice over who should step into their father’s shoes and take control would have been heard.
Had his fatherfullytrusted her, he suddenly wondered, thinking how it was only the public businesses she was privy to the secrets of. She was rarely brought into the stuff they kept in the shadows. For sure, she knew exactly who they were and what they did in the shadows, but his father had never made her a part of it, and that had nothing to do with her being female – Siena was as involved with everything as the three brothers were. Well, two brothers now that Rico had fallen in love and chosen to withdraw from the business completely. The bastard had given the casinos held in his name to Siena.
The sheets rustled again.
Why hadn’t his father pulled Gabriella into the shadows with the rest of them?
Had it been a lack of trust or only because she wasn’t his blood daughter? Something else?
Whatever his father’s reasons, Gabriella was cold. He didn’t care. Let her shiver the night through. She was lucky she could still shiver.
The sheets rustled again. He swore again, this time audibly. He was never going to get any damned sleep if she didn’t stop fidgeting. He supposed he could hunt a length of rope and bind her in it; that would keep her still, but it required effort when all he wanted was oblivion.
He guessed another five minutes passed before he finally snapped and rolled over.
“Come here,” he said roughly, reaching for her. Locking an arm around her waist, he dragged her to him and spooned himself to her.
Rubbing his hands up and down her chilled arms, he hooked a thigh over hers and settled his cheek on her pillow with his chin resting on the top of her head. “Now go to fucking sleep.”
Gabriella watched dawn slowly filter into the bedroom.
She’d been lying there for hours, hardly able to even blink. She’d probably taken ten full breaths in all that time. Her brain, though, had raced at warp speed, constantly replaying everything that had happened since she’d found Tommaso in her apartment and trying not to dissect just how unsettling it was to be cocooned in his strong, warm body. Unsettling because he’d cocooned himself around her to warm her.
She would have been less shocked if he’d made her sleep in the bath.
The sensation of his heat permeating her was unlike anything she’d felt before. She could feel his breath in her hair. The scratch of his calf hair on her leg. The thud of his heart against the skin of her back. The weight of his limp cock at rest between her buttocks. The urge to wriggle herself against it was almost as strong as the urge to stroke the forearm slung over her breasts.
Strangely, the deep, rhythmic breaths of Tommaso at sleep were soothing. She supposed it was because if he was sleeping, then his hate was sleeping too.
