Hating the pang that shot through his heart just to look at her, he sent the staff home and fixed two strong coffees. Back in the living room, he shook her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and lifted her head, blinking away her tiredness as she covered a wide yawn. “What time is it?”
“Talking time.”
Gabriella took a mental deep breath and sat up. It didn’t escape her attention that Tommaso had seated himself on the armchair he’d taken that first night when he’d made her strip for him. His back was straight, his huge feet planted on the floor.
Was that really only three nights ago? It felt like that many months had passed.
Shivering at the coldness still emanating from him, she rubbed her arms before reaching for the cup he’d placed on the glass coffee table next to her with a couple more painkillers. She hugged it in her hands and took a sip. The coffee was strong, sweet and creamy, exactly as she liked it.
“Did you check my story out?” she asked quietly. Gabriella had watched Tommaso screech out of the electric gates in his Ferrari with a weight in her chest she’d struggled to breathe through.
His black gaze was obsidian, his handsome features immovable. “I didn’t need to.”
“You don’t want to believe it?”
His eyes narrowed. “My father had no need to lie. Not to me or my brothers.”
“He did if he wanted to keep his own legend alive in your eyes.” That was the conclusion Gabriella had come to beforeshe’d drifted off to sleep, after she’d spent an age turning it over and over in her mind.
“He had no need to lie,” Tommaso repeated, leaning forward. “Your mother was in the grip of a delusion, but I am curious – you promised her that you would destroy all of us, yes?”
Taking another sip of her coffee, she nodded.
“Why did you go along with it?” Animation flickered through the obsidian. “I can understand why you made the promise to her – she was dying – but why try and fulfil it?” The animation gave way to anger. “Even if you believed my father killed your father, why go after the rest of us? What the fuck did we ever do to you? We were children. Siena is a month younger than you and was still in the womb just like you were. She was your sister in all but name, but you were conspiring to have her spend the rest of her life rotting in a prison.”
“A sister who wants me dead, the same as the rest of you!” she retaliated. Unbearably close to tears, she put the cup on the table before her shaking hands spilt the coffee everywhere. “My mother told me to take you all down because you’re all the same as him, and she was right. I watched you all embrace the shadowy world without a moment’s hesitation – Siena demanded she be allowed in.” Shaking her head, Gabriella threw her arms in the air. “Look at you all, putting on the act of rich philanthropists when you’re nothing but jacked up thugs running an empire built on the blood shed by people like my father and the Ranieris. You want to know why your father lied about killing mine? It was to justify his war to take down his biggest rivals. They had control of the biggest district; control he took by killing them all.That’swhat he built his empire on, and whether you believe he killed my father to start the war or believe Marco Ranieri put the bullet in his head, the result was the same, and you all know it. Not one of you hasn’t got blood on your hands.”
“The only blood that’s been shed is from those who chose to be a part of this world. Not one person enters without knowing the consequences of living in it.”
“Bullshit!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “I was born into this world without any say in it, and what’s Niccolo’s lover if she’s not innocent? You set your men scouring England and the rest of Europe to find her! What were you going to do when you found her? Make her a cup of English tea? The only reason she’s still breathing is because Niccolo traded my name for her life, and the only reason I’m still breathing is because you chose to play a warped game with my life instead of killing me. If Mattia or Siena had been tasked with the job, I wouldn’t be standing here now.”
“If you hadn’t been plotting to have us all imprisoned, you wouldn’t be standing here at all!” he roared before moving with such fluidity that she barely noticed the transition from him being seated to him being right before her with his hand holding her chin. His gorgeous face contorted, and suddenly he was cupping her cheeks, his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his breath on her mouth. “This is the life we were all born into, Gabba, and we all made our choices. You chose to punish me and my siblings for the sins you believe were committed by our father. That wasyourchoice, and for as long as I breathe, I will never understand why I let you live.”
“You let me live as punishment for me refusing to sleep with you,” she spat, making a fist of his shirt. “You were so intent on punishing me that you didn’t stop to ask why I’d been working to destroy you. I thought you knew, but you didn’t, and until I told you why, you didn’t care.”
The tip of his nose brushed against hers, his fingers sliding round her head and threading through her hair. “I cared, Gabba. More than I ever should have.” With a muttered curse,Tommaso turned his face away from hers and roughly dragged his lips down her neck.
Chapter Ten
Gabriella carefully appliedfoundation over the vivid red mark in the arch of her neck. It could easily be mistaken for a bruise. The long-sleeved emerald-green jersey dress she’d put on only half-covered it. She had nothing in her wardrobe that covered the whole of it, not unless she chose to really piss Tommaso off and put a hoodie on.
It wasn’t the only bruise-like mark on her skin. There was another, even bigger one, on her left breast, and when Tommaso joined her in the dressing room with only a towel slung around his waist, she glimpsed the identical mark that she’d left on his neck.
Their eyes met in the mirror’s reflection. He made no comment about what she was doing.
Gabriella had never received or given a love bite before, and it made her heart ache to know these first ones should be rechristened as hate bites.
Since she’d told Tommaso the truth he didn’t want to hear about her father’s murder, the lovemaking she couldn’t even call lovemaking had become increasingly angry and intense between them. She took no comfort that he loathed the sick desire thatkept drawing them together as much as she did. No comfort in knowing his punishment of her had become his punishment too.
Satisfied she’d covered the mark as best she could, Gabriella concentrated on putting her makeup on…tried to concentrate. She didn’t think she would ever get used to sharing her life with Tommaso, but for all the constant sex, it was the intimacy of sharing a dressing room she found the hardest to cope with.
This would be her fifth day in a row spent accompanying him to work. The fifth morning they’d dressed together for the working day. The fifth morning she’d had to physically stop herself from staring at him while he dressed. There was something in the way his huge hands and fingers deftly did up the tiny buttons of his shirts that she found fascinating, and she’d not yet been able to watch him knot his tie without imagining herself yanking it off him.
She would never give him the satisfaction of being the one to instigate their lovemaking that wasn’t lovemaking. Since that evening in Gino’s, an evening that still made her burn with shame to remember how she’d draped herself over Tommaso in the back of the car, she’d not touched a drop of alcohol. It helped that the last four days had been entirely taken up with work. What didn’t help was that she’d had no respite from him. Since he’d stormed off in his Ferrari, they’d not been apart.
Now that the official period of mourning was over, the Esposito siblings were working flat-out to shore up both aspects of the empire. Tommaso kept Gabriella glued to his side while he got on with his part of it. He never let her out of his sight, taking her with him as he flew back and forth to Milan, the media hub of the Esposito empire, with his entourage. As Gabriella had never been involved in the media side, her previous trips to Milan had been sporadic and always in her role as Lorenzo’s executive assistant.
