Three little words.
Almost eighteen fucking months.
I would have sworn it impossible that the most beautiful woman in the world could disappear so completely. A woman with fire in her eyes, venom on her tongue, and a presence that bent rooms around her.
And yet Lucia Dragoni vanished like smoke.
Over and over, my men brought me nothing but dead ends. Sightings that dissolved. Names that led nowhere. Places she should have gone and never did.
Until yesterday morning.
My head of security stood in front of my desk in New York, shoulders squared, jaw tight like a man afraid to breathe too loudly. “We’ve found her.”
I leaned back in my chair so slowly he mistook it for indifference.
It was not.
Relief cut through me like a blade to the ribs, sharp, breath-stealing, violent in its intensity. I fixed my eyes on him, unblinking.
“Tell me everything.”
And what he told me brought me here.
To this absurdly languid corner of the Caribbean. To sun-bleached wood and salt air and a beach shack where my wife poured drinks and pretended she was free.
The last place I would have expected my fierce, espresso-fuelled, no-nonsense Lucia to hide.
Which, of course, made it perfect.
At first, no one dared question where my new wife had gone.
The Dragoni Don does not misplace his bride. Not publicly or even privately.
I was forced into dexterity instead, vanishing under the polite fiction of an “extended honeymoon,” while in reality I tore continents apart looking for her.
She would pay for that enforced retreat, severely punished. Because she had taken something from me I had waited months for.
My wedding night.
The anticipation had nearly driven me insane. Not because of a hard-fought-for conquest, because Lucia was not that woman, but because restraint with her had been agony from the start.
I had touched her sparingly before the ring; kissed her like a promise rather than a demand. I’d taken my time because I discovered, with a shock that still made me smile, that my bold, mouthy, fearless Lucia was untouched.
A virgin.
At twenty-three.
The absurdity of the odds almost made me laugh aloud when I learned it.
And yes, perhaps that was why I put a ring on her finger eight weeks after meeting her. That and the way she tasted. The way she learned me. The way she tested my restraint like a devil with silk gloves.
She had done everything but give herself to me.
And then she ran.
Left me with eighteen months of anticipation, the severest case of blue balls known to mankind, and unanswered hunger, not just for her body, but for the bond she shattered when she fled without a word.
All because she finally chose to see what had always been in front of her. That I was more than a businessman.
