“Giovanni!” I protest, thumping uselessly against his chest.
“I think we’ll do this somewhere more comfortable,” he states as he carries me out of the kitchen without breaking stride.
“You can’t just manhandle me however you wish, you know?”
“Now there’s a salacious idea,” he mutters. “Because I’d love to manhandle you quite thoroughly on my cock.”
I’m sputtering over that when we reach the living room, and he crosses over to the wide sofa. “Stay,” he orders, setting me gently on the couch.
I open my mouth to argue. He raises one brow.
I close it, knowing this is another useless fight I won’t win. A fight that will dissipate my energy when I can spend it making plans to wrestle back my freedom.
So I say nothing when he kneels again, taking my foot carefully into his hands.
The touch is precise. Controlled. Almost reverent. And warm. God, so warm, so… electrifying, I have to catch and hold my breath, unable to take my eyes off him as he cleans the tiny cuts I didn’t even feel I’d earned running across gravel and sand.
Considering the charged air whipping around us, considering the one heated, measuring look he levels on me before he starts, his fingers are surprisingly steady and gentle.
And that’s somehow worse than if he were rough.
Because this feels intimate.
Sure, possessive and vastly territorial too. But there’s a level of care. Reminiscent of the man I knew, the man who captivated and fascinated and made me fall under his spell before the truth of him was revealed.
I watch him, my heart doing things I don’t want to name, swallowing down the swell of something dangerously close to gratitude.
He finishes quickly, tapes the last small bandage in place, then stands without comment.
For an age he simply stares down at me, making me aware of every inch of my skin, every stuttered breath I fight to inhale and release.
Then, “I’ll see you at dinner,” he says calmly.
And then he walks away. Leaving me sitting there, foot wrapped, chest tight, emotions clawing at my ribs.
I stare at the doorway long after he’s gone.
When I sag back against the cushions, the weight of our earlier conversation returns in full force. Everything Giovanni said and everything he didn’t say crashes down on me.
My fists bunch in my lap as I think of my father.
Of the way he lived, hands always rough from work, laughter easy, anger rare but righteous. The kind of man who believed in earning every inch of your ground.
Then I think of how he died.
Alone and afraid because he took a wrong turn, then refused to kneel. Refused to let a man more powerful and more ruthless grind him into the ground.
And now here I am. Married to a man who rules the very world that crushed him.
That truth has haunted me for eighteen months. Not just that Giovanni turned out to be just like the men who killed the father I loved.
But that I fell in love hook, line and sinker without inkling at all that he was cut from the same cloth.
That I wanted him in the first place.
That part… that complete and utter lust and passion-glazed blindness… still eats at me.
What would my father think?
