But.
I roll my shoulders back, exhaling slowly, my jaw tightening as if it would stop the thought most would find as sacrilegious as blasphemy.
But… I would be lying to myself if I pretended I had not enjoyed the anonymity she offered me. The sheer novelty when she looked at me on that Queens street with eyes that bore no recognition of the man I was.
Then the realisation in the weeks and months that followed that Lucia Argento really had zero clue about the man she was letting put his hands and mouth all over her fucking delectable body.
The illusion.
The reckless, intoxicating normalcy of being seen as just a man.
Not a Don or a threat. Not a weapon wrapped in silk or a candle to a thrill-seeking moth.
She didn’t look at me with awe or calculation or secret fascination for violence the way the women I fucked before her gagged over.
She looked at me like I was… charming. Infuriating. Sex-charged and eager to get between her thighs, naturally.
But perhaps most of all… human and not a larger-than-life lord of the New York mafia underworld.
She argued with me over coffee orders. Mocked my three-piece suits even as her beautiful eyes lingered all over me, her eager innocence giving away her inexperience I discovered was authentic right to her never-been-touched pussy.
Hell, she had zero clue how near the truth she was when she told me my driver looked like a retired assassin and that I should stop surrounding myself with men who scared small children.
It’d been intensely and fuck… addictively gratifying that she wanted me.
Not my power or my money or even the possibility of dwelling in my shadow empire.
Me.
That had been a reprieve I had not realised I was starving for until I was drowning in it.
So yes, maybe I had withheld more of myself than I needed to because I liked who I was allowed to be when she didn’t know everything.
I liked that my woman did not lie awake at night imagining blood on my hands. I liked that she thought my worst flaw was arrogance and a tendency to buy her absurdly expensive diamonds and shoes she refused to wear.
I liked that when she looked at me, there was no fear in her eyes. Only heat. Only want and sexy defiance that made me wantto throw her over my knees and spank her juicy arse until it was as red as her gorgeous cheeks.
It had been heady and surprisingly unique in a way I’d never experienced before. Dangerously so.
But my life is my life. And illusions rot. Change is not optional in my world. Nor is the unrelenting war for survival.
Especially now.
I set the wineglass down and glance down at my watch just as I hear footsteps on the stairs, curbing a stiff smile.
Fashionably, and I suspect defiantly, late, as usual.
I look up when my wife, the woman who’s taken up an increasingly obscene amount of space in my head, enters the room.
And for a moment, every thought leaves my head.
Lucia is dressed simply. Not in any of the clothes I brought, of course, because that would be too easy for my feisty bride.
It’s another of those island dresses that would look drab and cheap on any other woman. Except on her, it’s anything but. I suspect she could walk down the runway in Milan and turn every head.
Like the flick of a match, heat ignites, then rises up from my very toes, lingering long enough to turn into a damned blaze in my loins as my compelled gaze tracks the fitted black dress that hugs her dangerous curves, the thin straps I want to drag down her bare shoulders with my teeth, while I fist the hair she’s brushed into a perfect, shining waterfall down her back.
So very effortlessly, she proves she doesn’t need diamonds or silk or designer heels.
