When I noticed something I hadn’t seen before:
A circular scar on Giorgio’s left arm, on the bicep.
A bullet wound.
My stomach turned slightly.
I hadn’t noticed it last night because everything had been so dark – although I vaguely remembered feeling a raised surface on his skin.
I’d thought it might be a scar…
Just notthattype of scar.
I pressed my hands against his chest to force him back a little.
“What’s this?” I asked, tracing my finger across the skin.
“Oh, that,” he said dismissively. “Occupational hazard.”
He grinned.
I didn’t.
“It’s nothing, baby,” he murmured as he started to nuzzle my neck.
“It doesn’tlooklike nothing.” I pushed him away from me so I could look in his eyes. “I want to hear about it.”
He groaned, then rolled off me and onto his back. “There’s nothing to talk about. I got shot while we were rescuing Lucia – ”
“What?!”I exclaimed. “What happened to her?!”
“She got kidnapped. I went with Adriano and Massimo, who was just her fiancé at the time, to get her back.”
“Just the three of you?” I asked in amazement.
“No, some other guys went, too.”
Something was off.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.
He sighed and rolled up on his elbow so he could look at me. “Lucia’s… from a family like the one I work for. Adriano and Massimo’s cousin kidnapped her – ”
“Theircousin?!”
Giorgio ignored me and kept plowing ahead.
“ – so Adriano and Massimo went to rescue her. They brought along some other people, like me and a guy named Lars. He’s my boss, too. He works for the family. In fact, he’s the one who trained me.
“It was like the situation with Maurizio. An asshole did a bad thing, and the family stepped in and took care of the asshole. I got shot, but so did the bad guys, and Lucia wound up safe and sound and married Massimo. End of story.”
I frowned. “But – ”
“Babe, I’ve already told you more than I should have,” he said gently. “At some point, you’re going to have to trust me.”
He was deliberately calling back to the words we’d said last night when we’d had sex without a condom:
I trust you.
