She pauses. Just a heartbeat. Then her fingers slide across my palm. I want to lick her wrist. I want to trace my tongue up her arm, across her shoulder, down the valley between her breasts. I want to taste every inch of her until she's trembling and crying my name.
Instead, I lift her hand to my lips.
I press a kiss to her knuckles. My eyes never leave hers.
Her pulse jumps beneath my thumb.
There you are, solnyshko.
She sits without speaking. The waiter materializes to adjust her chair, pour her wine, recite the evening's specials. She ignores him completely, her gaze locked on mine across the candlelit table.
I sit.
Silence stretches between us.
The waiter retreats. Conversations murmur around us. Somewhere, a woman laughs. None of it matters. Nothing exists except this woman and the electricity crackling in the space between us.
She thinks she's started a game.
She thinks her silence will unnerve me, force me to speak first, give her the upper hand.
Moya krasotka.My beautiful girl. You don't understand patience. You don't understand what it means to want something so badly you'd burn the world to possess it, then wait years for the perfect moment to strike.
I've built empires on patience.
I've destroyed men with it.
I pick up my wine glass. Take a slow sip. Set it down.
Her eyes track every movement.
The candlelight plays across her features—the sharp line of her jaw, the full curve of her lower lip, the intelligence burning in those dark eyes. She's calculating. Trying to find my weakness.
She doesn't realize she's already found it.
She is my weakness.
The silence holds. One minute. Two. The waiter glances our way nervously, uncertain whether to approach. I give him nothing.
Her fingers curl around the stem of her wine glass. She hasn't drunk yet. Testing me. Waiting for me to speak, to break, to give her ammunition.
I won't.
I've interrogated men for hours without speaking a single word. I've sat in rooms thick with blood and screaming, my face perfectly blank, my breathing perfectly even, until my targets broke from the silence alone.
Vittoria Sartori is magnificent.
But she is not stronger than me.
"Why do you want to marry me?"
Direct. No games. No pretense. Just those dark eyes fixed on mine, demanding truth.
I admire that.
I set down my wine glass. "I need a wife. You need a husband. We can make that happen."
She picks up her own glass and takes a slow sip. The Barolo stains her lips darker.
