Smiling, she poured herself a finger of Scotch. She lifted the glass to her mouth when a rough hand pulled the drink away from her and ended up sloshing it all over her. “Jesus Christ! Enough with spilling my drinks.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Alessandro glared at her.
A soft gasp escaped her mouth.
His face was…a kaleidoscope of bruises. The lower lip she was so obsessed with was swollen and cut with crusted blood. A cut under his right eye made his cheekbone swell up, and a blue-green bruise the size of her palm painted his jaw. This was so far from the calm, remote Alessandro she’d known from day one that she forgot her anger. “Are you in pain?”
Leaning against the desk, he threw his legs forward. “Pain was the point of it.”
“You look like you took part in a street fight. And lost.”
“Ahh, your lack of faith hurts more than all of this,tesoro. I promise Bruno looks worse than me.”
She rubbed her palms over her hips, just to do something. “I thought you were beyond all this, your control ironclad.”
His gaze searched her face and held hers. “I was in a nasty mood, and there were only two ways to work it out of my system.”
Heat flushed through her in warm rivulets at his tone.
“What wereyouabout to do? Alcohol messes with your medication.”
Back to this, were they? “Two sips won’t kill me.”
He raised a brow, and even with his face all bruised, it was the most arrogant gesture she’d ever seen. It made her blood boil, brought all the anger and hurt back to the surface. Looking away, she grabbed her jacket from the desk. “I was stupid enough to want to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
She reached the damned heavy double doors. “I’m leaving.”
He stalked toward her. There was no other word for it. “And going where exactly?”
Sam took him in—how the drop of blood on the pristine white of his shirt looked so out of place, the buttons undone to his abdomen showing olive skin sprinkled with sparse chest hair, how his usually immaculate black trousers were rumpled. How he hadn’t even waited long enough to change before sparring.
As if all the masks of politeness had been stripped off, leaving him with only pure instincts and wants.
She wanted him even more like this. Wanted this raw, distilled version of Alessandro to want her.
“Angelina’s cousin’s apartment. I’ll still visit Matteo daily. Angelina knows the truth. There’s no need for us to pretend.”
“Did you have fun at the club?”
The sudden switch in the conversation left her unbalanced. “I did.” She didn’t even have to force the smile. “Angelina’s cousins are a hoot. Especially after she told them that I’d never been to a club before. Had never danced before, never been flirted with before.” The twins had been outrageous to begin with, sandwiching her between them on the dance floor, but it was harmless fun.
“Did you like all the attention you got?” There it was again, that feral quality about him. Somehow, he’d stalked her back across the room until she was leaning against his desk. Away from the door. “Did you dance with those two men to make me jealous, Sam?”
“I don’t play games like that.” She frowned. “Wait, how did you know I was dancing with…” She bit her lip, and his gaze zoomed down. Heat crested her cheeks as she remembered all the crazy things she’d gotten up to. “You saw those videos?”
“Matteo showed them to me.”
Whether he knew it or not, he’d pushed her into crawling out of her shell. Into owning her scar and her body.
She’d been terrified when she’d walked into the club. Terrified that her scar would be the only thing people would see, that it’d make them feel sorry for her. But while one of Angelina’s girlfriends had openly asked her about it, no one had given it a second glance.
While she was never going to be comfortable in provocative clothes, now she knew that it was her choice. Not one made out of shame.
“You won’t make me feel guilty about it. Not about this overtly provocative dress. Not about the secondhand smoke I inhaled. Not about the fact that I enjoyed flirting with two men. Men of my age. Men who found me sexy and interesting.”
He cast a long look at the dress in question, his lashes flicking down. But his gaze didn’t linger on her scar. It moved over the upper swells of her breasts, the asymmetric hem that barely covered her left thigh and her feet clad in black stilettos. Then it climbed back up over her, and this time it did linger on her scar.
