Page 54 of One Filthy Kiss

I hear him. But our life in London was different. I never felt eyes watching me wherever I went. I never felt as if he were closing in on us, not the way I do now.

The elevator pings, and I release a heavy sigh.

Gio is back.

Only when Ric and I turn around, it isn’t Gio who steps out of the elevator.

It’s a woman.

I’ve never seen her before. If I had, I would remember.

She’s tall, with glossy tanned legs that seem to go on forever beneath her short white skirt. She wears a floaty chiffon blouse over a skimpy neon-pink tank top. Sparkling heels that she doesn’t need because she must be at least six inches taller than me. And diamond earrings that catch the sunlight from the window and send patterns spiraling across the floor.

We stare at each other, and for a few moments, Amber’s father is forgotten.

“Hello, you must be Megan.” She glides down the steps as if her feet don’t touch the ground and offers her hand in a formal greeting. I accept it numbly. “I’m Lucia. Giovanni’s fiancée.”

12

GIOVANNI

“Lucia?”

Her presence in my apartment is so out of context that I stagger out of the elevator, my brain frantically trying to figure out how she fits in with the note left in Meggie’s purse at the playground.

Then it hits me with the force of a wrecking ball.

She doesn’t.

Lucia has her own agenda.

And this is simply the shittiest timing in a long history of fucked-up coincidences that have followed me around since I was old enough to understand the life I was born into.

My eyes land on Meggie, and her pain stabs straight into my heart like a dagger on the rebound. She is all that matters. I will deal with Lucia later, but for now, my priority is keeping Meggie safe. And happy.

I try to hold her gaze, to convey my love for her from across the room, but she looks away, and she might as well have screamed that I’m a lying, cheating fuck the way it hurts.

And I deserve it.

I never told her about Lucia.

I never told her about Lucia because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing to tell.

We got engaged a couple of years ago. In secret. To create an alliance between the Sabatellis and the de Giacomo family. It was a business transaction, nothing more. Both parties wanted something, and I gave Lucia a ring to seal the deal.

She only wears it when she is in Sicily. To keep up appearances.

In return, her father ensures that my family’s properties and land in Sicily remain untouched, while I guarantee her brother’s protection in New York.

When she isn’t visiting home, ostensibly blaming me for the delay in setting a wedding date, or hitting the socialite circle in New York and LA, Lucia can be found on a Texas ranch riding horses and herding cattle. Or more importantly, she can be found on a Texas ranch fucking her lover. A rancher thirty years her senior with a grown-up family who stand to inherit nothing from their father’s substantial will since he fell in love with his Sicilian beauty.

But none of this alters the fact that I kept my fiancée a secret from the woman I love.

Why should she believe that Lucia means nothing to me? All she’ll see are lies, false promises, and empty declarations of love, and if I know Meggie as well as I think I do, she’ll have already made up her mind that she is in this alone. Amber’sfather got close to them—too fucking close—and now she’ll run.

I’m a stupid fucking idiot. I’ve ruined the best thing that ever happened to me, and for what? For a fake relationship with a woman I don’t even like.

I glance at Ric. His expression is neutral. He’s loyal to me, but I only have myself to blame for putting Meggie in this position.