My grimace deepened. My fingers dug into my chest. “How dare you?”
“I’m giving you a chance to say your goodbyes. To get your closure. To understand he’s gone. But after that—”
“Cosimo will never leave my heart. I belong to him. Only to him.”
“Not anymore.”
“You can put your ring on my finger. You can shove your fucking dick into my pussy in front of a million people. You can carve your own fucking name on my forehead. Still, I won’t be yours.” I tapped a finger near my heart. “Cosimo’s name is tattooed inside. You can never take that away.”
He got to his feet and closed the distance between us, breathing down my neck. Literally. His scent struck me. No cigarette stench. No whiskey. Then he traced a finger over my rib, right under my left breast “What if I tattooed my name in there, too? With my knife?”
I gulped.
“I don’t give a shit about love. You can keep Cosimo in your heart, dolcezza. That’s not what I care about.”
“So you just want to own my body?” When he smelled like this, I didn’t really mind.
Therapy!
His finger moved from my rib to the area between my breasts and traced a line up to my forehead. “And mind. I want to own every corner, every darkness, every fantasy, every thought.” His finger glided back down, touching the tip of my nose, toying with my lips and stopping at the hollow of my throat. “I want to fuck every part of your body and your mind until there’s nothing left but me and the pleasure only I can give you.”
My toes curled, and my eyes fluttered closed.Therapy!
“And you think you can do that? You think you can fuck my mind, erase his mark and leave yours?”
“Do you wanna bet?”
“You’ll lose.”
He chuckled. “One month, and Il Tagliatore will be sculpted on every cell of your brain.”
“And you’ll do that by pretending to be Cosimo?” I mocked.
“Who said I’d be Cosimo for the whole month?”
“How long then?” I couldn’t believe I was curious enough to know, to consider whatever fucking sick deal that was.
“As long as we’re on this trip.”
“So let me get this straight. You’ll sleep with me as Cosimo for four days, and then I’ll have to let you, Enzio, fuck me for almost four weeks.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s more than fair. It’s generous.”
“Generous?!”
“A husband who will pretend to be his own wife’s old lover to please her instead of slitting her throat for being a cheating whore is a very generous man, dolcezza. You should be grateful, not greedy.”
Of course that was how Il Tagliatore would see it. “What happens after?”
“You will be mine. No more Cosimo this, Cosimo that. No more hating me. All the exhausting shit between us will end. We’ll live as the family we should be. A husband, a wife and their son.”
“But what happens when you lose?”
“I won’t.”
