"This better be important," I said as I walked into my office and looked at the faces of the men who had agreed to recognize me as head of the Venosa family before my father's death.
"Just us. The last thing we wanted to do was pull you from your wedding night." Romolo Barbieri's smirk was going to get him hurt one of these days. He wasn't much older than me, his father having been murdered the year before, and he was stillgetting used to the particular discipline that came with running a family rather than just being part of one.
Apparently the Avola family was making calls and causing trouble in all their cities, looking for Cecelia.
"It's only a matter of time until they figure out Chicago," Gabriele Amato Sr. said. He was older than the rest of us and carried the particular weight of a man who had been right about enough things over a long career to be listened to carefully. "I think the only thing preventing them from coming here directly is the history between your families. Avola is thinking she'd never set foot here because of it."
"That makes sense." I leaned back in my chair. "From what Cecelia has told me, it was beaten into her from birth that we were the aggressors and responsible for every problem their family had."
"You need to make it known she's here," Romolo said, cautious but forceful. "Once it's public that she's your wife the calculus changes entirely. He can be angry but he can't make a legitimate claim."
Before I could respond there was a knock on the office door. Every man in the room straightened and reached for their weapons simultaneously, the automatic response of people who understood that vulnerability came with gathering. The heads of the Cosa Nostra meeting always came with heightened security for exactly this reason. I nodded at Lorenzo and he opened the door and spoke quietly to whoever was there and then turned to face me.
"It's Mrs. Venosa. She needs to speak to you."
"My mother couldn't think of a better time?" I said, standing.
"Not that Mrs. Venosa." Lorenzo's smirk was even more annoying than Romolo's. "Your Mrs. Venosa."
"How about from now on we just call her Cecelia," I said as I moved toward the door, ignoring the laughter behind me that I was absolutely pretending not to hear.
"Cecelia?" I closed the office door behind me.
She was standing in the hallway in my mother's dress, her hair fully loose now around her shoulders, and she was looking at the floor with an expression that made me want to close the distance between us immediately.
"I'm so sorry to bother you." Her voice was soft enough that I had to step closer to hear it. "I'm kind of stuck and I couldn't find anyone else. Could you unbutton me?"
She looked up through her lashes at me, and I could see the nerves in her face, the particular combination of wanting something and not being sure how it would land, and I reached out toward her and she flinched before she could stop herself.
"Sorry." She said it immediately, the reflex apology of someone who had learned to apologize for their own reactions. "Habit. When I would interrupt my father, he'd hit me."
I let my hand settle gently against her jaw instead, and watched the fear drain out of her face as she understood I wasn't going to move quickly or without warning. "I will never raise my hand to you, Cece. I told you that." I held her gaze until I was sure she believed it. "Turn around."
She turned, and I reached for the first button at the top of her spine, and my hands were steadier than I expected them to be given how long I'd been thinking about this. The buttons gave way easily, one by one, and as each one came free I could see more of her skin, sun-warm and flawless, and I kept my hands moving rather than letting them linger because there were men on the other side of that office door and I had to go back in there.
When the last button opened I pushed the dress gently off her shoulders, just enough, and she shivered under my hands. "Are my hands cold?" I asked quietly.
"No." Her voice was barely audible. "I just haven't had anyone touch me like this before."
I looked at the line of her bare back and thought about everything that sentence contained, and then I heard voices somewhere below and I thought about the men in my office and I shrugged out of my coat and draped it over her shoulders because I was not interested in any part of her being seen by anyone else tonight or any other night.
I leaned close to her ear and said, "I'll be finished soon," and put my arm around her waist and pulled her back against me for just a moment, close enough that she could feel exactly how finished I needed to be, and felt her breath catch.
She turned in my arms and looked up at me with dark eyes and reached for my hand and pressed my palm flat against her stomach, low, deliberate, and held it there. "I'll be waiting," she said, and stepped out of my grip and walked back down the hallway toward our room without another glance at me, my coat around her shoulders, and I stood there for a moment doing the necessary work of being a functional human being before I went back into my office.
I flung the door open and looked at every man in the room and felt nothing but impatience. "Let's get this over with," I said, and took my seat.
The meeting was shorter than it deserved to be, which was exactly right. With Emilio ready to make it known that Cecelia was here and was a Venosa, I saw the men out and headed back to our wing at a pace that was almost undignified and that I did not care about in the slightest.
I pushed open the door to our room and stopped.
She had waited up for me.
She was on the settee in a white satin negligee with a high slit that showed the length of her thigh, and she was still wearing my tuxedo jacket over it, and her hair was loose around hershoulders, and she looked up at me when I came in with dark eyes and an expression that had nothing managed in it at all.
I stepped over the dress pooled on the floor and crossed the room to her. "Are you sure you want this?" I asked, because she deserved to be asked, because it mattered to me that the answer was hers.
She stood and let my jacket fall to the floor and looked at me, and the sheer lace of the negligee in the dim lamplight showed the curve of her breasts and the dark shadows of her nipples through the fabric and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
