He didn’t know why he did that.
She didn’t upset him ...
He just felt odd around her. Like when she’d started crying in the car when he drove them to Toronto, and his first reaction was to be rude. And then just as quickly, he found he needed to fix that and her because he didn’t want to see her cry.
He shouldn’t care at all.
She was a fucking job.
“Corrado, are you listening?”
“Yeah,” he muttered, coming back to the conversation at hand. Although, he was still staring across the hall even as he said it, half amused by the fact Ginevra slept on top of the blankets, and also slightly bothered by it at the same time. Not because he thought she might be cold—the penthouse was warm—but more because he noticed at all. Like he noticed the shape of her thighs, and the way her legs looked under the pair of cotton shorts she’d pulled on. Fuck. He needed to get back to Les. Now. “What’s going on?”
“You asked for time off from The League?”
Corrado stiffened in the bed, scrubbing a hand over his face at the same time. “Who told you that?”
“Who do you think?”
“Dare, likely. Cree doesn’t pay attention to that shit.”
“You’re not wrong,” Alessio grumbled.
Across the hall, Ginevra rolled over in the bed, a soft sound escaping her at the same time. It almost sounded like a moan. Add that onto the fact that Corrado was still admiring the swells and curves of her body, not to mention, the fact he was quite aware that she was a beautiful woman, and he suddenly needed to ignore a raging erection under his own sheets.
Great.
That’s just fucking perfect.
Another woman, under entirely different circumstances, and Corrado might have acted on his attraction. He would have let Alessio know the shit he was feeling, that he was attracted to the chick, and it would have been done.
That was their rule.
It was fine.
Except this was different. He wasn’t just attracted to Ginevra—he was also interested in her, and what brought her here to him. Things he had no business feeling, and he didn’t know how that factored into the way he and Alessio had always done things when it came to women. Not to mention, he gave his word about the job with Ginevra; he wasn’t to tell people where she came from, or who she was. Including Alessio.
It was a fucking mess.
This was trouble.
That woman was trouble.
Why, or for what reason, or even how ... Corrado didn’t know those things, but he knew this. He could tell already, one week into watching Ginevra, that she was going to be an issue for him. For more reasons than he cared to admit, if he were being honest. Sometimes, Corrado just got a feeling about something or someone, and he was rarely wrong.
He’d had that same feeling about The League.
Or Alessio.
Different jobs.
He didn’t ignore it now.
“It’s for that favor, right?” Alessio asked. “Andino Marcello?”
Corrado cleared his throat and forced himself to avert his eyes from the figure across the hall. As it was, the guilt had already started to compound in his chest. “Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“And you still can’t tell me what it is?”
“Not really. I gave my word, that’s all.”
Although, Corrado was starting to think that was probably a lame fucking excuse. There was no one he trusted more than Alessio. Life had taught him that, and Alessio only proved it time and time again.
He could, at the very least, explain the gist of the job, and the fact that he had a woman here with him. Except, then he was wading into dangerous fucking territory with that—he would still be omitting important details to Alessio.
Like his interest in her.
The attraction.
So, no.
Corrado refused to say anything.
Because he didn’t plan to act on it.
None of it.
Simple.
Or that was the lie he was going to tell himself. He’d fucked up here. From the moment Ginevra got inside his car at that church, the first thing Corrado should have done the second he could was call Alessio.
Been honest.
Gave every detail.
But he didn’t.
And now here he was, a week into this thing ... and he was just digging the hole deeper. It wouldn’t be as simple, now. He couldn’t just tell Alessio the truth, and the man shrug it off. That wasn’t how they worked.
That’s not how their thing worked.
The fact that he didn’t tell Alessio from the start would be a nail in the coffin. Corrado didn’t need confirmation from Alessio to know it was true—it was their goddamn rule. Except he hadn’t done anything, and as long as he continued on that path, then there was nothing to tell.
Right?
Yeah.
The guilt compounded deeper.
Fuck.
So, yeah. He was going to say nothing. Do nothing. He wouldn’t act on a damn thing—not his attraction, or his interest. He was going to get this fucking job done, and go back home to Alessio like he’d planned to from the start before he looked at Ginevra after she got in his car, and got that feeling.
That same feeling he had when he met Alessio for the first time. A feeling that said this is going to change everything for you. Because what else could he do? He’d already dug this fucking hole, he might as well keep digging until he was out of it, too.
“I’m just saying that I don’t like finding out shit from Dare instead of you,” Alessio said on the phone, bringing Corrado back to the conversation again. “And you know how Andino Marcello is—he doesn’t care what shit you step in for him, so are you sure this job is even on the up and up with him?”
“Les—”
“Since when do you hide shit from me, Corrado?”
Yeah.
Shit.
“I’m not hiding anything,” he said.
There was just nothing to tell.
Not yet.
Across the hall, Ginevra made another noise before she rolled to her back. He saw her eyes flutter open, and she stared up at the canopy above the four-poster bed.
“Corrado—”
“I have to let you go,” he said quickly. “I’ll call you back.”
He hung up the phone, and tossed it to the bedsheets without waiting for a goodbye from Alessio. His chest became tighter—that pain, growing sharper.
But he probably wouldn’t call back. Not when it meant needing to hide things from Alessio because now, Corrado just didn’t want to lie. That guilt was a killer.
Corrado still wasn’t sure how he got to this point simply by taking a goddamn job to pay back a favor. All he had to do was open up his fucking mouth. Tell Alessio the job was a woman. And because it wasn’t as simple as it seemed, his dick decided to get involved, and maybe his curiosity, too.
That was it.
That’s all he needed to do.
He was making it more complicated than it actually was, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Nothing was ever simple with him and Les, even if on the surface, it might seem like it. Those were lies, too. They’d made this complicated.
Corrado blamed himself for that, too.
20.
Ginevra
Ginevra eyed the landline cordless phone charging on the counter as she stirred the sugar into her steaming coffee. It’d been a week, and not once had she considered using any one of the many phones throughout the penthouse to call out.