I blinked at him. “Okay…Is there a way to turn the plane around?”
He chuckled, leaning close to brush his nose over mine in a gesture that was achingly sweet.
“You are with me now, si? You are mine as I am yours. I told you once, I am the most honest man you will ever meet so do not ask questions you do not want the answers to.” He paused, his black eyes all-consuming. “So I’m asking you, how much do you want to know?”
Unconsciously I picked at a hangnail as I considered his question.
I could physically feel the conflict inside me, the sharp edge of jostling swords and the agony of pierced flesh. My body was a battle zone for the thoughts raging in my head.
I didn’t want to be a bad person. I never had, which wasn’t to say I’d succeed in that.
I’d been bad.
But I’d always had this fairy tale ideal of good and bad, pure and evil. I’d assumed I would always be on the ‘right’ side of the law and morality. But when one contradicted the other, I found myself at a cross roads.
And Dante was asking me to pick one path and journey down its shadowy corridors alongside him. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could be with Dante romantically and not become entangled in his underworld dealings.
The truth was, it had already happened.
I’d unwittingly become the right-hand woman to his consigliere when I took on his RICO case. I’d befriended his closest associates and overheard information in passing that could make the case I was an accessory to criminal activity.
I’d shot a man.
Seamus Moore was dead because of me.
But then…hadn’t I already been embroiled in the mafia and crime because of that same man? The father who sold my youngest sister into sexual slavery at the age of eighteen in order to repay his gambling debts? The same father who brought Christopher into our lives and consequently into my bed.
It was ironic in a way, to think that I’d eschewed all things morally grey and certainly criminal because my father was a deplorable human only to meet a man who was both of those things yet the best person I’d ever known.
It was mind boggling and I couldn’t sort the threads of my thoughts well enough to give Dante an eloquent answer.
“I want to be with you,” I promised solemnly as I cupped his jaw, running my thumb over the jutting bone and the sharp stubble there. “I just don’t know what that means for me. If I stand beside you the way you might want me to, it means I could never be a lawyer again. You have to understand, the dream of being a lawyer has tethered me all my life. It–it would be difficult to give it up.”
Difficult, but maybe not impossible.
I had to re-examine why I was a lawyer and if there was some way I could do good in another capacity.
Dante’s laugh was hard and hollow, a spent casing clicking against the floor. “We are going into the belly of the beast, Lena. I’ll do my best to shield you from the brunt of it, but I can’t make any guarantees. If people know you are my woman, they’ll assume you stand at my side.”
“Don’t most mafioso’s wives and girlfriends stay one step behind them?” I quipped lamely, trying to pull the frown from between his thick brows.
He blinked at me solemnly, those long lashes absurdly thick over those fathomless eyes. “I’m not most mafiosos. I thought we had already established that.”
It was my turn to blink hard, this time on a wince.
I didn’t mean to continue to judge him, but a lifetime of carefully constructing my own moral compass made it difficult to curb my impulsive reactions.
His sigh wafted over my forehead, stirring my hair. “You are here with me when I never thought you would take such a risk. For now, that is more than enough.”
“I don’t want to let you down,” I admitted even though it hurt, the words torn straight from the fabric of my heart. “I’ve let my loved ones down all my life and I can’t bear the thought of doing the same to you.”
“Then don’t,” he said simply, palming my throat and dipping down to kiss my brow. “But Elena, you should know, I have never met a woman with such coraggio. And I have no doubt that whoever you felt you let down in your past let you down as well, si?”
I thought about Daniel and Giselle, but the sour tang of bitterness and remorse didn’t wash over my tongue the way it normally did.
“You give me too much credit,” I murmured, avoiding that penetrating gaze that seemed capable of x-raying more than just my bones.
His fingers slid into the hair over my ear, tipping my head so that he could feather a kiss over the bruising my father had left under my eye when he hit me. When he pulled back, his eyes were soft as suede. “No, you do not give yourself enough.”
And just that easily, Dante convinced me once again that abandoning everything I knew just to be with him was the best choice I’d ever made.
Two
Elena
We were staying at Amadeo Salvatore’s villa in the countryside outside the city of Naples where he kept a working olive grove and made his own wine. I’d heard Cosima speak about it before, the endless olive groves to one side of the property and the vineyard scaling down the hillside on the other. Apparently, Tore was meeting us there having caught his own private flight from upstate New York.
Even though Tore had been a stock villainous character in my childhood, I found myself wanting to impress him then. He was the closest thing Dante had to a father. Anxiety tied knots in my belly that made it hard to swallow as I thought about spending an undisclosed amount of time with the man in close quarters. How did one impress a mafia don?
I was in the back bedroom of the plane staring at the hap hazardously thrown together contents of my single suitcase when the door creaked open behind me. A second later, warm hands slid around my hips and over my belly under the fabric of my camisole.
Dante placed his head on my shoulder. “Based on the way you are staring at these clothes, I thought you were trying to crack open a safe or discern the meaning of life.”
I snorted softly. “Close. I’m trying to decide what to wear to meet your father figure.”
“You’ve met Tore before.”
“As your lawyer, not as your…” I hesitated, scrambling to define what this gorgeous man was to me and me to him. “As your partner.”
He turned his head so that his hot breath wafted over my neck, his lips tickling the thin skin over my hammering pulse. “Partner? Mmm, I don’t think so. I like the sound of… my lover, my woman, innamorata mia, amora mia.”
My love, my heart.
I shivered as he clamped his teeth around the side of my neck and sucked in a way that would leave a bruise. Hickeys were tasteless marks yet I found myself leaning into the suction, gasping at the sensation and the knowledge that everyone who looked at me with him would know I was his.
I’d never yearned for possession the way I did with Dante. I was a woman who valued my independence fiercely so I’d always thought that the idea of belonging to someone else was a direct contradiction to my independence. I’d been wrong. Owning the heart of a man like Dante Salvatore didn’t make me weak, it made me strong. I was proud to be seen as his because I was proud of the man he was and the woman he helped me to become.