“How much longer you got? Like six months?”
“Nah, man,” he says with a grin. “She’s almost in the third trimester.”
“Jesus,” I mutter to myself. I’m missing goddamn everything being exiled out here. It’s been longer than I thought.
I miss Boston.
“So what’d Romeo propose?” I ask. We don’t want the Campanelles coming after us. We fought them before and won, but not without significant losses to both sides. We don’t want to have to fight them again.
Tavi sits heavily beside me, his lips turning downward in a scowl. Before this conversation, I’d have told him that marriage was good for him. Eased his tight-ass ways a little, made him actually fucking smile every once in a while. But now, he looks older.
He looks up to me with haunted eyes and shakes his head. “He’s promised Rosa, Santo.”
I blink. A cold chill skates down my spine.
No.
No.
“Rosa?” I ask, my voice choked. I knew this could happen. I knew that Rosa, after the death of her husband, was considered eligible to be married. And in our world, the Rossi women are commodities.
They’re treated with respect and protected at all costs, but all of us have known from the very beginning that they were never meant to stay here, that they weren’t going to stay with us forever. We knew it was only a matter of time before they were given away in marriage to someone else.
I stand and somehow make it to the sideboard. I pour myself a glass of wine, but my hand trembles.
None of them know how I feel about her. If they did, I’d be a dead man walking.
I try to hide the way the wine sloshes on the table and pour more than I need in my glass. I grab a bar towel and swipe at the dark red liquid. I watch the wine stain the white towel. I’ve cleaned blood the same way, watching it seep into the terry cloth.
I swallow hard.
Tavi’s phone rings, an obnoxious girly ringtone.
I give him a quizzical look. The wine’s already dimmed my initial rage at the news, but my knuckles on the stem are still white.
“What the fuck is that?”
He rolls his eyes. “Elise gave me all these damn ringtones,” he says and shakes his head. He snorts. “Wait until you hear yours.” He hits a button. “Hello?”
Ah, it’s not a phone call. FaceTime from Elise.
Her face takes up the whole screen. “Oh, hi, honey!” she croons as she blows him a kiss. “Is that Santo back there?”
She squints, and I wave, lean back on the arm of the couch and take another sip of wine.
Rosa.
Rosa.
My mind can’t help but spin this around, to try to decipher meaning in the black hole of this intel.
I’m not paying attention to the FaceTime call until I hear my name again.
“Santo?”
I look to see Elise isn’t home like I assumed, but in her store in Copley, the same I helped her prepare for retail.
I hate retail. I only helped with the store because Rosa likes pretty things, and I knew because she’s friends with Elise she’d end up there as well.
And Rosa is safer in America.
“What’s up? How’re you feeling?”
All the Rossi women are like sisters to me.
Well, all but one that is.
“I’m good,” she says, and she does look like she’s glowing. She holds the phone back so I can see her hugely swollen belly. That makes me smile.
“You sure there’s only one bambino in there? You can’t trust a guy like Tavi…”
Tavi play-punches me, but it still hurts. I duck and laugh, rubbing my arm, when I suddenly freeze.
Elise isn’t alone.
I swallow.
Rosa’s bent over a display of leather handbags, arranging them artfully. She turns and looks over her shoulder at the phone when she hears my voice.
“Oh, hey, Santo,” she says casually. Not a hint of familiarity.
I’ve been a member of this family since I was ten years old, and she greets me like I’m the guy that pumps her fucking gas.
“Hey,” I say, an icy tone in my own voice. “How’s business?”
“Oh, Santo, it’s booming. Thank you. I think the marketing guy you found has really helped our exposure. You know how competitive it is in Boston, but he’s put us on the map!” She beams. “And, Rosa’s got the Midas touch, you know.”
I swallow hard. “Yeah?” My voice is a little husky. I hope I mask it. I can feel Tavi’s razor-sharp gaze on me. “How so?”
“Someone comes in for one little handbag, and the next thing you know, they talk to Rosa, and they walk out with the entire collection.”
I smile. “Well done, Rosa. How do you do that?”
Fuck, but I like the feel of her name on my lips. It feels like velvet and chocolate, soft and seductive.
She shrugs modestly and looks away from the camera. “I tell them they’re worth it. I tell them they work hard, and that it’s okay for a woman to indulge herself once in a while.” She smiles. “And if it’s a guy, I tell him his woman will be very, very thankful and be sure to show her appreciation.”
Tavi laughs. “Well done, sis. Looks like you have a calling, eh?”
A calling to be the wife of one of our enemies. Yeah, she’s got a fucking calling.
“Guess so,” Rosa says. She walks back to her work, and Elise and Tavi chat it up again. She had a visit to the doctor today and fills him in on everything about the size of the baby, how healthy things are, and all the little details that matter. He eats it up like she’s feeding him manna from heaven.
I turn my back to them and finish my wine, until he hangs up the call.
The room’s silent for a minute, until the clock chimes eight. It’s two o’clock in Boston, then. They’ll be closing in only a few hours.
“Who’s watching them?” I ask nonchalantly, as if I don’t hold my breath waiting for his response.
“Amadeo and Tommaso,” he says. Amadeo was once reprimanded by Romeo for drinking on the job, and ever since then, hasn’t stepped a toe out of line. Tommaso is new, but trustworthy. I trained him myself.
“You’ve got two guards on them?”
He nods. “One per person. Not enough?”
He should have a fucking legion stationed out there.
“Need one for your bambino, man.” I watch him grin and smile to myself.
I change the subject. “Rosa looks pretty good for someone who just found out she’s betrothed to a stranger.”
I try to keep the edge out of my voice but fail miserably.
Tavi looks away and doesn’t meet my eyes. He twirls his wine glass between his fingers and frowns.
“Ottavio.”
He still doesn’t look at me.
Though technically Tavi’s above me in rank, we’re brothers. We’ve taken then same vows to The Family. Well. Most of them, anyway.
Any of us would give our lives for the other.
But I don’t push him. I wait.
Finally, he releases a breath and looks to me. “She doesn’t know yet, brother.”
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USA Today bestselling author Jane Henry pens stern but loving alpha heroes, feisty heroines, and emotion-driven happily-ever-afters. She writes what she loves to read: kink with a tender touch. Jane is a hopeless romantic who lives on the East Coast with a houseful of children and her very own Prince Charming.