by LJ Shen
Frantic. Breathless. Guilty.
“Leave before I ruin your life,” I spat out at Kristen. “And this time, you won’t get a third warning.”
She laughed. “Seems like you two have a lot to talk about.”
My former mistress scurried away, her laughter carrying in my ears long seconds after she was gone. I plastered Angelo to the wall, grabbing him by the collar.
I knew it looked bad.
I knew I had to explain it tomorrow morning.
I simply no longer cared.
“Who was with you in that room?” I demanded.
“I’d strongly advise you stop acting like a thug unless you’d like to be treated like one.”
I strongly advise you to stay away from my future wife before I really do kill you.
“You’ve had sex,” I countered.
“Thanks, Captain Obvious. I was there.” He laughed, regaining some of his composure, which infuriated me even more.
“Who with?” I pulled at his collar, almost to the point of choking. That sure wiped the smile off his face. I knew I had to calm down before people started noticing the little scene I’d created. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, gather my wits.
“See, my first answer to you. None. Of. Your. Business, Keaton.”
“Senator Keaton.”
“Nah. You sure as hell don’t represent me.”
“Any particular reason why you insist on getting on my bad side?”
“You’re on my future father-in-law’s bad side,” he said, unflinching. I had to hand it to him—he had balls the size of cantaloupes. “And the race to Francesca’s heart is one I’m going to beat you at.”
“I very much doubt you’re capable of beating me to anything other than pre-ejaculation, kid.”
“I’m fully prepared to test that theory. Heads up—I told Francesca I would gladly marry her without dowry, and that I am more than happy for my family to shell out whatever money is needed to untangle her from her Keaton situation. Might want to find another bride to fit that dress you bought.”
I was about to punch him in the middle of my engagement party when my fiancée slipped out of the second floor, too. She looked like a barely contained mess. Her smeared makeup was carefully wiped from her face, her eyes were wild with realization. Paired with Bandini’s frank admission that he’d slept with her, I saw very clearly what everyone else at the party were about to see, too.
Yet again, Francesca Rossi had been fucked by a man who was not her fiancé.
At her own engagement party.
Minutes after she was on my arm, no less.
I pushed Angelo down the stairs, pulling my future wife by the arm. She shrieked when I touched her, her eyes darting up in hysteria before softening when she saw it was me. Then she saw what was written on my face. If she could read me—which she could by now—she knew she was in deep trouble.
“What do you want?” she seethed.
A loyal fiancée.
A fucking shotgun.
For this nightmare of a sham relationship to be over.
“You just broke our verbal contract, Nemesis. Not a good thing to do with a lawyer.”
She frowned but didn’t try to defend herself.
There was a guillotine inside me, and I wanted to snap her pretty head off her body.
Tonight.
I’d just wiped the tears from my eyes after telling my mother that I was starting to warm up to my husband. The revelation was bittersweet, if not completely crushing. Perhaps it was the nightly encounters in the vegetable garden, or the way he kissed me so openly in front of Ms. Sterling tonight when he picked me up.
“Is it Stockholm syndrome, Mama?”
“I think it’s just young love, Vita Mia. Love is, after all, a little mad. Otherwise, it is not love but merely infatuation.”
“Do you have to be mad to fall in love?”
“Of course, you do. Falling in love is, by definition, going crazy for someone else.”
“Are you crazy about Dad?”
“I’m afraid I am. Otherwise, I wouldn’t stay even though he is cheating on me.”
That happened, too. And it threw me off even though I should have seen it coming. It was not uncommon for the men of The Outfit to take a mistress or two.
Mom said that if it rips you apart, that means it is real.
“But shouldn’t love feel good?”
“Oh, nothing is good if it doesn’t have the power to feel bad, too. It’s all about the quantities, Francesca.”
Quantities.
The quantity of my affection toward Wolfe revealed itself when Angelo ushered me to the garden away from the throng of people. Despite my feeling completely crushed and angry at my coldhearted fiancé, I’d wanted to stay with him and brave my father together. Then Angelo sat me down and brushed a dark curl from my eyes and asked me if I was happy. I thought about it long and hard.
I wasn’t happy.
I was not unhappy, either.
I’d realized that not only did I harbor unexplainable, positive feelings for the man who’d imprisoned me, but I no longer craved Angelo’s touch the way I had before Wolfe bulldozed his way into my life. I still loved Angelo, but only as the kid who protected me from his brothers and shared smiles with me from across the dining table. Instead of his warm, familiar, soft hands, I longed for my fiancé’s strong, callous, hard palms. The realization struck me like lightning, and I told Angelo that although I felt bad about him and Emily—it was over between us.
For good.
Once I saw the look on his face, I took his hand and brought it to my chest, begging for his forgiveness. And when he stood up and walked away, all I wanted to do was find my mother and tell her. I had to wait until Angelo was nowhere near me so it wouldn’t look like we were going to the same place.
Angelo had disappeared inside the house shortly after. My cousin Andrea said between sipping mimosas that she saw him slipping into a guestroom upstairs with the blonde reporter Wolfe used to date.
“The one with the pretty hair? Tall? Lanky? Tan?”
I didn’t need a reminder to the fact that Kristen was gorgeous.
“Right. Thanks.”
Instead of feeling anger at his behavior, all I felt was strange hostility. Even that wasn’t toward Angelo—it was toward my own fiancé, who had humiliated me in front of my parents when my father threw a jab at him.
Now we were in the car, staring outside our windows as we always did, watching Chicago whooshing by in its majestic, grayer-than-Wolfe’s-eyes glory. I fiddled with the edges of my white dress, unsure what to say or do. Again, Wolfe arrived at the silly conclusion that I’d slept with Angelo. And again, I felt that defending myself was encouraging a pattern where I always had to make excuses for talking to a friend.
Did he really think so little of me? We had a verbal contract, and since striking it, time had passed. Time in which I kissed him and caressed him and opened my thighs for him to stroke me there through my clothes. I stroked him, too. Did that mean nothing to him? Did he really think I could do that with any man at any time?
“I will not marry a whore,” Wolfe said with dry resolute, still staring out the window. In the rearview mirror, I could see Smithy, his driver, cringing behind the wheel and shaking his head. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry.
“Let me go, then.”
“Am I hearing an admission, Miss Rossi?”
“I will not defend myself in front of a man who does not deserve my pleas,” I said, as calmly as I could.
“Is he worth my wrath?”
“You don’t scare me, Senator Keaton,” I lied, ignoring the tears clogging my throat. I liked him. I did. I liked that he defended me in front of my father, and that he offered me the freedom to study and work and leave the house unattended. I liked that he was at war with my family but didn’t put me in the middle of it.
I even liked that he didn’t want me to be his baby machine. Liked that he was agreeable whenev
er I decided to play nice with him. That the version of Wolfe I was going to get—the jerk or the sharp-tongued admirer—solely depended on my behavior toward him. I liked how his body enveloped mine like a shield, how his lips scorched my skin, how his tongue swirled over my needy flesh.
“Yet,” he corrected, his jaw as hard as granite. “You’re not scared of me yet.”
“You want me to be scared of you?”
“I want you to behave for once in your miserable, bratty life.”
“I did not sleep with Angelo Bandini,” I said for the first time that evening, and—I promised myself—also for the last time.
“Shut up, Francesca.”
My heart coiled in the corner of my chest, and I swallowed the bitterness bleeding in my mouth.
When we arrived at the house, he rounded the car and opened the door for me. I stepped out and ignored him, pushing the front door open. I was so mad I wanted to scream until my vocal cords tore. He had such little faith when it came to me. Who had made him so hardened and skeptical?
Probably my father. There was no other way to explain the bad blood between them.
Behind me, I heard Wolfe instruct his bodyguards to stay out of the house, which was against protocol. He never went against protocol.
I rushed to my room, desperate to gather my thoughts and think of a way to tackle this. I didn’t stop to think that running away from confrontation may look to him like an admittance. My only sin was sitting somewhere public with Angelo and telling him that he needed to stop texting me. That I wanted to give my future husband a fair chance.
“You can forget about college.” Wolfe slammed his phone and wallet against the marble mantel behind me. “The deal is off.”
I turned around sharply, my eyes flaring in disbelief.
“I didn’t sleep with Angelo!” I railed for the second time. God, he frustrated me to no end. He never once asked me for an explanation or voiced his concern. He just assumed.
Wolfe stared at me, placid. I ran toward him, pushing his chest. This time, unlike the first and second time I pushed him, he moved backward, just an inch. There was heat in my touch. I wanted to hurt him, I realized, more than he had hurt me.
Quantities.
“Are you sure you’re a lawyer? Because you sure suck at collecting evidence. I did not sleep with Angelo.” Third time.
“I saw you in the garden together.”
“So what?” I was so upset I couldn’t even explain myself properly. I clung to his dress shirt, tugging down and twining my arms around his neck to pull his head down. I pressed my lips to his, desperate to show him that what we had was real, at least for me, and that in my kiss, there was something unique—a potion—I could never give anyone else.
He didn’t move or reciprocate. For the first time since I’d met him, he did not demolish whatever stood between us the second I gave him permission to touch me. Normally, whenever I moved an inch toward him, he crossed an ocean, drowning me with kisses and caresses. He devoured me if I let him. This time, his body felt rigid and cold under my fingertips.
I took a step back, the dull pain in my chest spreading all over my body.
“I like you, Wolfe. I don’t know why, but I do, okay? You make my body feel different. It’s confusing, but it’s true.”
And boy, was it ever. The truest thing I’d ever said. My blush was back in full force, ready to obliterate my face.
“That’s very kind of you.” He smiled at me sardonically, standing taller and bigger and more frightening than I’d ever seen him before. “Tell me, Nemesis, do you think allowing me to fuck him out of you would help your chances at attending Northwestern?”
“Wh…what?” I pulled back, blinking. He still didn’t believe me. There was nothing I could do or say to change his mind.
He lifted his hand, stroking my cheek. Usually, I basked in his attention as though it were a glorious sunray on a December day. Tonight, his touch made me shiver and not with excitement. I was still wet because he was there, because he was present, and because his eyes were on me. But it felt all wrong. My desire for him felt dirty and desperate. Doomed, somehow.
“I’m not lying to you,” I said, biting my lower lip to keep it from trembling. “Why do you always think the worst of me?”
He lowered his lips to mine, and whispered, “Because you’re a Rossi.”
I closed my eyes, inhaling venom, exhaling hope. I felt like I was drowning even though I was standing in the middle of the foyer in the arms of the man I was going to marry. I knew what I had to do just then to save him from hating me. I just wasn’t sure if, by the end of it, I would still be able not to loathe him.
Wolfe was not going to believe me, and it was too late and too convenient to tell him that I was a virgin now.
No. He had to learn that himself.
“Take me,” I whispered brokenly. “Sleep with me. Compromise me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling my pride leaving my body, evaporating like mist. “Fuck Angelo out of me.”
He took a step back, and I could see the war raging inside of him.
Too proud to accept my offering, and too angry to turn it down.
“Please,” I clung to the collar of his shirt, rising on my toes and plastering my body against his. His erection dug into my stomach and gave me false, stupid hope.
“I want you.”
“You want Angelo more.”
I shook my head fiercely, kissing his jaw, the corner of his lips, his Cupid’s Bow.
“You,” I breathed. “Just you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, and stepped away from me. I clung harder to the fabric of his shirt, clutching him in a vise grip.
“You’re turning me down? Really?” I whispered against his neck, feeling his Adam’s apple bob against my lips, his stubble, and his tight muscles. Every inch of his body tried to fight it. Us.
“Get on your knees,” he rasped, “and beg for me to fuck you.”
I drew away from him, my eyes widening.
“What?”
“You fucked another man at our engagement party. The second time you have fucked him since we got engaged. I want you to kneel and beg for me to fuck him out of you. And I am afraid that there is no other way around it, Nemesis,” he said coldly, raising a thick, dark eyebrow, his jaw locked with rage.
I was speechless.
I cupped my mouth, stifling an agonized moan that had threatened to tear past my lips. His face remained indifferent, unaffected; I wondered how he could be so cruel to the woman he was going to promise his forever. There was no going back from what I was about to do, if, indeed, I was to do it. I wanted to turn around and walk away. But I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if I did that, we would be over.
He needed to know that I didn’t sleep with Angelo. And, after lying to him that I had, multiple times, there was only one way to prove my innocence.
The logic behind the idea was twisted, but so was Wolfe. Our whole relationship was crazy.
With an unsteady inhale, I began to lower myself to my knees in front of him. I pressed my eyes shut, determined not to see what was on his face as I stripped off my dignity for him. Mama used to say that pride was the most exquisite jewelry a woman could wear even when you’re naked. But Wolfe had just ripped it from my neck, every pearl of confidence rolling on the floor. I bowed my head down, and when my knees touched the marble, a groan of pain and self-hatred escaped my mouth.
I hate you.
I like you.
I wish I could quit you.
If I didn’t show Wolfe the truth, he’d make my life hell or worse—throw me back to my parents, cancel our engagement, and make me the talk of the entire city of Chicago. He would use whatever he had against my father, and we would be poor, powerless, and defenseless without my father to protect my mama and me from poverty, the Irish, or The Outfit’s cutthroat society.
I would lose everything.
The choice not to kneel was never truly mine. I couldn
’t afford for this wedding not to happen. And I couldn’t afford for my future husband not to believe me as I knew it would make both of us miserable and hateful toward one another.
The foyer was so silent, I could hear the echo of my heartbeat ricocheting off the ceilings. I slanted my chin up and cracked my eyes open, meeting his punishing gray ones. We stared at each other for a few seconds, my fingers laced together at the small of my back. He was right. Kneeling for someone did make you feel like a peasant.
The minute you willingly lowered yourself for someone else, they would never, ever look at you the same way. In or out of bed.
“I will not take you by force.” His voice was a sharp-edged knife, traveling across my nerves, nipping though not cutting all the way in.
“I offer myself willingly,” I said, my head bowed down.
“Up.”
I stood up.
“Come to me and kiss me the way you did Angelo tonight.”
I swallowed the sour bile rising in my throat. Hatred, humiliation, excitement, dread, and hope swirled in my chest. With my knees bumping into each other, I made my way back to him, pressing my lips to his as I wrapped my arms around his neck.
My body hummed with dark energy. I wanted to devour him with rage and show him that I was innocent. That I was still untarnished, and that I was his. But I was met with such passive disinterest, I couldn’t muster up the courage to do to him all the things I wanted to.
He lowered his lips to meet mine—finally—and I thought he would reciprocate, but he just grinned into my mouth. “If that’s how you kiss the man you want so desperately, I can see why Angelo didn’t put up a better fight to win you.”