Dark Romance Collection
A Sexy, Dark Bundle
Parker S Huntington
Skye Warren
CD Reiss
Contents
Foreword
Damiano DeLuca
Damiano De Luca
Playlist
More Books
Author’s Note
Deception
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Rough Edge
Rough Edge
I. Prequel - Cutting Edge
II. Book One
III. Book Two
ALSO FREE IN KINDLE UNLIMITED
About the Author
Better When It Hurts
Better When It Hurts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Afterword
Did you know the audio version of this bundle has a bonus book? Along with the three amazing books included here, you’ll also get Rivalry: Slay One by Laurelin Paige.
Better yet, the bundle is available in Audible Escape and includes these incredible narrators:
Veronica Fox
Maxine Mitchell
Joe Arden
Zachary Webber
and Elena Wolfe
Damiano DeLuca
by Parker S huntington
Copyright © 2018 by Parker S. Huntington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Damiano De Luca
“If ever I am gifted the opportunity to betray you, I’ll take it. If life hands me the chance to destroy you, I will. Today. Tomorrow. Ten years from now. I will always seek revenge. And you will never stop looking over your shoulder.”
Ten years ago, I crushed Damiano De Luca’s heart,
vowing false promises I never delivered.
The revenge? Didn’t happened.
The destruction? As if I could.
Betrayal? Not. A. Chance.
We were 18 when I left, taking my secrets with me.
Now at 28, there’s no trace of the jaded mafia prince with the protective streak.
He’s crueler. Colder. More calculated than ever.
And he’s glaring at me from a funeral pew,
looking at me and my wedding ring like we should be the ones buried six feet under.
The war is back on, but I’m not that teenaged girl anymore.
This time, there will be blood.
And it won’t be mine.
Greenlight - Jonas Brothers
Do You Think of Me? - REMMI
Crowded Places - Rynn
You Found Me - The Fray
Goodnight Moon - Go Radio
It Ends Tonight - The All-American Rejects
Stay - Mayday Parade
Miserable At Best - Mayday Parade
We Don’t Have to Dance - Andy Black
I Miss You - blink-182
Dear Maria, Count Me In - All Time Low
Jet Black Heart - 5 Seconds of Summer
All over You - The Spill Canvas
Dancing On My Own - Calum Scott
Fuck Apologies - JoJo ft. Wiz Khalifa
Highway Don’t Care - Tim McGraw
ft. Taylor Swift & Keith Urban
Mr. Brightside - The Killers
Listen on Spotify here.
Asher Black
Niccolaio Andretti
Ranieri Andretti
Bastiano Romano
Renata Vitali
Damiano De Luca
Devious Lies
Hey, readers!
A part of me wants to skip the author’s note and send y’all on your way to the prologue, because that’s what it was like writing this book for me. It was passing my normal stops and diving into territory I was unfamiliar with.
Truth. Deception. Two sides of one coin. Two opposites intwined so thoroughly, you can’t appreciate one without acknowledging the other.
I’ve written about a ton of heavy themes before, themes that all mean a lot to me—courage, forgiveness, resentment, and duty. But nothing intimidates me more than speaking of truth and deception, because these two cuts deeper.
So, I found myself wondering what lessons I needed to learn, what lessons I wanted to teach others… And here it is:
Thinking you know someone and learning later you couldn’t have been more wrong, that you’ve been deceived, is gut wrenching. It annihilates relationships in ways nothing else can. Friendships, love, companionship—none of these survive without trust. In the face of deception, deception always wins.
You can’t ask people not to deceive you, but you can choose not to stick with them when they do. You can choose not to deceive others, to be pure of heart and intentions. And above all, do not deceive yourself.
With so, so, so much love,
Parker
For Chloe.
Always for Chloe.
Who gives a fuck about your first love? Give a big round of applause for your second love, because they taught you love still exists after you thought it never could again.
That One Pinterest Pin
de·cep·tion
dəˈsepSH(ə)n/
(Noun)
The action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth.
Deception is an act of twisting the truth. Betrayal. Distrust. Suspicion. All bred by deception and blossomed in relationships. Sometimes, when you spend your life deceiving others, the line between fact and fiction is blurred, and you begin to deceive yourself.
That’s the worst type of deception. Self-deception. If you’re trying hard to co
nvince yourself something is true or untrue, take a step back and re-evaluate. Be true to yourself. Above all, be true to your heart. Know what your heart wants and chase it relentlessly.
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
Leonardo da Vinci
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all.
Nana used to say this. She’d pass it off like it was her quote, as if Oscar Wilde wasn’t a prolific writer any decently read human being would recognize. The words, however, were true. I felt them each time I yearned for something more, though I’d never tell Nana that.
Nana also used to say, you get what you’re brave enough to ask for. Except this particular line was bullshit. You get what you’re an asshole enough to take. I knew that the second I met Renata Vitali, and her amber eyes widened and her lips parted like she was already mine.
Only Ren didn’t know it yet.
And back then, how she felt about me hadn’t mattered.
Not until it was too late.
We could never have loved each other. We were too different. Too haunted. Too jaded. Too volatile. Too combatant.
We fought, and an earthquake rumbled the earth across the world. We touched, and lightning struck the same place twice. We kissed, and a tornado tore through towns nowhere near Tornado Alley. Being together meant destruction, and I may have been a Vitali, but no matter how much I tried, I wasn’t bred for cold-hearted carnage like the rest of my family.
And Damiano De Luca was carnage, the secret De Luca son, wrapped in designer clothes and a faint, too-cool-for-me sneer, whereas I was the mafia princess, out of my league but too stubborn to admit it. Thing was, I’d never done anything to antagonize him. Not immediately, at least.
So, I never understood why he’d hated me from the second I moved into his home, exiled to De Luca territory by my own father. I may have been mafia royalty, but Damiano De Luca was the distant prince. Him, the conqueror; me, the conquered. He ruled the land I walked on, and it was his laws that governed my life.
It took me years to learn what I should have known from the start.
Twisted princes didn’t love.
And when they became kings, they destroyed.
There’s a degree of deception in silence.
Don Lemon
Sixteen Years Old
Sometimes, you know when catastrophe is about to strike you. A screech of tires. Oxygen masks shooting at you from above your airplane seat. The numbness spreading across your face before a stroke.
There were no warning signs for me.
My heart was calm when Angelo De Luca turned the corner of the East Wing hallway, seconds after showing me what would be my room for however long Papà’s punishment for me lasted.
My heart was calm when, not a minute later, I darted to the room next to mine, and my fingers twisted the door handle without a moment’s hesitation.
My heart was calm as I eased my way into the bedroom. The one that belonged to the secret De Luca son. Damiano, his dad had called him, not an ounce of affection in his voice.
I should have known better.
In this world, there was only one reason to hide a child if you were a mafia boss for one of the Five Syndicates. The thought of learning firsthand what was wrong with Angelo De Luca’s secret son should have scared me.
But in the rare moments I’d seen my father, he had taught me that fear was weakness, and weakness was death. It wasn’t a quaint lesson, nor was it a father’s honorable attempt at keeping his daughter safe.
It was a warning.
Against him.
He was the threat in my life. Always would be. I’d been here less than an hour, but every second I spent in Devils Ridge, Texas reminded me of that.
Don’t be weak.
You’re a Vitali.
Vitalis don’t feel fear.
Christ, a whole continent away, and Papà’s voice still plagued my mind. Usually, he inspired anger. Today, determination darted from my head to my toes as I began my search for a cell phone or landline in Damiano De Luca’s room.
Like my room next door, this room felt un-lived in. Unlike my room, someone had been living in this one for longer than all of one point two seconds.
Telltale signs of neglect painted the room. Crisp, clean sheets—untouched for who knew how long. Aged air—stale with a fading hint of aftershave. A sole eighteenth-century dresser, coated with a fine layer of dust.
I should have considered what that meant. That even the maids hadn’t entered this room in some time. I didn’t. Maman deserved to know that I’d seen Papà pounding into his secretary before he sent me to Texas to live with the De Lucas—without a phone and beleaguered by explicit instructions never to be in contact with one, lest I be given an opportunity to tattle to Maman.
I wasn’t the type to listen, but people were like scampering rats when it came to my family. Or maybe they were cult followers—frail and obeisant, followers begging for a command, all too happy to hide the electronics from me. This meant searching for a damn phone in foreign territory proved nearly impossible.
It startled me how much control Papà had over people, even an ocean away. As the head of the Vitali family, Papà was il condottiero. The leader. In layman’s terms, if the syndicate territories across the world were states and their bosses were governors, the Vitali family would be the federal government. And Papà? He’d be president.
Still, he may have made the rules for the mafia underworld, but I made my own rules. Those included doing all I could to defy his. Like finding a phone. I scoured the room, optically tracing every inch.
My heart was calm as failure met my eyes. There was a neat stack of laundry on the desk, a journal that peeked out from beneath the pillow-top mattress, and a box with north of twenty grand worth of Gurkha Black Dragon cigars tucked away in a built-in humidor beside the Alaskan king-size bed. But no phone.
Murmurs sounded from the hallway, and still, my heart was calm as I searched the room for a hiding place. Locked closet. Bathroom across the hall. Curtains tied so tightly together, even my thin waist couldn’t hide behind them. Four-poster bed with a bottom blocked off by 18th century wood.
Silly, naive Renata Vitali.
Would I ever learn to plan for the worst?
Yet, my heart was calm when the handle to the bedroom door twisted, and I realized there was nowhere to hide.
My heart was calm as I perched myself in the center of the bed, looking as ready for my first encounter with Damiano De Luca as I could in old designer sweats stitched for rebellion and a samurai bun that weathered the eight-hour private flight from Italy to Texas.
My heart was calm as I accepted the inevitability of discovery with grace.
My heart was calm.
My heart was calm.
My heart was calm.
Until I saw him for the first time, and it wasn’t.
Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense—self-deception.
Soren Kierkegaard
Sixteen Years Old
You’re a fighter, Renata.
Maman had drilled that into my head at a young age, and I’d always agreed. Never felt like there was another option. After all, why be weak when I could fight?
How arrogant of me to think I would always have the luxury of choice.
Angelo’s secret son—and I just knew it was him—had swung the door open, his eyes landing on mine in an instant. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.
But I sure did.
In a so-cliché-it-decimated-my-ego moment, my eyes widened, and my lips parted. Choice had been ripped away from me. There was no fighting my reaction, because I wasn’t equipped to handle this. To handle him.
Suddenly, I understood what Monet had felt when he’d destroyed his own art because it wasn’t perfect enough. I’d laughed it off in Art History class, but staring at Angelo’s son, I wasn’t laughing anymore. Every boy I’d ever lusted over proved inadequate preparation
for this moment. He was the indescribable, the je ne sais quoi people sought but didn’t dare imagine.
Angelo mentioned we’d be attending the same high school, but looking at him, I could hardly believe we were close in age. He towered in the door frame, his body already well above six feet. His muscles were lean but sinewy, and calling him a high school boy would be like calling my dad’s yacht a boat. Damiano De Luca didn’t look like a high school boy. Heck, he didn’t even look like any man I’d ever seen.
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