by Bethany-Kris
The bastard.
God, she loved this man.
“The food should be here soon, if you want to wash up or anything,” Gian told her.
Cara nodded, thinking she should do just that. Chris hadn’t given her much time to do anything except throw on something appropriate after she’d arrived home from classes. “I’ll be quick.”
“Bathrooms are toward the back, bella.”
A quick kiss later, that was all but ignored by the other men at the table, and Cara headed for the bathrooms. She made fast work of washing up her hands, and did a check of her little bit of makeup in the mirror, finding her lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara had held up remarkably well throughout the day. She fluffed her curls with her fingers, resetting some of the waves, and headed back out to the table.
She nearly rammed into a familiar man as she rounded the hallway corner leading back out onto the restaurant’s main floor. For a brief second, as she apologized out of habit for not paying attention, she hoped he wouldn’t recognize her.
She knew that was a foolish wish.
Of course, Frankie would recognize her face. Her features were a perfect match to her dead twin’s. And from what information she had gathered from Gian and Lea’s online, private journals, the two had been involved for quite a while. It still made her a bit uncomfortable, given the circumstances of their relationship, but Cara was now sadder about it, more than anything else.
She wished Lea had told her.
“Cara,” Frankie said, taking a wide step back.
“Frankie.”
He shifted from foot to foot, shooting a glance over his shoulder before looking back to her. Nervousness wrote heavily all over his actions.
Cara cleared her throat, waving toward the semi-private area. “I should get back to my table.”
“Sure, but first, uh … could I apologize?”
“For what?”
Frankie shrugged one shoulder. “A while back—at the club when you showed up. I probably came across as rude, and that wasn’t my intention. You shocked me, and your face, it really took me off-guard. I’d seen you from afar before, with Lea, but never up close like that. When she said identical, she meant that quite literally, I guess.”
He offered her a tentative smile that Cara returned. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not, Cara. I am sorry.”
She nodded quickly. “Thank you.”
“How are you?” he asked, posing the question with a careful tone. “Don’t feel like you have to tell me, if you don’t want to. You certainly don’t owe me anything, but in a way, I feel like I might know you. She talked about you often, even though we tried to be casual and keep the personal shit out of it all.”
“She’s doing well,” came a deep voice from behind Frankie.
Cara’s gaze flew to Gian, who had clearly come looking for her, and she smiled a bit wider. “I am. I’m doing a lot better now.”
Frankie murmured something fast in Italian to Gian, who shrugged in response, as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
“All is fine,” he assured Frankie. “As long as she says so.”
“It is,” Cara said. “Thank you again, Frankie.”
Gian side-stepped the man as Frankie headed down the hall toward the men’s bathroom. “I need to make a call, Cara. Can you find your way back to the table without running into someone else?”
She laughed at his teasing. “I’m sure I can.”
“All right, get going. The food is waiting.”
He dropped a kiss to her forehead before he headed down the hallway, bypassing the bathrooms altogether and exiting through a back door into what looked like an alleyway.
Cara wasn’t all that interested in sharing a table with her cousin and Stephan while Gian was gone, but she sat back down with a smile and surveyed the pasta and salad dish that had been set out for her.
“What the hell took so long?” Constantino asked.
“And where’s Gian?” Stephan added.
“I had a conversation with someone,” Cara replied, “and Gian is making a phone call.”
“Who?”
Cara glanced at her cousin. “Pardon?”
“Who were you talking to?”
Jesus.
Why were people so nosy?
“I ran into Frankie coming out of the back,” she said, offering little else. Constantino should know enough to know who Frankie was—or had been—to Lea.
Constantino made a noise that sounded unpleasant under his breath.
Stephan shot his friend a look. “Relax, man.”
“These donnas make it fucking hard,” Constantino muttered. “First the one, now the other. It’s a damn shame, like they don’t even care how they look or how they’re making the rest of us look.”
“I beg your pardon?” Cara asked sharply.
Constantino paid her no mind, still going on to Stephan in his way. “You know what I mean, Stephan. You’re not quiet about what you do running around with that girl of yours, but at least Lea had the fucking decency to keep out of sight when she was with Frankie, for the most part. This isn’t any different, no matter what anybody says.”
“Constantino,” Cara snapped.
Her cousin’s gaze cut to hers. “What?”
She wasn’t entirely sure what Constantino was going on about, but she certainly didn’t fucking like it. She definitely wasn’t going to sit back and let him compare her relationship with Gian to the one Lea had been involved with, where Frankie was concerned. She didn’t see how the two could possibly compare. It was like apples and oranges.
“If you have something to say to me, then say it,” she told her cousin. “But keep in mind, your opinion of me, my business, and what or who I choose to do are none of your fucking concern.”
Constantino rolled his eyes. “That’s exactly the fucking problem. You don’t care that everyone else is looking at what you’re doing, and seeing it for exactly what it is, Cara. Playing a man’s whore, nothing else. It’s shameful.”
Cara felt like he had slapped her. “Why am I playing any man’s whore? Because I’m not like every other principessa della mafia, getting married the first chance I can, and making sure every little fucking thing I do is approved by a man in my family? Is that why? You know what, don’t bother answering.”
She stood from the table, already done and wanting to get the hell out of there. She could take a fucking cab home, for all she cared. She wouldn’t, however, be sitting there for another second longer.
“Go fuck yourself,” she told Constantino before leaving.
The first thing Gian noticed when he returned to the table was that Cara was absent. Right off the bat, that put him on edge. Constantino ate his food with heavy forkfuls, as though he didn’t have a problem, while Stephan picked at his plate and chatted away on his cell phone.
“Where’s Cara?” Gian asked.
He didn’t even bother to sit down.
Constantino shrugged. “She left.”
“Say that again.”
It didn’t even come out as a question.
His friend let out a heavy sigh, dropping his fork to his plate with a loud clatter. “I said, she left, Gian.”
Gian reached for the cell phone in his suit jacket, but hesitated before pulling it out. “And why the hell would she leave, exactly?”
Constantino made a dismissive noise under his breath, going back to his meal. “She didn’t like what she was told, I suppose.”
What. The. Fuck.
Gian sincerely hoped this was not another incident like he’d had with Constantino at the hospital, but it was looking worse and worse by the second. “I’m going to give you ten seconds to explain what in the fuck that means before I drag your ass out of this restaurant and beat you fucking senseless.”
Made men didn’t fight.
It was a rule.
Gian no longer cared for that particular rule.
Especially not when Cara was involved.
&
nbsp; Stephan cleared his throat, dragging Gian’s attention to him for the moment. The man quickly said goodbye to whoever he was speaking to on his cell phone, hung it up, and put it in his pocket. Standing from the table, Stephan dropped his napkin down and pulled money from his wallet, letting it fall by his glass of water.
“And where are you going?” Gian asked.
Stephan jerked his head in Constantino’s direction. “As much as I like this stupid fuck, sometimes he goes too far.”
“Hey—”
“You do,” Stephan interrupted Constantino. “There are things you need to not talk about, or give your opinion, and a guy’s girl is one of them.”
“Is that where you stand on the line for this?” Constantino asked.
Stephan nodded sharply. “You’re damn right it is. Call me when you get yourself straightened out, Constantino. And make sure you apologize. Even if it is Gian.”
Gian let that barely-hidden insult brush off his shoulders, but only because he had one fucking idiot to deal with for the moment, and he wasn’t in the mood to handle two. Besides, Stephan never made an effort to hide his dislike of Gian, in the grand scheme of things. Constantino, on the other hand, had been doing some pretty underhanded shit that left Gian fucking unsettled.
Like whatever this was.
“My apologies,” Stephan said as he passed Gian by to leave.
Gian let him go, never budging an inch, even when Constantino went back to eating his food again. That only irritated the shit out of Gian more.
“Sit, eat,” Constantino demanded. “We’ll talk this out. I fucked up, big deal. It happens.”
Gian didn’t sit. “How did you fuck up, though?”
“She mentioned running into Frankie.” Constantino waved a hand as if to dismiss what he was about to say next. “I might have mentioned that it doesn’t look good on our family to have her running around with you, doing what she’s doing, like she is. Just like it didn’t look good when Lea was involved with Frankie a while back.”
Gian bristled all over. “And you think this is even remotely the same?”
Constantino, stone-faced and dry-toned, said, “It’s exactly the same.”
“You’re wrong.”
“No, I’m not, and I’m within my rights to say so, if I want to. She’s a woman of my family, regardless of where her brother is. So, who gives a shit if her father is dead, and her brother is too busy finishing out a war in Chicago to look after his sister’s business? I’ll speak for them—what you’ve done with my cousin is a fucking shame, Gian.”
“You’re way out of line,” Gian murmured, forcing himself to keep his tone level.
“You know I’m not. Fact is, Cara is now good for what you’ve used her for, and very little fucking else, man. That’s the sad part. Nobody else will ever look at her and think, shit, wife material or anything of the sort. You’ve ruined that, and I don’t even think she knows.”
“Constantino, I warned you once, didn’t I? I warned you—friends or not—I would fucking hurt you, if you spoke badly about Cara again.”
Constantino dropped his fork again, standing from the table and moving to stand toe-to-toe with Gian. Neither man moved a muscle, neither looking away from the other. It took every ounce of willpower Gian had left in his body to keep his hands down at his sides, clenched into tight fists he was ready to throw.
“What’s worse, Gian, is when you are boss at the end of all this, when it’s all said and done, she won’t matter. Not for more than what you’ve already used her for, and maybe even for less. She won’t be allowed to matter. No whore—”
Gian was pretty fucking sure he broke a knuckle on impact of punching Constantino in his ignorant, disrespectful fucking face. He barely felt the pain, and since he felt like one punch wasn’t good enough, he landed another two, back-to-back, sending his friend sprawling to the floor of the restaurant.
Constantino wasn’t knocked out, but he was pretty damn close. Gian figured that had been enough to make his point—he didn’t need to do more, not when the guy was now bleeding and groaning on his back like an idiot.
Gian checked his knuckle.
Not broken.
Dislocated.
He gritted his teeth, and reset the knuckle as he heard a server approach from behind. With a single wave, the server retreated. One of the many benefits of owning the place, he supposed.
Bending down, Gian turned Constantino’s head to make the man look at him. “I warned you, man. I won’t be doing it again. We’re done. You mean less than shit to me at this point. And unless you pull your head out of your fucking ass and work out a damn good apology for this one, you’re going to remain that way. It doesn’t matter to me, one way or the other.”
Constantino laughed hoarsely. “Just tell her the truth, Gian. See what she says.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
Gian knocked on Cara’s apartment door, ignoring the pain that bloomed in his swollen, bruised knuckle. She hadn’t answered his calls as he’d left the restaurant, or the ones that he’d made on the drive over. A quick check with Chris, who had been designated to follow Cara for safety reasons again, had confirmed that she was at home.
Chris didn’t have more information to offer, though.
“Cara, open the door,” Gian said quietly. “I know you’re here, mon ange.”
Silence answered him back. He understood why. It still hurt like hell. He’d take ten dislocated knuckles over her rejection. Funny, how love worked that way.
Gian knocked again. “Cara.”
“Did you know that in Italian, cara means dear?”
Her quiet question filled him with a sense of relief. She hadn’t opened the door, but it was a start. Gian would take it.
“Of course, I know,” Gian said. “Mia bella cara, amore.”
He heard the lock unlatch on the door a second before Cara slowly pulled it open. She stood on the other side, the apartment’s darkness shadowing her in the hallway light. She had lost the dress from earlier, and the heels, too. Clean-faced, any makeup had been removed, and she’d tossed her wild hair up into a messy bun. An over-sized T-shirt fell at her mid-thigh, and she looked ready for bed.
“I’m sorry I left without at least waiting for you,” she said, crossing her arms under her breasts and staring off to the side. “I got angry and I only wanted to leave. So I did.”
“It’s fine.”
Or, it was now.
Gian understood why. He had simply reacted in a different way than Cara had, perhaps a less than proper way, considering his status. Even Cara had walked away when she was offended, Gian had definitely not.
“I’m sorry for whatever it was that Constantino said to you,” Gian said. “He has no business putting his opinions in where they’re neither wanted, nor warranted. And trust that he absolutely knows that, now.”
Cara nodded. “Sure.”
“You don’t sound sure, sweetheart.”
She looked up at him, sadness coloring her blue eyes. “Did he have a point, though?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“Really? Because if he feels the need to say that running around with you looks bad on me, and if my uncle felt the need to warn me away from you, then why not think something is wrong with it? And what is it that’s so wrong? I don’t understand. I’m not doing anything wrong, am I?”
“No,” Gian rushed to say. “There’s nothing wrong with this—with us. There never has been. Some people have their opinions because they’re stuck in a different time, with different rules. Women should do as they’re told, as they’re expected to do, and not what they want to do. I’m not of that mindset, Cara.”
She frowned.
Her sadness hurt him as badly as her silence.
“And who the fuck cares about those people, anyway?” Gian asked. “I sure as hell don’t. I only concern myself with what you think and feel, not them. They get no say in this or us. None at all.”
“Then why did I l
et what someone else thought bother me so fucking much?”
“Because you’re allowed to have feelings, Cara. You’re allowed to demand respect from other human beings. No one has any right to make you feel less than them, especially when they don’t know who you are in your heart. They don’t know you. Not like I do.”
“You really do know the right things to say.”
“I say the truth, love.”
Gian stepped forward, opening his arms to test the waters. Cara gave him one of her small, sweet smiles before letting him wrap her in his embrace. Slowly, he walked her backward enough that he could kick the door closed behind him. Tangling his hand into her soft curls, he tilted her head back far enough to steal a kiss from her pretty mouth.
“Anyone who even thinks to breathe a bad word about you in my direction deserves every fucking thing they get,” Gian told her, his calm voice belying his inner rage that had finally simmered a bit. “You’re mine, Cara. I love you. Nothing else matters.”
It was shocking to him in that moment how savage and brutal his love could be. That, without care or consideration, he would willingly and happily hurt someone he thought of as a friend simply because they had hurt her. The possessiveness that nearly always filled him whenever Cara was too far away was suddenly settled when she was in his arms, and his restlessness finally drifted away when he could touch her again.
This wasn’t wrong.
He wasn’t going to let her, or anyone else, say otherwise.
“Fuck,” Gian snarled, pulling his mouth away from Cara’s as she laughed. “I’m going to kill whoever that is.”
“No, you won’t.”
The persistent knocking on her apartment door had effectively cock-blocked him in the worst way. He had just gotten her out of bed, and ready to sit down and eat something—a feat in itself, where Cara and mornings were concerned. He thought a nice fuck on the kitchen table would be a reward for his good deed before breakfast, but apparently, that wasn’t going to be the case.
Cara pushed Gian away, and jumped off the table, pulling the over-sized shirt down her thighs a bit more. “It’s probably Chris.”