A surge of frustration swept through her. “So it’s back to me being a prisoner in my own life?”
“I wouldn’t look at it that way,” he countered smoothly. “Whether it’s because you are a Castiglione or because you are my wife, Gia, you are a target. As is Leo. It is a reality you need to face.”
Which she wouldn’t have needed if she was still in the Bahamas. A wet heat stung the back of her eyes. Blinking it back, she snatched a short, silk robe from the wardrobe and shrugged it on. Santo covered the distance between them, his slow, purposeful stride accelerating her pulse. Stopping in front of her, he stuck a hand against the frame of the dressing room door and blocked her exit when she would have stalked out.
His deliciously enticing aftershave worked its way into her head as she sank back against the wall, a heady combination of bergamot and lime infiltrating her senses. His tall muscular body blanketing her with a wicked heat, she focused her gaze on a place somewhere in the middle of his chest.
Long fingers crawled up her nape, slid into her hair to tilt up her chin. He studied her face with such a thorough appraisal, she felt utterly transparent. As if he could see how desperately she was melting inside. “What’s wrong, Gia?”
Frustration and fear and something else she was afraid to identify, something far more dangerous, bubbled up inside of her. “I am off balance, Santo. Lost. You’ve torn me away from a life I loved. Put me right back in the middle of this,” she said, waving a hand toward the window and its unparalleled view of Manhattan. “Am I simply supposed to walk back into everything that I was as if nothing has changed?”
“No,” he said evenly, “you need time to acclimatize. To establish a new life for yourself, which will be built around the family we create together.”
Her heart gave a bittersweet twinge. And what was that going to look like? She couldn’t see her mother right now, the one person who would have grounded her other than Delilah. The Di Fiores were hardly likely to be any more welcoming. She’d taken Santo’s son and run. Had deprived him of three years of his life. She couldn’t imagine they would understand.
And then there was her father, and the looming question of Leo. The political time bomb she carried.
She expelled a breath. Leaned back against the wall. “What happens when my father resurfaces? He’s going to hit the roof when he finds out what I’ve done.”
His expression hardened into one of pure determination. “I told you I will handle your father. Leave him to me.”
“How? How are you going to handle him? He isn’t simply going to play nicely because you ask him to, Santo. You know what he is.”
“You don’t need to know.” His delivery was flat. Icy cool. “I know exactly who and what your father is, Gia. I will deal with him. What you need to focus on is settling you and Leo into a new life. Getting your bearings back.”
She shot him a deadly look. “I am not a china doll.”
“Clearly not,” he said softly. “You took your child and walked away from one of the most powerful organized-crime families in the world. That took guts. But now it’s time to relinquish control and let me handle this.”
She inhaled a shaky breath. She wanted to do just that. Wanted to let him fix this as he’d fixed everything else in the past. But she felt so vulnerable, as if her soft underbelly had been exposed to the world again. And her father was a wild card no one could predict.
Santo ran a finger down the heated surface of her cheek, the slow caress rippling a reactionary path through her. “What else is going on in that head of yours?”
“I may have agreed to do this,” she said huskily, “but that doesn’t mean I am happy about it. You have turned my life upside down. Taken away everything I’ve built. I am angry with you. Furious.”
“Good,” he murmured. “That makes two of us. We can work through that. But I need all your feelings out in the open where I can see them, Gia. I can work with that—the icy shell not so much. And as far as you being angry with me?” He tipped his head to the side. “Honor it, wallow in it if you need to, but you are going to have to get over it, because we are going to make this marriage work.”
She swallowed hard, past the inevitability clogging her throat. His powerful length imparting a seductive heat, a faint darkness on his jaw where his stubble was beginning to show, the thick fringe of lashes over those beautiful mahogany eyes decadently tempting, he was far too close for comfort. Too close for her to think straight.
Her hands curled tighter at her sides. “I thought I would sleep with Leo tonight,” she blurted out. “It’s a strange place. He might get frightened.”
His gaze drifted over the heightened color in her cheeks. The accelerated beat of her pulse at the base of her throat. “I think that’s a good idea,” he said quietly, lifting his gaze back up to hers. “Sleep with him for a few nights—he might need the comfort. But just to be clear, I am not okay with the concept of separate beds because I think it creates a distance between us before we’ve even started. And since I intend for us to start this relationship off on the right foot, that means we share a bed together, sex or no sex. We build an intimacy between us, which includes you opening up and sharing those thoughts and fears of yours.”
The very concept of it made her brain freeze. She slicked her tongue over her lips in a nervous movement, Franco’s appraisal of her as “ice-cold” and “not worth the effort” filling her head. “I’m not sure I can do that.”
“You can,” he rejected flatly. “You merely choose not to. You’d prefer to live in that safe, self-protective world of yours that has shielded you from real life as long as I’ve known you. It’s how you’ve survived. But that isn’t going to work for us.”
She absorbed his utter implacability with a sinking heart. “Even if I can learn to open up, it’s not going to happen overnight.”
“I’m not asking for you to do it overnight. I’m merely telling you there is no more running and there is no more hiding. There is only going to be the truth between us, Gia, so get that through your head.”
CHAPTER FIVE
GIA DID HER best to acclimatize to her new life over the next few days. A stunningly warm early summer heat blanketed the city as temperatures soared into the high eighties. She and Leo put on shorts and played in the park under Benecio’s watchful eye while Santo worked, the two of them indulging in an afternoon ritual of ice cream and a dip in the spectacular terrace pool at the penthouse.
It was New York at its most glorious, the city transformed into a glittering, vibrant green jewel. It had an energy about it, an aura of excitement that Leo loved, regarding it all as a big adventure. But Gia missed the peace and tranquility of the islands. The simplicity of her life there. The job she’d loved so much. Her freedom. It was like a punch to the gut every time she thought about it.
Not to mention the fact that she was still so angry at Santo for taking it away from her, it was hard to find the peace she was looking for. She knew he was right—that she had to get over it if they were going to make this marriage work. But she wanted to wallow in it, to mourn what she’d lost, because it had meant everything to her to have that independence she’d fought so hard for.
And overshadowing it all was the news coverage of her father’s flight from justice. The papers were positioning it as a glamorous international intrigue—a tangle between two foreign governments. Her father, through his lawyer, insisted it was all a tactic on the US government’s part to expose holdings they imagined he had, but in reality, he did not. High drama played out for all to see.
It made her worry about her mother. How she was handling all of this. She was tough, she knew, because she’d had to be. She would have her family around her. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be reeling from it, her foundation rocked.
Meanwhile, in the shadow of it all, she was having dinner with the Di Fiore clan that evening, an event that di
dn’t ease her nerves. She had grown up with Nico and Lazzero. Had known them since they were teenagers. But this was different. She was afraid they wouldn’t understand the decisions she’d made when it came to Leo, exactly as Santo hadn’t.
She had tried on and discarded five outfits before Santo came home from work. Standing in front of the mirror in the dressing room scrutinizing her latest choice—a turquoise, off-the-shoulder dress with a ruffle at the hem—she heard him blow through the front door of the penthouse.
Leo’s excited greeting as he went running to meet him did something strange to her heart. If anything had felt right in all of this, it was the decision she’d made when it came to her son.
Every night, bar none, Santo had come home from work in time to have dinner as a family, then put Leo to bed, after which he would work until midnight with his grueling schedule. He was clearly committed to being the father his own hadn’t, as Leone Di Fiore had been so caught up in his high-powered Wall Street career in the early years, then later in the bottom of a bottle, Santo had only a few distant memories of the bond they’d once shared. It made her heart hurt to think of it. To watch him changing history.
Her husband breezed into the dressing room, having left Leo to his collection of NYC first-responder toy vehicles he’d come home with last night, much to her son’s delight. Dressed in a sharp navy suit with a pale yellow tie, with tawny blond stubble darkening his jaw, he looked so gorgeous he made her heart stutter in her chest.
She imagined the women of New York had spent the day watching him walk down the street drooling in his wake. And that was without the look he lavished on her, his dark, appreciative gaze taking in the flirty line of her short, feminine dress.
“You look amazing,” he murmured, bending to brush a kiss against her cheek. “I only need five minutes to get out of this monkey suit. It’s far too hot for this.”
Which was such a shame, she opined silently, more than a bit off balance at the sight of him. Santo stepped back and stuck his fingers into the knot of his tie. “How was your day?”
She gave as casual a shrug as she could manage. “The same. The park. Ice cream. The pool. I’m exhausted. So is Benecio.”
His mouth quirked. “Maybe we should switch. I sat through four hours of meetings this morning, spent my lunch debating our social-media strategy after one of our athletes decided to blow up Twitter by sending nude pictures to his girlfriend that were somehow leaked. Then,” he continued, stripping off the tie and dropping it on a chair, “the icing on the cake was my afternoon spent ironing out a manufacturing flaw with the Elevate design team. Not what I needed at this stage of the game.”
“Did you get it figured out?”
He lifted a brow. “The nude tornado or the potentially crippling flaw?”
“Both.”
“Yes.” He threw her one of those sexy smiles that could melt a woman’s knees as he made quick work of the buttons on his shirt. The smooth expanse of rippling, bronzed flesh he exposed made her stomach contract.
“I will want my career back,” she murmured, as a distraction more than anything else. “When Leo gets settled. I can only wander aimlessly around Central Park and eat ice cream for so long.”
“Of course,” he agreed smoothly. “But there’s no hurry. Meanwhile, you can focus on us.”
On the fact that he was now stripping off his dark trousers, revealing snug-fitting black boxers that left little to the imagination. Which brought every second, every minute of that explosive night they’d spent together, roaring back with crystal clarity. Because she remembered how amazing he looked. How virile. How incomparable. It was not what her strung-out nerves needed at the moment.
Dear God. She fumbled around for earrings to wear. Found some simple diamond teardrops that would enhance the feminine lines of the dress.
True to his word, Santo had given her the space she’d asked for. She’d been sleeping with Leo ever since that first night they’d come back, avoiding these kinds of intimacies. But sooner or later she was going to have to address what was between her and Santo.
Clad now in a pair of dark jeans and a black T-shirt that looked just as deadly on him as the suit had, clinging to his lean, hard body in all the right places, he propped himself against the dressing table, eyes on her. “You’re nervous.”
“A bit.” She refused to show just how nervous she was.
“Don’t be. You know Nico and Lazzero and you’ve met Chloe a few times. Chiara,” he added, “is amazing. You’ll love her.”
She sank her teeth into her lip. “What do they know about us? About Leo?”
“The truth. That I have a three-year-old son with you and that we are married. All they need to know. Nico and Chloe are thrilled that Jack will have a playmate.”
Which she had denied him for the past couple of years. A whirlwind of conflicting emotions sweeping through her, she presented her back to Santo so that he could do up the top clasp of her dress. They weren’t helped by his close proximity, which only got worse when his fingers, having deftly dispensed with the tiny hook and eye closure, trailed a path down her spine to her waist, sensitizing every centimeter of flesh he touched.
Her bare thighs brushed against the rough denim that encased his length and his palms heated her skin, making her awareness of him sky-high—it was sensory overload. “Stop thinking about the past,” he said softly. “Think about the now, Gia. The right decisions we are making. About this fresh start we have.”
Her skin fizzled beneath his touch, a golden heat invading her blood. Her eyes fixed on his in the mirror, a luminous green snagging a slumberous black. She couldn’t deny how tempting the thought was to believe that they could make this work. That somewhere in the midst of all of this insanity, of the mistakes she had made, of the gulf that now stretched between them, something good could emerge.
But there was also fear. Fear that clawed at her insides at making herself that vulnerable ever again.
He bent his head and pressed a kiss to the delicate skin of her neck. An involuntary shiver raked through her. She moved closer in an instinctive reaction. His hands dropped lower on her hips to hold her more firmly against him. More of those fleeting, butterfly-light kisses pressed down the length of her throat until it felt as if her skin was on fire.
He tightened his hands around her hips and turned her around. Gia sank back against the dressing table. Her pulse a frantic, staccato beat at her throat she couldn’t seem to control, she read the dark intent in his gaze before he lowered his head to hers. A mad anticipation fizzled through her, sizzling her blood, just before a tiny, dark-haired dynamo launched himself between them.
“Wee-oh, wee-oh,” cried Leo, waving his fire truck in the air.
The heat in Santo’s eyes cooled, replaced by a reluctant amusement. “The very epitome of an inopportune moment,” he drawled. “One we will pick up later.”
He bent to scoop his son off the floor. Her cheeks scarlet, her head a muddled mess, Gia went and looked for her shoes rather than let her mind go down that path.
* * *
Nico and Chloe’s Westchester estate sat on the banks of the Hudson, the magnificent Georgian home sparkling in the late afternoon sun. Situated on three acres of lush, picturesque landscape, it offered unparalleled privacy and endless vistas across the water. Private gates opened to the main residence, which was surrounded by multiple stone terraces and an in-ground pool.
It took Leo about five minutes to warm up to his new cousin, Jack, a gorgeous little dark-haired boy with a big personality, before her son was off and running, Jack’s nanny in tow. Which was a bit unnerving, because deprived of her son’s lively presence, Gia felt completely under the microscope.
Chloe and Chiara were amazing—warm and wonderful. Nico and Lazzero, on the other hand, were guarded with her. Polite, but distinctly cool. Particularly the aloof, hard-to-know Lazzero. Which
wasn’t entirely unexpected. The three brothers had always been close, given the way their family had shattered apart. It would take time to earn back their trust.
A hand fisted her chest. But hadn’t that always been the way? Guilty until proven innocent? Never had anyone given her the benefit of the doubt—she’d had to earn it every single time. Prove herself. This would be no different.
She pushed back her shoulders and absorbed their scrutiny with an unflinching look. Chloe, quiet and lovely, soon took her under her wing, suggesting she and Chiara join her for a glass of wine on the deck while the men threw a football around with the boys.
A brilliant scientist who’d developed some of the world’s most popular perfumes at Evolution, the cosmetics company she ran with Nico, Chloe told them about the new fragrance she was debuting at the Met Young Patrons party, one of the biggest nights of the year. It would go into all the gift bags for the influencers in attendance, but she’d send Gia home with a bottle of it tonight to try.
Chiara, a talented, up-and-coming clothing designer, was the polar opposite of Chloe. Stunning with her dark Latina looks and fiery personality, Gia could understand why the impossible-to-catch Lazzero had fallen for her.
Alight with the news that her hip line of street clothing, which had been garnering so much attention among the city’s fashionistas, had just been picked up by one of the largest department stores in the city, Chiara was brimming with excitement.
“I am dressing a few people for the Met party,” she buzzed. “Speaking of which,” she said, tipping her glass at Gia, “Abigail Wright is going to flip her lid when she hears Santo is married. Just last week she was telling me she is not over him. That she’s only dating Carl O’Brien, the quarterback of the Stars, to make him jealous.”
Abigail Wright. Gia’s brain sifted through a mental list of who was who. Miss Arkansas. Abigail Wright. The paragon of virtue she was sure she could never live up to. Who was apparently dating New York’s most famous quarterback.
Married for His One-Night Heir Page 7