by Anya Nowlan
“You don’t really need me to explain, do you? You take me from my home, against my will, and fly me out here to… to what? So I could meet your soon-to-be wife? So your mother could tell me that I might be getting my head lopped off for hiding your son? To scare the living daylights out of me?”
“You’re pacing,” he said idly, crossing to one of the windows facing the courtyard and glancing out.
Giovanni was still standing there, his arms crossed over his chest, looking to be putting up a good front to the heated questioning of Rossella and Amira. Antonio would have to talk to both of the women, it was inevitable, but at the moment, he had more important things to do. Like pay attention to his mate, and his heir, and… well, himself.
“I had you brought to me because you have my son. My son should not be kept from his family, from his title… from his destiny,” Antonio said, shrugging his shoulders.
The line about destiny was something so deeply ingrained in him by his father that he couldn’t help but cringe slightly when he uttered the words. He’d never thought it would be so easy to parrot the words of the late alpha of the Capirelli family, especially when Antonio had never sought to take up the mantle so soon.
“I did not keep him from you,” Julie huffed, crossing her arms tighter around her, almost looking like she was cradling herself rather than trying to simply hold in her aggravation. “There was never a question about what that night was supposed to be, not in my head, anyway. I was not fooled into thinking that there could be anything between us beyond that evening together, and you did everything to confirm that.”
A twinge of remorse snaked through him, followed just as closely by the vivid images of the one night he’d had Julie in his arms. There had been something so delicate, so fragile about her from the moment he’d met her, hidden underneath an exterior that told the world that she had no weaknesses. She was an amazing little thing, a perfect jewel made better by her carefully concealed flaws, that had fascinated him.
It was supposed to be a night of simple passion. When he’d set his eyes on her for the first time, one too many whiskeys had been burning in his gut, pushing him into recklessness. One day before his arranged engagement was to be made official… One day before he’d lose the freedom he’d always held precious.
Julie was supposed to be an act of rebellion. Taking a woman who wasn’t even a dragon, but a lowly human, to his villa and fucking her on every surface he could find, was supposed to be a quiet ‘fuck you’ to the ways of his brood, and the heavy mantle that would be set upon his shoulders soon. But it had turned out to be so much more.
“Did you think I would not want to know?” Antonio asked, trying futilely to brush the strands of memory out of his head.
Did I have her in this study? he wondered. I must have.
“I thought I got pregnant from a one-night stand that should have never happened, and that whatever happened next was my responsibility. I still think that. Tony is mine, and to me, he is not a burden. Do you… well…”
Julie averted her gaze from him, looking at the child on the floor. Her lips curved in a gentle smile despite her anger, her features softening from the barely constrained frustration that seemed to be keeping her going. The frayed edges of exhaustion were clear upon her.
Antonio wanted nothing more than to go to her and kiss the tiredness, the stress, the uncertainty out of her.
So he did.
He crossed the distance between them in a couple of long strides. Julie turned toward him, looking up at him with those gorgeous green eyes of hers just in time for him to pull her to him and press his lips to hers.
She tasted like freedom, and like bad decisions that led to the best of consequences. He slipped one hand along her neck and cradled the back of her head as he claimed her in his tight hold, his lips eagerly exploring hers. There was reluctance at first, though she didn’t shy away, but when her lips parted in a moan, Antonio’s world fell away.
His tongue slipped between her pink lips and tasted her mouth, making the dragon rumble out a long, possessive growl in his chest. Her short, curvy body seemed to meld against his perfectly, and it took everything he had to keep from picking her up and carrying her to the first table that he could, to lay her down there and make her scream in pleasure for him as he had time and time again on that sole night they’d shared.
It was Tony’s presence that made Antonio control himself, to rein his desire in to only a wild lick of flame instead of the all-consuming inferno that he felt inside. She was sweet, and fiery, and all his and he couldn’t believe he’d ever let her step out of this house.
He’d known that she was his mate then, and he knew it now.
And just as he’d known then, he knew now that despite it all, they were doomed to be miserable.
He broke the kiss, leaving Julie’s head still cocked back, her eyes hooded as she seemed to revel in the aftermath of the unexpected kiss. The moment her eyes fluttered open, she took a step back and smacked him across the cheek, hard.
Or what counted as hard for a human female smacking a grown dragon shifter. She probably hurt herself more than she did him.
Tony splatted his palms together, reproducing the sound the smack had made.
“Splat!” he hollered, as Antonio rubbed his cheek with bemusement.
“Did that make you feel better?” he asked, glancing from Tony to Julie, who had backed away another couple of steps.
She’d put a high-backed chair between them, as if that would keep him away if he chose to grab her in his arms again.
“The kiss or the smack?” she asked, her lips thinned into a line.
“Both. Either,” he offered with a shrug, crouching down next to Tony and offering the boy his hand.
Tony grabbed his fingers. His grip was strong.
Good.
“No,” she deadpanned. “But I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from ever doing that again.”
“A promise I cannot make,” Antonio murmured, chuckling as Tony hauled himself up and started patting his face with his short, stubby fingers, as if learning the contours of it.
“How would your betrothed feel if she knew you were kissing another woman?” Julie asked, obviously trying to get a rise out of him.
“She would be disappointed that I kissed another woman before I ever did her, I would imagine,” Antonio said with a shrug, scooping Tony up in his arms.
When he righted himself, the boy securely sitting on one forearm, he was met with pure confusion in Julie’s eyes. He cocked a brow at her, only to have it poked by Tony, barely missing his eye.
“You… what?”
“It holds no importance. You are the mother of my child. I have done far more than simply kiss you before, or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” she said, her brows furrowing into a frown.
“Good, then you should not be surprised if I sought to claim what is mine once again,” he said, turning to walk to the door.
His mind was made up. Julie was here, and so was his child, and it would stay that way. Though, earnestly, Antonio wasn’t entirely certain if he could have let her go even if Giovanni had only brought back her, and that tight, nagging feeling that there was a piece of him out there that he didn’t know about had been nothing but the disillusioned thinking of a desperate dragon.
“I’m not going to stay,” Julie sputtered, rushing to catch up with him. “And I am certainly not going to do… that with you again. I’m not going to be some mistress, some concubine stuck in a tower, waiting for your next whim.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Antonio scoffed, unlocking the door and leading the three of them out of there. “The villa has no towers.”
Five
Julie
The room looked a lot different without Antonio in it.
She’d only just gotten the door closed after him, when she already wished she hadn’t. Antonio had brought her to the room that they’d slept in that one fateful night, when she�
�d found herself in the arms of a dragon of a man. Of course she hadn’t known it then.
Maybe I should have guessed. No ‘mere mortal’ could live in this kind of obvious wealth.
Julie was still reeling from the kiss, and what Antonio had told her after, and she didn’t know what to start unraveling first. This was the first moment she’d been allowed to take a breath for herself, without a Capirelli right there to count her heartbeats, and she was as disoriented as she was perplexed.
“Come on, honey. You must be exhausted,” Julie said, cradling Tony in her arms.
Antonio had been reluctant to leave them, but she’d argued that after a transcontinental flight and seeing his father and extended family for the first time, Tony needed a nap. And he wasn’t the only one. The fact that he’d brought them to this room, that he had to unlock it unlike the rest of the many rooms in the ginormous villa, and that it looked like it had not changed at all since she’d been in there last, all stirred up way too many feelings in her.
She walked to the bed and slipped off her shoes, loving the way her toes dug into the soft, fur rug in front of the columned bed. Gently, she maneuvered herself and Tony onto the high mattress, rearranging the pillows slightly to make a makeshift barrier for Tony. The boy barely stirred as she set him down, sleeping soundly.
When her back hit the mattress, a kind of exhaustion washed over her that she could hardly put into words. It was like for the first time in a long time, it felt safe to sleep. Truthfully, she hadn’t had a decent night’s rest in forever. At first, she’d blamed it on being a side-effect of the pregnancy. Later, she thought that it was because she constantly listened in on whether Tony was sleeping soundly.
Now, she got the eerie feeling that it might have just been the fact that Antonio wasn’t close. Knowing that he couldn’t be more than a hundred feet away from her at any time however was oddly comforting.
That’s the spirit. Praise your captor for your brain being clearly screwed up.
She closed her eyes and try as she might, the kiss came back to the forefront of her thoughts. The way his lips pressed against hers – firm, yet gentle, unyielding in their desire, yet so careful to give her the same. The way his hands roamed across her body, making every nerve ending stand on edge.
It was just as good as she’d remembered it. And she sort of wished it wasn’t. At least then, it would have been easier to hate him.
Though angry at him for uprooting her like that, without even the courtesy of asking her to come – though she wasn’t sure if she’d come, really – she felt an odd kind of peace within her. What it was, exactly… well, maybe she could figure it out after she slept a little. Nothing couldn’t be made better by a nap, right?
“””
Apparently, naps couldn’t fix everything.
After sleeping for what felt like ages, Julie was awoken by Tony, tugging on her hair. It took even her sleep-addled brain less than a moment to realize that what was bugging Tony had to be the same thing that was chewing at her – hunger. Scooping up the boy, and yawning as she did, Julie wandered out of the bedroom and closed the door carefully behind her.
“Time for another adventure,” she whispered to Tony.
It was dark outside, but since Giovanni had grabbed her cellphone after they’d landed in Italy, Julie had no idea what time it was. She remembered from her earlier and far more voluntary trip to Italy that night fell quickly there, the time between dusk and darkness was a short one. For all she knew, it could just be early in the evening still.
Wandering around the house, heading toward her faint memory of where the kitchen might have been, she reveled in the way Tony took in the sights. The boy’s head was a swivel, looking from one statue, or painting, or piece of grand antique furniture, to another. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but the flecks of gold in his eyes seemed to be growing, too.
So much I don’t know about dragons… Is this normal? she wondered.
Julie kept a careful ear out for any movement, preferring not to run into any of the other family members before she could fortify herself with some dinner. When she did finally find the kitchen, she breathed a sigh of relief, having managed to pass the gauntlet of possible dragons successfully.
She found the kitchen empty, like she remembered it.
“I would think you’d have endless servants around,” she’d said when Antonio had snuck her in through the back door and led her to the kitchen for a drink of wine and a midnight dinner of bread and cheese.
“I prefer being alone when I can. Taking care of yourself is an art easily lost on a man with… means. I’d rather not become one,” he’d said.
Julie had always thought that he’d meant more than he’d let on by what he said then, but she was relieved that the kitchen staff was missing this time as well. She settled Tony down on the pristinely clean tiled floor, before looking for food that would fill them both.
A quick scan provided her with some apple puree and fixings for a sandwich and a drink of water, which would be more than enough. She settled on a seat with Tony and fed him slowly, the boy losing all of his usual finicky tendencies with food this time. Either he was more famished than he’d let on, or being around fully grown dragons was doing him good.
Julie didn’t question her blessings.
She was just about to bite into her sandwich when a voice behind her made her cringe.
“You’re still here,” Rossella said, an obvious sneer in her tone.
“So it appears,” Julie said, biting into her sandwich after that.
If she was going to be in for another bit of confusing and unnecessary drama, she might as well be well-fed for it.
“I would have thought that he would have sent you back to whatever dusty hole you came out of,” Rossella said lightly, pouring herself a glass of white wine.
“One would imagine, wouldn’t they,” Julie replied cheerfully, shrugging her shoulders between bites.
Tony was busy licking the spoon of the last of the apple puree, and tossing grumpy looks at Rossella. He’d certainly gotten his frowns from his father.
“You’re not going to get away with it, you know,” Rossella said, her voice light and chittery.
“Get away with what, exactly?”
Why am I even bothering to react to her? My problem is with Antonio… Though I guess if it means I could get home faster, it might be worth it, Julie thought, finding herself considering the lithe woman who sidled into a seat across from her with some curiosity.
She was certainly a beauty, and it wasn’t difficult to see why any man would like having Rossella around. Plush lips, hair that seemed to catch the light whenever she moved, and those regal features of hers would speak to any man. Yet there was a kind of bitterness in her that seemed to twist and contort those features immediately.
Then again, Julie wasn’t exactly unbiased in her current opinion.
“You’re not going to take him from me,” Rossella said firmly.
Julie couldn’t help but scoff.
“You say that as if you think I want him. He abducted me, remember? I didn’t exactly go out of my way to find him. In fact, if you could tell him, or his mule of a brother, to shove me on the first flight out of here, I’d be much obliged.”
It should have sounded right, but it didn’t. Not all of it, anyway.
For all intents and purposes, Julie should have been chomping at the bit to get out of here. She had, after all, been taken against her will. Yet, something, and she wasn’t sure what, made her want to stay a little longer. Maybe the kiss? Maybe the way Antonio looked at Tony, and how Tony looked at him?
It’s just because I want Tony to know his father, she decided off the cuff.
It had to be that, right? Why else would she be staring down an obviously pissed off dragon, who would have preferred her head on a platter, and not running in honest, reasonable terror right now?
“He won’t let you go,” Rossella said morosely, slumping in the seat i
n a particularly un-ladylike fashion.
Julie frowned, scooping at the sides of the apple puree jar and handing the spoon back to Tony.
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you have that,” Rossella said darkly, motioning toward Tony.
“He’s a human being,” Julie bristled. “Not some sort of a thing to point at.”
“He’s not a human being. He’s a dragon. A dragon with Capirelli blood. As long as he lives, he will never again be far from these lands.”
Rossella’s gorgeous gown seemed crumpled suddenly and her eyes flashed full gold, giving her face a sunken look against the colors of the dress. Her expression was grim, making Julie worry despite herself. Generally, the last person she would take seriously was a scorned, peeved woman, but in this case… well, things clearly were a little more complicated than Julie could imagine, right?
She still wasn’t sure what the deal was with Rossella and Antonio. Had the female dragon not been threatening the safety of her child, perhaps Julie would have been more inclined to question her about it.
“I understand that you’re a dragon, but I am more than willing to sock you if you threaten my child,” Julie seethed, slicking her tongue across her lips.
Rossella tossed her head back in mirthless laughter, her long fingers twirling the stem of her wine glass.
“I am not threatening your child. I am simply telling you what it true. He has Antonio’s blood in him, so he will always be tied to these lands, and these dragons. You, however, do not have to. I understand that the firstborn of a dragon will be dear to him, even if he is… illegitimate, but I believe it is something that we could learn to live with. If the circumstances were right.”
“What are you saying?” Julie asked, feeling markedly uncomfortable now.