He fixes his eyes on me, watching me more intently and with more interest than I think I’ve ever been watched. Having those eyes like blue-hot flames focused on me is my first taste of his drug, and it’s the moment I know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to be his. No boundary I wouldn’t shatter. At the same time, a kind of cold hopelessness grips me in the chest. He’s going to laugh me out of the shop. Worse, he’s going to look at me like an idiot and take his eyes off of me for good. He’ll have forgotten any of this happened within seconds.
Just do it, Ana. Grow some balls.
“This is going to sound completely crazy, but…”
2
Angelo
I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend just for a few minutes. Please,” she says.
I look down at all five-foot nothing of her. Thick red hair in a loose ponytail. Smooth, porcelain skin. Lips thick as sin and flushes red like her cheeks. And those eyes… They’re a perfect blue to go with her hair, and the skin beneath them is tinged with red, like she’s been crying or she’s about to.
When I don’t respond right away, she shoots a nervous look over her shoulder toward a black Rolls-Royce idling outside. Nice car. Expensive car.
I let her request marinate for a few long, unhurried moments, enjoying the thought of it. I have rules, though. I don’t do relationships. Commitments are weaknesses. Chinks in the armor to be exploited by a cunning enemy. And yet…
I want to have her. I’m not sure how I can say, but I can tell there’s something profoundly different about her. Maybe it’s just the hideous dress she wears or the innocent defiance in her eyes. It might even be the car idling ominously outside. What I do know is that I’m already willing to bend my rules for her. Just for a little while, at least.
I look back at her and make my decision. It’s an easy one.
I slide my hand around her, letting it fall to her ass where I take a generous, greedy squeeze.
She gasps and melts into me, putting her small hands up against my chest to brace herself, and in that moment, I know I’m in trouble. Her hands feel small and warm against me. Delicate. It makes me want to wrap her in my arms and hold her to keep the world away from her, to protect her and never let go.
Stupid. So fucking stupid, Angelo. Just walk away. Don’t drag her into your world. Don’t poison her. Let her leave.
I should. But I’m too selfish to let her get away. I know I’d only spend the rest of my life wondering what she would’ve tasted like, wondering how sweet her moans would’ve sounded in my ear, how hot and wet her breath would be against my neck when she came for me again and again.
“Why pretend?” I ask, tilting her chin up to me with my forefinger. I take those sweet, plump lips in mine. She tastes as good as she looks, and when my tongue flicks into her mouth, hers swirls back against mine, hot and hungry.
I was only planning on a quick kiss, but fuck. I’d take a casual kiss with this girl over the best sex I’ve ever had. I pull her closer, not caring about the way people are gasping and making prim noises of disapproval around us.
When I finally pull back from the kiss, she’s so red-faced she looks sunburnt across her freckled cheeks and practically grasping for breath. “I didn’t get your name,” she whispers.
“Angelo,” I say. I nearly tell her then and there who I am and what I do. I almost tell her to get lost before she gets attached and winds up hurt. Angelo Luciani. Don of the Luciani crime family. The last thing men have seen before they died. The last thing you need in your sweet, innocent little life.
“Ana,” she says.
“I want to see you again. Come to my club tonight. Wear black. And you’d better not dare wear panties,” I add a little more quietly, even though our public kissing session seems to have cleared us a relatively open space in the coffee shop.
She stammers out something between a laugh and a croak. She calms herself with a visible effort and then looks up to meet my eyes before looking away again a split second later, as if deciding eye contact is a bad idea right now. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. I’m sorry. I know this was sudden.” She makes a half-hearted gesture to the car behind her. “They’re waiting on me though and I only needed—”
“Take this,” I say, stuffing my card in her hand.
She looks at the card and then back at me, chewing that plump lip of hers on one side before she stuffs the card in her bra and gives me a shy but playful twist of her lips.
“Don’t stand me up,” I say.
She opens her mouth to protest, but lowers her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t know if this—if I can—”
“You will, because if you don’t come tonight, I’m going to have to track you down. This is a big fucking city, and I’m going to expect a big fucking reward for my efforts if it comes to that.”
She gives me the first glimpse of her smile then. Sweet and shy and seductive all wrapped into a perfect, tight little package. Just like her.
Goddamn she’s going to be trouble for me.
She takes one step backwards toward the exit, pauses, and then reaches to shake my hand.
I take her hand and pull her in again, stealing one more kiss. She lingers in it, as unwilling as I am to break away, but finally whatever waits for her in that car seems to win out, and she leaves me standing there with a strange, sad look in her eyes like she doesn’t think we’ll ever meet again.
Bad news, Ana. If you think this is the end, you don’t know me well enough. I never let something I want get away. Never.
The music of the club thumps, heavy and hard, like a fist against my chest. It’s past the hours most decent people stay awake, past even the hours most indecent people stay awake, but that’s when the club comes alive. My club. Club Seven.
Seven floors, each caters to progressively more unique sexual needs and desires. For a Dom trying to break in a girl who’s new to BDSM, there’s not a better place you could ask for. Relying on shock and awe doesn’t work as well as most would think, and I’ve heard of many Doms scaring away their submissives after just a few minutes inside a true BDSM club. They think they’ll take a girl they met at Starbucks into a playroom and jump straight into whipping her with a riding crop. They don’t understand that everything good and bad is its own kind of drug. BDSM is no different, and that’s why my club is the perfect place for Doms to ease their submissives into the lifestyle.
I’m on the first floor now, which is essentially just a typical club with a dance floor, a great atmosphere, and a full bar.
My younger brother, Gino sits beside me. He’s inspecting his shot glass—rotating it in a slow circle and studying the reflected light it casts on the bar. “Fuck, man,” he says. “Enzo would know what to do.”
Enzo. Our older brother. When our father got a life sentence, Enzo would’ve inherited the Luciani family business, except he passed it on to me instead. Can’t blame a man for wanting to protect the ones he cares about though. He has a family now, after all.
“You saying I don’t?” I ask, voice dangerous.
Gino just shrugs. Almost any man in the city will shrink back from even a shadow of my anger, but not my brothers. “I’m saying we’ve known the Torretti are up to something for two days and we haven’t done shit.”
I wave off his concerns. “We’ll handle it. But I don’t want to talk business. Not tonight.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “A girl?”
I nod. “I’m starting to think she’s going to make me go hunt her down, though.”
He chuckles. “Someone had the nerve to stand up Angelo Luciani? She’s screwed.”
“She has no idea.”
3
Ana
I’m in the middle of my Psych 101 class, which I’m taking as a senior just to use up a general elective. The classroom is a huge lecture hall with seating for about three hundred, but there are more empty seats than not most days. Miraculously, the entire room fills up on exam days. It’s hardly surprising when prof
essors choose not to enforce any kind of attendance policy.
I barely pay attention to what I’m doodling in my notebook while my professor lectures, more zoned out than focused on any one thing. I keep replaying what happened yesterday. The car ride. The argument with my father about me needing to find a man. My lies. Then Angelo.
Every time I think back on him, chills pass across my skin and my head feels like it’s buzzing. There was something dark around him, almost like a foreboding aura, as if all my instincts were warning me away just like they’d keep me from taking a dark, unfamiliar backroad late at night. Except there was the promise of something in those eyes of his—something so alluring I can’t stop thinking about it.
There’s no point focusing on that now, though. I stood him up last night. I made it as far as getting dressed. I even… I even slid my panties off, just like he asked. I put my hand on the door to leave and couldn’t go through with it. I ended up watching Netflix all night instead, wearing a sexy black dress with sweatpants on underneath. And panties. Granny panties, in fact, as if I was trying to remind myself that I wasn’t sexy enough to deserve a guy like Angelo, anyway.
“...and Pavlov inadvertently laid the foundation for modern day scientific experimentation. Had he been less…” My professor—a rigid woman in her late forties with a tendency toward too much makeup and too-tight clothes—trails off, eyes fixed on something at the back of the room.
I see heads turning around me, toward the spot where she’s looking.
It’s not unusual for the door to be opening and closing all throughout class as people come in late or go to use the restroom, but it is unusual to see a man like Angelo towering in the doorway, so tall and broad that he dominates the entire space.
My professor clears her throat, and continues her lecture after a few seconds of stunned silence, but she sounds distracted, and almost every girl in the room is still gawking at Angelo. The ones who aren’t are red-cheeked and staring at their books.
He scans the room, eyes narrowed until they fixate on me.
The world seems to stop around me in that moment. I know how rabbits feel when a hawk sets its sights on them, the hopeless knowledge that no matter what they might try, there’s no escaping. They are outmatched. Prey before an apex predator.
He stretches his arm out and curls his finger, beckoning me wordlessly to him. From any other guy, the gesture would be ridiculous—obnoxious even. From Angelo though…
I cover my eyes, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and thrilled. My classmates mutter, looking around in the direction Angelo gestured. More and more eyes gradually land on me, jealousy and confusion plain in their eyes.
He waits, showing no signs of feeling awkward or uncomfortable.
Stupidly, I put my index finger to my chest, raising my eyebrows. Me?
He nods slowly.
I gather my things, not wanting to make more of a scene than I already have. I feel the weight of everyone’s eyes and jealousy burning into me as I scurry from my seat, mumbling apologies as I step on feet and make people move their knees to give me room to get out. To escape.
Realization settles in with every step I take, every inch I draw closer to him. I’m not making an escape as much as I am stumbling into the waiting jaws of a beast. A beast I dared to stand up last night.
He takes my hand when I reach him, favoring me with the slightest flicker of a smile before leading me out of the lecture hall and to the hallway outside.
A few students sit against the walls, textbooks or notebooks in their laps as they study. Just like in the classroom, he gradually draws more and more eyes just from his presence alone.
“I told you not to stand me up,” he says, voice so low it’s practically a growl.
He’s so big. So imposing. So unfairly sexy. I’ve kept my distance from men more as an act of spite until now, just to show my father he can’t use me like some bargaining chip to secure the future he wants. Actually wanting a man feels like a betrayal of all the effort I’ve put in until now.
Except maybe father wouldn’t have to know. It could be my secret. My dirty little secret.
“I had class this morning,” I say, gesturing dumbly to the lecture hall behind me. “I needed to get some sleep.”
He touches the rough pad of his thumb to my chin, stroking below my neck with his index finger as he looks down at me with a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “Responsible. No worry. We’ll fix that.”
I blush, not even knowing why I’m flushing with embarrassment on any conscious level. All I know is the way his eyes are smoldering with meaning is painfully obvious.
“You have two choices, little pet,” he says. “You can either take me somewhere on campus where we won’t be interrupted, or you can come to my club tonight.”
Little pet. The way the words drip with amusement and sexuality when they leave his mouth makes my core clench and fill with heat. “You’re serious?” I ask, half-laughing before an impulsive swallow chokes the sound off abruptly.
He takes a step toward me, forcing me backward until I’m between his hard body and the wall. His hand is pressed against the concrete behind me, eyes locked on mine. I feel my own eyebrows raise when I notice something hard and very big pressing against my lower stomach. Right where his… I look down, mouth falling open when I see what I’m feeling, the bulge in his pants.
“Do I seem serious to you?” he asks.
More serious than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. All I can do is nod.
“I don’t like to ask questions twice, but it wouldn’t be any fun if you didn’t need training. Broken in,” he adds, voice deepening into a low rasp that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention.
My brain struggles to keep up, to figure out what he’s talking about, to focus on anything except those perfectly formed lips of his and those long, inviting eyelashes. “Q-question?” I stammer.
“Your choice. Now, or later?”
“The club,” I say. “I’ll come tonight. I don’t have class tomorrow.”
A small smile spreads across his lips. After a few moments, he chuckles, pushing off the wall and looking down at me. “Well that’s good, at least. I wouldn’t want to keep you up all night before class. Oh, and I like your picture,” he says, nudging my notebook with his knuckle before turning to walk away without waiting for a response.
Stunned, I turn the notebook up to look at what I drew, not even remembering. For the first time in my life, I wish I wasn’t any good at drawing, because there’s no doubt in my mind who I was drawing a picture of instead of listening to the lecture. It’s a sketch of Angelo that is embarrassingly lifelike.
I squeeze my eyes shut and let my head bang against the wall behind me before I sink down into an exhausted heap. Seriously? I drew a freaking picture of the guy in my notebook like some lovesick middle schooler? At least I wasn’t practicing my signature with his last name, I guess. Come to think of it, I don’t actually know his last name. I chew the corner of my lip as I sit there, trying to imagine what it would be.
Like it matters. As long as it’s not Luciani, it’s all the same. For some reason, that thought makes my blood run a little colder. The Lucianis are the only rival crime family in the city, and even if my father tries to keep the family business as quiet as he can around me, I’d have to be deaf and blind not to know that he’d be more likely to shoot a Luciani than to shake their hand.
I laugh a little to myself at the thought of that, sweeping my pen across the notebook and signing the name Anabella Luciani. Now that would give my father a heart attack.
4
Angelo
Gino is playing poker with Damian on the first floor of Club Seven. I’m keeping a closer eye than I’d like to admit on the entrance of the club, which isn’t easy when the place is packed full of people. It’s already an hour past ten, and with how concerned Ana seemed about keeping a reasonable sleep schedule, I’d expected her to show up by now.
I c
ould’ve told her I’d pick her up. I already had one of my guys find her and then tail her, so I have her address and even her class schedule down. If she wanted to give me shit for that later, then more power to her, as long as she fucking shows up.
Damian sits on the barstool beside me, giving me a knowing look. He has dirty blond hair and a short beard, with hard blue eyes and tattoos covering his arms. He’s a billionaire, and easily the wealthiest Dom who attends my club. I hardly ever see him with a submissive, though. He mostly just prowls around, brooding and glaring at everyone. He’s one of the few people I keep company with who has nothing to do with the family. I met him through the club, and he knows who I am and what I do. He lets it stay that simple, and I like him for that.
“Girl trouble,” he says. It’s not a question, just a statement. A statement with the weight of experience, as if we’re outside and he’s saying something as obvious as blue sky.
“Submissive who doesn’t realize she’s a submissive yet, more like.”
He nods his understanding. “Been there.”
“And?” I ask.
Damian purses his lips. “Decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ll know when I find the right one. Until then, everything else is just a distraction. If it can’t hold my interest, then it’s gone.”
“That’s why you’re always by yourself.”
“Waiting is only hard if you don’t know what you’re waiting for,” he says.
I give him a skeptical look. “You read that on a fortune cookie?”
“I think it was a TV ad for depression meds,” he says, looking thoughtful.
I grin. “That’s a real source of fucking wisdom right there. Thanks, Damian.”
Baby for the Brute_A Fake Boyfriend Romance Page 2