Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  And maybe, a little voice I’d learned to subdue in the back of my mind that spoke from my heart said, in doing so, he would reclaim me himself.

  I shoved the idiocy from my mind and sought another end goal, finding it almost too easily.

  Ashcroft was proving himself to be an impulsive stronzo.

  Maybe he would slip up and expose something I could use to take him down.

  To take the Order down.

  I flipped the ripped invitation onto the tray and tilted my chin at the servant.

  “Tell him I’ll be there with bells on.”

  Unsurprisingly, Ashcroft’s New York City home was on the Upper East Side in a four-story stone townhome with vines gone red with autumn bursting across the façade. A liveried butler opened the door for me when I rang exactly one hour later and led me through the opulent, antique ridden interior to an office at the back of the house where Ashcroft sat behind a desk smoking from an honest to God wooden pipe.

  Lord, but the man took himself too seriously.

  He studied me for a long moment through the curling smoke as the butler closed the door on his way out. I felt his regard like greasy fingers running over my skin.

  “You aren’t wearing red,” he noted.

  “I was working when you ‘summoned’ me. In order to make it here on time, I had to come straight from the shoot,” I explained, waving a hand over my heavily made-up face with three leopard print spots drawn beside my eyes. “I also have to meet my family for our weekly lunch date in two hours. If I miss it, they’ll probably call the police.”

  I’d changed out of my minidress into black jeans, a pink silk camisole, and a blazer, unhappy that my nipples could clearly be seen through the thin material in the cold room.

  Ashcroft licked his lips salaciously as he studied them. “I’ll have to punish you for that nonetheless.”

  I tried to control my breathing to keep the sick swell of bile in my stomach at bay. The idea of him touching me, let alone assuming the role that had once been Alexander’s, made me want to throw up until I passed out.

  “As it is,” he continued idly, “I have something else in mind for the moment. I have work to do, but I thought it might be nice to have some eye candy while I do so, and my maid is away with some family issue so…” He nodded to the neatly folded clothes on the ottoman beside the leather couch to my left. “Change.”

  I swallowed as I walked over to lift the tiny black and white frilly edged and collared maid’s uniform. “You’re joking, si?”

  He adjusted himself obviously as he shifted in his chair and leered at me. “I never joke about sex. Change. I want to see the body Alexander risked his arse for and take pleasure in knowing it’s mine now.”

  I swallowed thickly, trying to find that almost forgotten space in my mind where I could block out the nightmarish reality of my life and focus just on my breath, on the peace inside the chaos. It was harder than it used to be, the steps there coated with cobwebs and dark with disuse.

  I took deep, even breaths as I shed my clothes and quickly donned the humiliating costume.

  “Ah,” he groaned in delight. “Look at those full breasts. Such a delicious thing.”

  Thing.

  Fuck him.

  I breathed deep and tried to remember why I was doing this.

  To keep from being blackmailed.

  To keep the job I’d come to enjoy that put food on my table and money in my family’s coffers.

  To get Alexander back.

  To get enough dirt on Ashcroft and hopefully the Order to destroy them.

  My spine straightened as I finished buttoning the dress and looked directly into Satan’s greedy eyes.

  “Come here,” he ordered, leaning back and spreading his legs, indicating the space between them.

  He watched me carnally as I walked over and stopped just outside of his reach.

  “On your knees, slave Ashcroft,” he demanded, reaching out to slap me lightly across the face for my insolence. “You know better than that. Knees, now.”

  I dropped, my head angled low so my eyes were trained on the ground, my knees folded and my hands palm up over my thighs.

  Submission coursed through me like a lightning strike.

  I gasped at the sensation of being bent and folded like origami into shape by another person’s orders and then burned with the shame of knowing how deeply it settled something eternally restless inside me.

  I didn’t want to feel this way with Ashcroft, and I knew it was only a tremor compared to the quake of rightness and longing I felt with Alexander, but it still disgusted me.

  I glared up at him instead of bowing my head in proper submission and watched as Ashcroft laughed.

  “You can defy me as much as you want to, little thing. I’ll break you in nice and slow.” He leaned forward to grasp my chin painfully. “After all, we have all the time in the world. No one is here to save you now.”

  I didn’t need anyone to save me, but myself.

  He didn’t need to know that, though, especially when I hadn’t yet figured out how to work this to my advantage.

  “You’ll clean for me now. I don’t have time to play at the moment. Then next weekend, I’ll take you to Club Bacchus for The Trials.”

  “The Trials?” I dared to asked.

  Ashcroft leaned down further, shifting his hand so that it collared my throat tightly. “Think of it as the Order’s annual Best in Show. Do you want to know what that is, sweet thing? I have a feeling with prime stock like you, I’m in for the ultimate prize.”

  I kept stubbornly mute.

  He chuckled and then lashed his tongue across my pressed lips before biting the bottom one. “I’ll debut you as my new slave, put you through your paces on stage for everyone to see, and then the council will vote on which slave is the most desirable, the most beautifully broken in.”

  “Fuck you,” I lashed out before I could control it. “I won’t be displayed like some kind of dog you trained for your amusement.”

  “Ah, but you will,” he reminded me, reaching over to his desk and dropping a folder open at my knees. Glossy sheets of photos spilled out over the floor, showing Alexander and me in the black, white, and gold tiled ballroom at Pearl Hall. Some had him chasing me across the room, others had him pressing me into the floor, my mouth open in shock and then progressing to full-blown desire. They were graphic and horrible, a visual reminder of the first and only time Alexander had taken me against my will.

  My heart thundered, and my cunt grew heavy.

  I remembered the thick, acutely agonizing feel of Alexander’s big cock between my thighs, sliding wetly through my pussy as he fucked me in the ballroom, in the Hall, in the stables, in the greenhouse, and in the wet crush of poppy at the back of his estate.

  I closed my eyes, hating myself for missing it, but mostly for missing him. The man who had bought me to collect me like a token bauble and then forgotten me so easily when I fled.

  My shame deepened because it was his complete and utter rejection of me three years ago in Milan that rankled me most and not any aspect of my year of slavery with him.

  “So you see,” Ashcroft said smugly, bringing me back to the present, “you will be my obedient little bitch because you have too much to lose if I let these little photos free.”

  I swallowed the knife’s edge of rage in my throat, feeling it slice my insides. “I’ll do it, but I’m warning you, Ashcroft. You won’t live a long and healthy life if you go through with this. I’ll kill you myself before the year is out for doing this to me.”

  He laughed uproariously, tossing his mousy blond curls back and holding his belly as he laughed and laughed.

  I visualized slicing open that exposed throat with the letter opener on his desk and felt momentarily better.

  “Have you not learned this yet, little slave?” he asked, genuinely curious as he looked down at me. “You are less than nothing. The only value you have is the one that is placed on you by men more po
werful than yourself. Alexander might have made you feel like his little countess when he married you, but you are nothing but a slave.”

  We stared at each other, my breathing hard with the effort to stay calm and not throw myself at him in a violent flurry. His eyes were almost kind as he let his truth settle around my wrists and ankles like the weight of phantom chains.

  I knew he was wrong. I wasn’t nothing.

  I was Cosima Ruth Lombardi, the wife of an earl, the sister of a famous actor, upcoming criminal lawyer, and incredibly talented artist, daughter to one of the most wanted mafiosos in Italy, friend to the New York Camorra’s capo. I was loyal and brave, beautiful and kind.

  And I was smart.

  No one had ever told me I was, but I’d learned to believe in myself that way.

  I was smart enough to trick Ashcroft into believing he held me in check and then use his arrogant mistakes to execute a Fool’s Mate and defeat him in the end.

  All I needed was patience and maybe a little luck.

  So I smiled at him beatifically. The smile that Willa Percy had used to launch the second phase of my career, the smile that had once so briefly wooed the most powerful Lord in England.

  I watched Ashcroft blink, capitulating to my beauty, letting it make him even dumber than he already was to think he could own me.

  I imagined my inner strength like an invisible shield coating my skin, protecting it from the vile man before me who I had to lull into a faux sense of security.

  “Yes, sir,” I said because my mouth wouldn’t form the word Master to this false Dominant. “I understand, and I am sorry for my attitude. How can I make it up to you?”

  Ashcroft grinned slowly like the cat that ate the canary and widened his stance. “I know exactly how you can make it up to me.”

  Cosima

  Almost two hours later, I rushed out the door of Ashcroft’s house once again in my street clothes, his semen washed off my chest from where he’d jerked off on me after spanking me with a wicked metal ruler for being late and leaving early. My ass stung, my heart ached, and I’d never felt dirtier, not even after Ashcroft had raped my mouth at Pearl Hall when I’d thought he was Alexander. It wasn’t much, he’d really barely touched me, and I realized that I got away easy. A spanking, his cum on my skin, and an hour of acting the maid with a duster and broom was trivial compared to my previous trials, but it hurt so much more.

  I knew why. I didn’t need my therapist to say words like Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD to know that it felt so wrong because it hadn’t been Alexander.

  I felt weak and exhausted as I stood on the sidewalk, blinking owlishly as I tried to gather the tattered remains of my self-control around me. All I wanted to do was go home to the apartment I had painstakingly saved for and curated with beautiful things and snuggle my cat Hades from the warmth and comfort of my bed.

  But it was Sunday, which meant family lunch at Mama’s restaurant in Soho. It was an unspoken rule that unless Sebastian or I were out of town working, we were all required to attend on pain of death by glare from our matriarch.

  So, I stepped to the edge of the curb to hail a cab to Mama’s part of town.

  “You look appalling,” a familiar European accent called out from behind me.

  I sighed heavily before turning around, both relieved and anxious at seeing Dante again after a few weeks without contact. We were close but only so much as our jobs allowed.

  There was hardly a month I didn’t have to travel for a shoot or walk, and even while I was home, I encouraged my agent to book as many go-sees and campaigns as possible. Idleness was not good for my mental state.

  Dante was busy with the Family.

  He’d been in New York City for nearly four years, and he’d already amassed considerable power. He tried to keep me out of the loop on the details, but I knew from Salvatore that he had usurped the old head of the Camorra to become capo just last year.

  Things were different for the mafia in 2019. It wasn’t the eighties anymore, and the mafia was much quieter, less showy than their older counterparts. That didn’t mean they were any less powerful. Police and intelligence agencies had diverted resources once aimed at curtailing mafia activity toward the newer, greater threat of terrorism, and Dante operated happily from the vacuum created by that.

  He was leaning against an iron lamppost the way he was known to do, his ankles crossed and massive arms folded over his even bigger chest. No matter how long I’d known him or how often I saw him, his sheer size and overwhelming beauty always took my breath away.

  It was still early enough in the day that the ink shadowing his hard-cut jaw was only a hint of the half-inch pelt it would become after dinner, and it perfectly contrasted with his full, ruddy lips. They twitched as I studied him, amused by the way I always needed a minute to order my thoughts after being hit with his beauty.

  Leaning against that pole in a black suit with an open collar black button-up and his thick hair pushed back from his forehead, he looked especially gorgeous—the definition of tall, dark, and handsome.

  And dangerous.

  So, so dangerous.

  I swallowed thickly before smiling at him. “Dante, you know better than to sneak up on me.”

  My guilt trip didn’t provide the distraction I’d hoped. His sensual smirk slid through the shadow of his beard as he straightened and strolled toward me, stopping only when we were toe to toe. I had to tip my head back steeply in order to maintain contact with his pitch-dark eyes.

  “Tesoro, you know I never sneak like some teppista,” he chastised me with a roguish smirk. “I called out to you so that you would know I was here, but you were too lost in your waking nightmares to pay attention. What has you looking so wrecked?”

  I wrung my hands before I remembered that he knew it was my nervous habit and then awkwardly jerked them to my sides before shrugging a shoulder. “Nothing much. Jet lag.”

  He cocked a brow. “Jet lag? From the woman who travels so much, she has trained herself to sleep at the drop of a hat? I do not think so. Now”—he leaned down, his sharp citrus and warm pepper scent filling my nose—“tell me the truth.”

  A cab rushed down the street, and I took advantage of it by flagging it down. I pulled open the door, told the driver the address, and then flipped my hair over my shoulder to attempt an innocent smile at Dante. “I’m late for lunch with my family, and you know how they get.”

  He stared at me with such warmth and gentle amusement, I felt it in my chest. That was, until he moved forward and pushed me into the cab, following so closely after me, I felt crowded by his big body even in the three-seater space.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “I’m taking you to lunch, and you are telling me what has you looking like someone ran over your hellacious demon cat.”

  “Hades is not a demon cat,” I snapped, falling into our old argument. “He just doesn’t like you because he has good taste.”

  “Does he?” he asked drolly. “If that’s the case, it seems his mistress doesn’t. You know you love me.”

  I rolled my eyes, but Dante’s familiar banter was exactly the remedy I hadn’t known I needed. There was something about my rapport with him that brought me comfort the way no other relationship could. Maybe it was because he had seen the worst of my trials, that he had saved me from Ashcroft and another disciple of the Order at The Hunt, or that he had spent years with my father, years I had missed out on. For whatever reason, he was my closest confidante, my only confidante, and I viewed him like a brother and a best friend.

  He shifted closer, his full lips parted in a smile that made my heart skip a beat, and a little voice asked me if my feelings weren’t as platonic as I thought they were.

  “I barely tolerate you, and you know it.” I sniffed haughtily, turning away to hide the smile I was sure he could hear in my voice.

  His huge hand landed on my thigh, squeezing until I looked back at him.

  “Cosi, tell me what’s hap
pened. How can I help if I don’t know who to harm?”

  I almost choked on my giggle. “Cazzo, Dante, when did you become such a mob boss? That was like something straight out of an Al Pacino movie.”

  “You know I don’t watch those stupid mob movies.” He scoffed. “I’m still recovering from when you forced me to see Goodfellas.”

  “Hey, that’s an American classic.”

  “Good thing I’m not American then.”

  We smiled at each other for a long minute that knit my torn edges together seamlessly. The dirtiness I’d felt after leaving Ashcroft felt washed away by Dante’s love and attention.

  “Tell me, tesoro,” he urged softly, reaching over to brush a lock of errant hair out of my face.

  I closed my eyes, trying to block out his beauty while I talked about something so ugly. “Ashcroft found me.”

  Instantly, the air went hot and metallic as if the car itself had caught on fire.

  “When?”

  I winced because I knew he would be furious with me for what I was going to say. After Alexander had dismissed me permanently in Milan and told me never to set foot on English soil again, I’d returned home more broken-hearted than ever. It wasn’t as if I could turn to my family. They didn’t know what I’d been through or how I’d fallen for my own personal villain.

  Only Dante and Salvatore did.

  They’d been stone-cold furious on my behalf. Honestly, it had gone a long way to repairing some of the damage Alexander had inflicted on me. It reminded me that even though I was damaged and depraved, there were two people who loved me more than anything. Salvatore had even proven he loved more than his own life by staging his death to end Alexander’s vendetta against him as peaceably as possible.

  They were going to freak when they knew I’d been back to England.

  And they would both know because anything I told Dante would inevitably be passed on to my birth father.

  “Sebastian was nominated for a BAFTA,” I muttered. “It was a huge accomplishment for him, and he has…his own issues with that country. I had to go with him for moral support.”