“Xan,” I said, pulling back to tip his head down to me with a hand at his neck, hard over his pulse just to feel it beat. “I would dance with you forever in the dark if it meant being with you. I don’t need the light or the diamonds, I hardly even need my loved ones. You could have dragged me into the cold, dim ballroom, clasped that old chain around my ankle, and I would still love you. I don’t regret the things you’ve done or the events of the past five years. They brought us together and cemented our bond. They made me strong, and they made you worthy.”
“Ours isn’t exactly a romantic story,” he admitted wryly.
I arched a brow, pressed my palm over the brand I knew he wore on the skin over his heart, and dragged one of his hands down my back to my ass where it rested over my own brand. I thought of Helios and my collar, of Xan pulling strings to get me a job with St. Aubyn, of the years he spent longing for me but denying himself to keep me safe. I thought of the way my body felt when I was away from him, like a form without a shadow even in absolute sunlight.
I thought of the way he would have died for me, and the way I nearly died for him.
“Isn’t it?” I asked softly. “I think it’s romantic as hell.”
“Literally,” Alexander quipped with a roguish grin that made me tip my head back to the mural of Persephone and her Dead God and laugh and laugh and laugh.
And when I looked back down at Alexander, my once Dead God was laughing too.
Cosima
The courtroom vibrated with hushed, anticipatory chatter as the gathered waited for the venerable Judge Hartford to take the stand and begin the proceedings. I could hear the cacophony of press and spectators outside the closed doors to the chamber and even outside on the street. It was the biggest trial against a supposed mafioso since the Mafia Commission Trial in the eighties, and it was sensational news throughout New York City and beyond.
This was helped, of course, by the fact that the man on trial for first-degree murder, racketeering, and illegal gambling was the gorgeous, charmingly incorrigible, and dangerously intense Edward Dante Davenport.
The noise rose tidal strong as the side door opened, and the man himself was ushered through by two guards and his law team. He wore all black even though it made him look wickedly sinful and sinister, his hair pushed back from his face but for one wavy lock that draped over her forehead into his black eyes.
He looked like an ad for mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
I shook my head as I caught eyes with Elena, who stood behind him with the rest of his law team with her red-painted lips pressed together in a line that underscored her fury at losing that particular battle with her client.
He should have worn a white button-up, at least, to soften his appearance and make him seem like your average businessman.
But of course, Dante didn’t care to look innocuous, and I was certain he had argued wearing such a getup would only make it more obvious that he was a lion dressed as a lamb.
“Bloody idiot,” Alexander muttered at my side as he glared at his brother.
My husband was not in a good mood.
Not only because his brother was on trial for murder but also because his being so made it necessary for us to be in New York.
Alexander hated the city.
It was the symbol of our years apart and my refuge when I’d been lost without him.
If he had it his way, we probably would never again set foot on Manhattan island again.
But Dante was on trial for murder, so here we were, sitting in the first row reserved for his family, lending the weight of the Davenport name and Greythorn rank to Dante’s case.
It was hard for the public to believe the brother of a duke would resort to becoming a mafioso.
“Tesoro,” Dante murmured with a small smile as the guards slotted him between the railing and the table he would sit at and then pushed him down hard into his chair.
My heart twisted up in my chest, turning my reassuring smile into a wince.
“Fratello,” I offered softly, leaning forward to place my hand on the railing where he could see it and know I wished it was on his arm or around his back in a fierce embrace.
The hard cast of his face softened for a moment as he stared at me, his love shining out from every pore. He had sacrificed so much for me over the years, and I refused to believe he would be punished for it by spending the next twenty-five years in prison.
“We will win.” Alexander cut into my thoughts with his strong, sure words. “I won’t let them do this to you.”
Dante’s grin turned wry as he looked over at his brother, his twin in form if not colouring. Gold and black, bad wrapped up in a pretty package and good trapped in bad boy form.
They were a yin and yang pairing I didn’t want to ever again think about living without.
“You think you can do anything.” Dante shook his head fondly. “You know the entire world does not bow down to your grace, si?”
Xan raised one cool brow in silent rebuttal.
Dante laughed, and the visual was captured by the court reporters many flashing cameras.
I had no doubt it would grace the headlines of all the popular newspapers tomorrow.
Mafia capo laughs in the face of his crimes.
“Shut up and face forward, Edward,” Elena snapped, pinching his leg hard as she took the seat between him and her co-counsel. “For once in your life, do as you’re told.”
“Make me,” he taunted her before shooting me an inveterate wink.
I smiled at him as he wanted me to, but I didn’t feel light-hearted.
Elena locked eyes with me, and her prim, professional mask shifted for a moment to show me her quiet worry. She had made me a promise to fight for Dante as she would fight for me, but I could see at the moment how much of a long shot it was that Dante would be found not guilty.
He wasn’t guilty, of course.
I’d been the one to kill Giuseppe di Carlo.
But after years of living under the influence of the Order, I knew how powerful manipulation could be, and right now? The public wanted Dante to go down for these crimes.
“I won’t let it happen, my beauty,” Alexander swore, leaning down into my ear to whisper the words there like a prayer. “I will go to the ends of the earth to make sure he does not suffer any more for us.”
I smiled thinly at him but took his hands in mine for comfort and rubbed the golden band on his ring finger. “You once told me that not everyone deserves a happy ending. Can you honestly say we do? That the brother you hated for the last two decades does?”
He tipped my chin with his knuckle and fused his gaze to mine. “If anyone deserves a happy ending, it is the people who suffer while finding it. I promise you, wife, this too will pass, and one day soon, we’ll all be drinking together and reminiscing about this exact moment. Do you believe your husband?”
I looked into the eyes I’d memorized the first time I’d seen them in a back alley in Milano, the ones that had been waiting for me when I woke up for the first time in Pearl Hall’s ballroom, and I thought about how he had promised me both times that he would be there waiting for me.
He was not a man who gave up, no matter the circumstances, and I knew this was just one more obstacle for him to cut his teeth on.
He was the hero of my story, but as any good reader knows, the hero would always become a villain if his loved ones were threatened.
And Alexander was all too willing to go to war for his brother and his wife.
“I believe you,” I told him.
And even though it took years and twisted turns we never could have predicted, in the end, I was right to.
Two years later.
I had never been in so much pain before. Not in my entire life.
God only knew that was saying something.
My entire body felt like a building burning down, the seams aching to hold up the increasing weight of walls as it threatened to cave in, the wood sweating from the heat as it rose hi
gher and higher.
It was pure agony.
But I gloried in it.
Not because my Master was using one of his many wicked toys to draw whimpers and sighs from me. Though he was, in essence, also the reason for this pain.
But because I was sweating and heaving and splitting apart at the seams between my thighs to give birth to the baby we’d made together.
“Why in the bloody hell is she in so much pain, Doctor?” my husband snarled at the country’s most renowned obstetrician. His handsome face was screwed up tight, his skin red with the force of bottling up all his considerable rage.
It went without saying that after everything we’d been through together, Alexander didn’t like to see me hurt.
“This is a completely natural process, your Grace,” Dr. Reinhardt promised, totally unfazed by the large, angry man scowling at him from my bedside. “Your wife is doing amazingly well considering the size of the baby.”
This placated him slightly. It pleased some manly sensibility in my husband to know that he had produced a big, healthy baby, and more, that I was doing so well under stress.
Praising me was the quickest way to get on Alexander’s good side.
As long as that praise was platonic.
Even then, if it was from a man who was unattached or in any way handsome, he might make a point to threaten him as a friendly reminder that I was, and always would be, his.
Pain ripped through my groin and up my spin to resonate in my brain like a radioactive strike.
Alexander cursed bloody murder at the guttural groan that sprang from my ravaged throat, but he took up his position by my side once more and let me grip his hand so hard his joints ground together in protest.
“You are so beautiful,” he told me in a broken voice as he leaned over to press his forehead against my sweat-soaked one. “You are so beautiful to me. At this moment, more beautiful than any other. No one has ever been prouder or more in love with their wife than me, do you understand that, my beauty?”
I nodded, my teeth gritted so tightly I could speak as another contraction rippled through me.
“Okay, time to push, Lady Greythorn,” the doctor encouraged me from his intimate position between my legs.
It had shocked me that Alexander had allowed a male doctor to be my obstetrician, but he was the undisputed top doctor in the United Kingdom.
And he was also gay, happily married to his childhood sweetheart.
Which explained Alexander’s willingness, though he did make Dr. Reinhardt interview with us three times before he gave him the position as the Duchess of Greythorn’s doctor.
“I’m ready,” I told him, my smile twisted like hot metal on my face.
My entire body felt like an overloaded electrical wire ready to explode. I was desperate to push and release the tension even though the pain as I bore down was nearly unbearable.
“I love you, my beauty, my topolina, my duchess,” Alexander chanted as he propped my back against his torso and held both my hands so I could squeeze them hard enough to break them as I struggled to push our child into the world. “You are my greatest treasure.”
I tilted my head back, muscles strained tight enough to pop and let the scream boiling in my throat erupt into the air.
A moment later, a piercing wail underscored the last notes of my scream.
I blinked slowly through my sweat-stung eyes, trying to focus beyond the pain as I’d become so adept at doing so that I could focus on the being Dr. Reinhardt held aloft in his hands.
“My God,” Alexander’s voice broke as he smoothed my wet hair away from my forehead and then softly laid me back down on the bed so that he could accept the clippers from the doctor and cut the umbilical cord. “My good God.”
My eyes burned, and my body felt like a deflated balloon, incapable of animation as I gave in to the impulse to close my lids and rest for a moment.
“My beauty,” Alexander’s soft voice pulled me gently from slumber. “It’s time to meet your son.”
Instantly, adrenaline coursed through my body, and my eyes snapped open, my vision clear and brilliant as I locked eyes on a pair of silver-blue irises I knew would turn into Alexander’s grey with time.
Our baby.
A sob lodged itself in my throat as my heart pounded hard and heavy in my chest. I felt swollen to bursting with love, overripe and vulnerable.
Baby Davenport was eight pounds, eleven ounces with a thick thatch of black hair and a perfectly formed bow-shaped mouth that was puckered as he fussed slightly in his daddy’s arms.
He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
I looked up at Alexander through my tear slicked eyes and saw in his expression the same prodigious tenderness that had overtaken me.
He sat on the edge of the bed and moved the baby so he could lay on my naked chest. The room was cleared, obviously ordered so by my domineering duke, so we could both watch in awe as the baby snuggled into my swollen breast and curled a fist over my heart.
“I never thought in all my life to dream this kind of dream,” Alexander murmured softly, aware of the sweet, secure cocoon we were enrobed in. “I never believed I would be free of my demons, let alone at liberty to share my life with a woman like you at my side, with beautiful children at our feet. Even if I was free from those chains that bound me, I never would have thought I would be worthy of such a future as this.”
The sob stuck in my throat fell from my lips as I turned my head into his shoulders and let my tears of gratitude anoint his black button-up.
He let me cry even though I know it pained him to watch me. His hand was in my hair, stroking it back from my hot, damp face in a way that soothed me to my ragged core.
I shifted my head back to press a kiss to the strong, steady pulse in his throat and then turned again to look down at the sweet bundle on my chest.
He was warm and quiet, sleeping against me as if he knew just how safe he was in my arms with both of us in the arms of his father.
Alexander would never let anything bad happen to either of us. We were bringing our child into a world without the Order, without Noel Davenport, and without the threat of the mafia hanging over us.
“This is our era of happiness,” I reminded Alexander as I placed a kiss gentle as a butterfly against our son’s soft head. “All he will ever know is joy and light.”
“Yes,” Alexander promised, one of his thick, long fingers uncurled against the baby’s plump cheek. “Though, your family is undoubtedly crazy, bella, so I hesitate to say it will be without drama.”
I let out a watery laugh as I ran my nose over the top of the baby’s head so I could drag in some of his sweet infant scent.
“Do we have a name for our future duke?” Alexander asked.
The pregnancy hadn’t been an easy one for either of us emotionally. Even though Noel was gone, he still haunted Pearl Hall and our memories of my truncated first pregnancy like a hellish spectre. Alexander was overbearing and viciously protective the entire nine months, barely letting me out of the house, let alone out of the country to visit my family or work out my existing contracts. I was just as loathe to be parted from our home and my husband. It had been two years since the end of our horrors, but it still felt as though no time had passed since I’d been back home at Pearl Hall as its mistress, and I wasn’t ready to be away from them for any real length of time.
I had morning sickness the entire pregnancy, horrible nightmares that lingered long after I woke, and terrible hot flashes that had Alexander installing a ceiling fan and four Dyson floor fans in our bedroom just so I could scrape together a few hours of sleep at night.
It was grueling, but we loved every minute of it. And by some silent agreement, we were careful about making too many plans for the baby once he or she arrived. We didn’t learn the gender, we didn’t pick out names, and we only had a crib back at home because Riddick had built one for us as a baby present.
It was stupid for two matur
e adults to believe it was possible to jinx it, but we’d lived through such trials and heartbreak for so long, we didn’t want to take any chances.
So, we didn’t have a name for the little earl that lay in my arms.
But as I peered down at his perfect, handsome little face, I thought of a name that was all too perfect for him.
“What about Aidon?” I asked, tilting my head back to look at the man who had burst into my life and dragged me through hell in order to give me a kingdom we could one day call our own. “Aides or Aidoneus is one of the lesser-known names of Hades.”
Alexander’s beautiful, strong face melted into one of his rare open smiles as he chuckled. “Only my wife would want to name our child after the Greek god of the Underworld.”
“Only your wife would understand just how much the story of Hades and Persephone means to me, to us,” I countered. “Hades is a misunderstood god, but he maintained balance and harmony between good and evil. He was a fair and just ruler with great responsibility, just as our son will be one day.”
I looked down at our gift as he shifted his little furled hand into his mouth, and I knew in a newly discovered chamber of my heart where motherhood sat and pulsed that the little man on my chest was going to be one of the greatest men who ever lived.
“Aidon,” Alexander tested, his accent carving the name smooth and clean like sculpted marble. “Aidon Dante Joseph Davenport, seventh Earl of Thornton and heir to the Dukedom of Greythorn.” He ran his big hand gently over the baby’s head as if metaphorically crowning him with his titles. “Yes, I think Aidon will suit him just fine.”
“I love you,” I told him fiercely as the feeling brutalized my chest and made it difficult to breathe. “If I had to go back, I would choose to be your slave again and again. I don’t want our enslavement to each other to ever end.”
My husband leaned down to press his forehead to mine, one hand still cupping the back of Aidon’s soft head. I kept my eyes open, gaze sank deep in the perforated silver of his gorgeous eyes.
“Thank you for giving me a gift I never thought to ask for,” he said quietly, his tone so genuine it made my heart ache. “I promise to prove myself worthy of it, of you and our child, every single bloody day for the rest of our lives.”
Enamoured Page 42