“Did you just throw me under the bus?” Cin elbowed Heath in the ribs.
He sidled away from her. “For fresh donuts? I’d throw you under a troll.”
Zoey waved goodbye as she peddled away.
As she wove through traffic, she tried not to think about ghouls, which was about as effective as trying not to picture a pink elephant in a tutu. Would Cin and her friends be safe? What could she do to make them safer? Nothing, really. They were like semi-feral cats. She couldn’t make them go stay in a foster home, where they chafed at having curfews and being treated like the kids they were. The local authorities had enough on their plate dealing with semi-regular magic attacks. They wouldn’t be bothered trying to corral a group of throwaway kids.
There was a package already waiting for her at the dispatch center. She had no idea what was inside, and she didn’t ask. Stuffing it in her bag, she zipped across town to the restaurant. Well, she was reasonably zippy. There were more obstacles than usual in her path—there had been ever since that whole weird wolf thing with Dominic. Was that just a coincidence? She was getting so used to it now, she barely even noticed and went whichever way the little GPS in her head told her. The obstacles often moved with her, trying to cut her off, which almost certainly meant they were related to Dominic.
Even with the detours, Zoey made it to the restaurant fifteen minutes early. It was a little hole in the wall Italian joint, her favorite kind, and as she walked in, the smells made her stomach growl.
The restaurant was packed, but she had been directed to go to a small room in the back. She pushed open a creaky wooden door and stepped into what seemed to be an empty room. A half-dozen tables with red and white checked plastic table clothes and flickering votive candles took up the space. As she stepped into the room, someone shut the door, and when she spun around to see who it was, she bumped right into Dominic. Wearing a pinstriped suit and a pale-blue silk shirt that made his eyes look even more beautiful, he stood between her and the door.
“You,” she said, clutching the package to her chest and taking a quick two steps back. “What a surprise.”
He feigned a hurt expression. “Is that any way to great your mate after a hard day’s work?”
“No,” she said, eyes sparking with annoyance. “That is definitely not how I’d greet my mate. Or husband, as we human-types say.”
Amusement lit his eyes. “Sassy. Don’t you want to know what’s in the package? It’s for you.”
“For me?” she said, startled.
“Open it!”
Zoey was tempted to say something snarky, but the look on Dominic’s face was so expectant and hopeful, she just couldn’t.
“Thank you,” she said grudgingly, tearing at the wrapping. Then she hesitated. “Is this something kinky or weird? It’s not handcuffs, is it?”
“No, I keep those in my bedroom.” He winked. “Along with some other toys.”
Dammit. Why did he have to go and say that? Her heartbeat sped up and she felt damp in her girly parts.
He sniffed the air appreciatively. “You like handcuffs.” He nodded approvingly. “Good to know.”
“Stop … stop doing that!” she sputtered, blushing so hard her face hurt. But she also really loved getting presents, and she hardly ever got them these days, so she ripped open the package and something spilled out in a river of glorious green silk. Her favorite color. She held up the stunning evening gown.
“For you,” he said. “You can change in the restroom. Or right here. Preferably right here. You’re having dinner with me.”
Zoey was about to lie and say she wasn’t hungry, but her traitorous stomach growled. She clapped her hand over it, as if that would help. “What about my bike?”
“I’ll have it brought inside and Sergio will keep it in the back for you.”
Was this when he’d claim her and take her back to the pack compound? Damn her overactive libido. She had the chance to ask him as many questions as she’d wanted, and she’d blown it. She’d been dying to ask him exactly when this claiming would happen.
So she could hide.
“Promise you’ll let me go afterward?”
“If you want to go, you can go.”
Zoey snorted. “I’m holding you to that.” Right. She could talk tough, but if Dominic wanted to drag her back to his lair, it wasn’t as if she could actually do anything about it.
She went into the bathroom and pulled out her phone and used the app that notified her boss she’d delivered her package and was off for the night.
Stripping off her sweaty jeans and t-shirt, she slid the dress on. With a grimace of dismay, she remembered she didn’t have shoes to go with the dress, so she was wearing big clunky sneakers.
She so hungry she could eat a hippo, so she threw back her shoulders and strode out of the bathroom, trying to fake a confidence she didn’t feel at all.
“Are you sure I look … okay?” She gestured at the dress awkwardly.
He looked her up and down. “Okay? No. Not at all.” He shook his head. “Not okay.”
Zoey felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She hadn’t realized how much she cared about Dominic’s opinion until he said those cruel words. And she realized she’d foolishly started to trust him in a way—she thought he’d never hurt her feelings.
The next thing she knew, her back was up against the wall, and Dominic was pressed up against her. The thick length of his erection pressed into her stomach, and he was breathing hard.
“Okay?” he repeated. “You never look just okay. You look good enough to fucking eat. And believe me, that’s going to happen in a very short time. Dinner, dessert, you. Possibly in that order.”
“Me?” she squeaked. “But I … my hair’s a mess, my face is sunburned …”
He tangled his fingers in her shiny brown hair. “I know,” he said approvingly. “You look like you just rolled out of my bed. Bedhead hair, your face kissed by the sun …”
“Wow,” she murmured. “You are very good at putting a positive spin on things.”
“I only speak the truth.”
He was bending down to kiss her when the door banged open, and the delicious smell of garlic wafted in. A roly-poly man in a chef’s apron and chef’s white cap bustled through the door carrying a tray of pasta dishes. He had a droopy dark mustache and looked as if he should be the advertisement for a line of spaghetti sauce.
“Oh, I interrupt!” he said in a heavy Italian accent, his eyes going wide.
“Yes, you do, Sergio,” Dominic grumbled.
Zoey squirmed in his arms, embarrassed, and tried to push him away, but it was like pushing a building.
“You want dinner, or you no want dinner?” Sergio looked comically offended. “I spend hours in the kitchen, over a hot stove, for you! You come to my house, you eat! Mangia, mangia!” He set the dishes on a table, next to a bowl of bread and a bottle of wine.
Dominic reluctantly released Zoey, and the two of them walked over to the table. Dominic pulled out the chair for her to sit down, and she tried to remember if any man had ever done that before.
“Enjoy!” Sergio said. “And Dominic? You treat this gorgeous girl right or I steal her!”
Dominic growled. Sergio backed up, eyes widening. “I kid, I kid!”
“Settle down,” Zoey said to Dominic, although she was secretly the teeniest bit flattered. Nobody had ever been jealous of her before.
Dominic poured her a glass of excellent red wine. They dove into the food, and her linguine with shrimp and lemon butter was what she would have requested for a last meal. It was heaven on a plate. The garlic butter was soft and fluffy and tangy. For once, she didn’t feel self-conscious eating in front of a man. He’d told her he loved her body just the way it was, and she believed him.
They ate in companionable silence, taking their time, enjoying the food. She didn’t feel pressured to make idle chit chat; she just savored every bite.
Zoey smiled as she set down her fork
to take another sip of wine, and Dominic nodded. “Smiling is good. Better than running from me. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“It’s nice to be able to relax and forget life’s stresses sometimes.”
“I can make all of your stresses disappear.” She arched an eyebrow, and he grinned fiercely. “You’re about to say, ‘So you’ll disappear, Dominic?’”
“Damn, am I already becoming predictable?” She shook her head ruefully and finished her glass of wine.
Dominic poured her another, and then reached out and took her hand. “I’d rather say reliable. Look at us, sparring like an old married couple already.” His hand was so big it engulfed hers, warm and comfortable like a blanket. He grinned, flashing big white teeth.
She let him hold her hand for a minute. It felt so good to sit there with a handsome man who looked at her with lust in his eyes even after she’d just carbo-loaded enough pasta to feed a medium-sized orc.
“Damn, Sergio really is an amazing cook. He’s single, you say?”
Dominic narrowed his eyes at her, and his growl rumbled in his broad chest.
“Seriously.” She shook her head in wonder. “Are you actually jealous?”
“Well, the man does know his way around a plate of pasta. Some women like that in a mate,” he huffed.
“Yes. That is pretty hot,” she agreed just to torture him. Then, because the growl was getting louder and she didn’t want him to kill a man who made the best Italian food she’d ever tasted, she quickly said, “Tell me more about this moon-bite thing you keep hallucinating about.”
“Come back to my house with me and we’ll discuss it.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
“You keep saying that like I have a choice.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Do I have a choice?”
Dominic avoided her gaze, released her hand, and stabbed into his plate of pasta.
“Ah, a loophole. Does this have something to do with that twenty-eight days thing you talked about?” she mused. “Do I have a choice until the next full moon?”
His handsome brows drew together in a scowl. “Maybe.”
“Can I say no to the whole thing at any time?”
“Can you reject my wolf’s claim? Nope.” He pinned her with a fierce glower. “Do you want to?”
She flushed. “That’s a complicated question. I barely know you, and … as we discussed, you and I have very different viewpoints on things.”
“You were upset with us because you thought we were taking your neighborhood’s money and not giving you what you’d paid for. Understandable. But now you know differently.”
“Yes, and I’m really relieved to know that, but that’s not the only thing. There’s also your … methods of enforcement.”
“We defend ourselves when attacked?” he said mildly.
“By killing people. And you extort money from businesses!”
“We give them protection the police can’t. If we didn’t protect them, they’d be targets of curses from competitors, ghouls, or ogres. We are willing to die to protect any business that pays us our fee.”
She was running out of arguments. “You encourage gambling,” she mumbled.
“Ahh. Like in Las Vegas?”
Zoey hated how he was batting away every argument and making it seem as if they were an organization of benevolent businessmen. They weren’t! But … were they really that bad? Especially compared to everyone else who ran this lousy corrupt city? Dammit. How was he getting inside her head like this?
She sighed and reluctantly set her fork on her plate. The buttery taste of pasta lingered on her taste buds, and she ran her tongue along her lips. The air suddenly felt warm, and she realized Dominic was watching her with a fierce hunger that burned away all of her defenses and nearly set her panties on fire.
I need to nip this in the bud.
She cleared her throat and squirmed in her seat. “All right, let’s discuss this logically. It makes no sense that you would want to hitch yourself to me forever. I mean, wolves mate for life. You don’t know me at all.”
His eyes gleamed with amusement. The more she resisted, the more it seemed to arouse him. “We have all the time in the world to get to know each other.”
“And before your wolf bit me on the ass, you never even noticed me.” Her voice was higher than she’d meant it to be, and she realized there was a shrill undercurrent of hurt to it. She winced in embarrassment, but Dominic didn’t seem to notice.
“The first time you catered one of our events, you wore your hair piled up in a messy bun.” Dominic’s voice was grave, and for once, that fierce gleam of humor faded and he was dead serious. “The sun lit up your hair and made it look like rich caramel. You wore little wire earrings with red stone hearts.”
He’d noticed all that?
Zoey thought her heart would stop. His gaze met hers, seizing it and holding it captive.
“I don’t have them anymore. My friend Cin gave me those. She stole them from somewhere, and when I figured that out, I made her take them back.”
“No, she made them. She makes jewelry.”
“She does? How do you know that?” And why did she not know that? When she’d asked Cin if she’d stolen the earrings, Cin had just shrugged and said, “I couldn’t exactly afford to buy them, could I?”
She felt a pang of embarrassment. Her plate was always too full, working two jobs, volunteering, and trying to keep their neighborhood from falling apart. She’d let herself get distracted and now she was making snap judgments, which was kind of a way of putting up a wall between her and Cin.
Cin was hard and prickly and also frighteningly reckless.
If Zoey didn’t get close to Cin, she wouldn’t have to worry about her as much, right? But that wasn’t fair. Cin needed someone to worry about her. No matter how busy Zoey was, she should have found a way to spend more time with the street kids and get to know them. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been so judgy.
Dominic reached out across the table and took her hand in his, his lips curling in a cruel smile. “Knowing things is my business.” His voice carried a dark, sensual undercurrent, a veiled threat and promise that mingled together and snatched her breath away.
She looked at him skeptically. “Are you saying you were interested in me from the first minute you saw me?”
“Entranced is how I’d describe it. I saw how you carried yourself with confidence and faced down mafia bosses even though you were quaking inside. I saw how kind you were to Carlo when he couldn’t figure out how to tie his own shoelace. You just knelt down and laced it up for him and talked about the weather like it was no big deal. And then you showed him how to do it himself without making him feel foolish. Ever since then, he’s remembered. When you were in the back with the other girls taking a break, you grew flowers and stuck them in a glass of water and made that dingy little break room feel like a party. And you made sure everyone had something to eat before you started.”
He took a bite of pasta, casually chewing as if he hadn’t just tossed a bomb at her that blew up her entire world. This was even more life-altering than hearing his wolf had claimed her as a mate. Now he was saying he had actually wanted her all along.
“So why did you never make a move on me?” Zoey’s heart thudded in her chest. She wanted to believe. More than anything. Not because she could ever let herself have a man like Dominic—a hardened criminal with walls around him she’d never breach—but just because it was the most marvelous, magical thing a man had ever said to her.
“Because, as one of the highest-ranking men serving under Arturo Moretti, I am expected to mate for the good of the pack and make a political alliance, not for love or desire. Unless my wolf choses otherwise.” He took a sip of wine. “Your turn. What did you notice about me when you first saw me?”
Zoey tilted her head to the side. “You were very handsome, and very self-confident, but not in a flashy way. A lot of the made wolves carry themselves like they have something to prove. You di
dn’t. You were also very alone. You stood back and watched everybody but didn’t let anyone get close to you.”
“Romano’s usually right by my side.”
“Physically. Mentally and emotionally, you’re a million miles away from him. And everyone else.”
He poked at the remains of the pasta on his plate but didn’t reply. The lights in the restaurant flickered.
“Restaurant’s getting ready to close.”
“Kind of early, isn’t it?” she said, puzzled. It was just starting to get dark.
“We’re near a vamp area.”
“Ahh. That’s right, I forgot.”
Lone humans and low-level magic-bloods tended to disappear from vamp areas at night. Rent near vamp areas was super cheap, although the price of garlic was through the roof. It also explained why an Italian restaurant would have set up shop in this neighborhood; a meal here would guarantee a person a safe walk home.
He put down his spoon. “You haven’t had dessert. I own this building, and I have an apartment upstairs where I crash sometimes. Come upstairs, and if you want to leave afterwards, I will escort you home myself.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” she grumbled, and she kept repeating that to herself as she let him lead her by the hand from the restaurant and up a flight of stairs by the side of the building.
Chapter Thirteen
D ominic’s apartment took up the entire floor above the restaurant. The furniture was black leather and rich cherrywood. There were framed watercolors of Nevada landscapes on the walls. Zoey recognized some of them by a well-known local artist. The bookshelf against the wall was beautifully arranged, with hardcover art, photography books, and bronze sculptures of wolves.
She never would have guessed his apartment would look so warm and homey. She’d pictured something sterile and straight out of a catalog. What else didn’t she know about him?
“You support the arts,” she murmured, pausing to look at a watercolor and admiring the luscious jewel tones of a desert sunset.
As he shed his suit jacket, he gave her a wry smile with an oddly wistful undertone. “Does that get me points?”
Mated to the Capo (Mafia Wolf Shifters) (Encantado Shifters Book 1) Page 10