It was a heady thing to know I could make the ice queen burn.
I grinned rakishly as I slid my gaze down her exquisite form. “Not in that dress. Comrades, though. Allies. Whether you like the association or not, Elena, you are now a lawyer for the Camorra. It seems you are only aware of the downsides to the arrangement, but there can be many boons, too.”
Unable to resist, I reached out to run a thumb over the silken skin of her shoulder.
She jerked away, but not before I saw goose bumps erupt over her flesh.
“I don’t need boons from the likes of you,” she said haughtily, adjusting that simple necklace in an oddly provocative way she was completely unaware of. “I want to be professional, nothing else.”
“Ah, lottatrice,” I sighed dramatically and snagged a wineglass from the collection on the kitchen island, offering it to her. “You don’t seem to understand you work for me now. And I make the rules. It is my game for you to play.”
“I could leave your legal team,” she suggested.
She was glaring at me, those storm cloud eyes dark and raging beneath her delicate red brows. It should have been an ugly expression, full of hate, but I saw only the beauty of her face beneath it and the fire of her fight shining through.
I was beginning to understand the intricacies of her character, despite her best efforts to remain aloof. At first, it was difficult to like Elena Lombardi. She was constructed like a work of modern art, all sharp angles, rigid lines, and dominant sensibilities; beautiful and intriguing but difficult to understand. It was only upon further reflection and intense study that the impact of her beauty moved through you, as complicated a feeling as she was a woman.
I was looking forward to furthering my studies.
“You wouldn’t. Success means too much to you,” I noted, leaning back against the island and crossing my arms over my chest. Her eyes dipped to the swell of muscles beneath the fabric before she could curb the impulse.
“You’re one to talk.”
I inclined my head. “The drive for success motivates me, si. Not more so than the drive for happiness.”
“They are one and the same,” she concluded with a shrug that was the physical expression of the word “duh.”
“They are not. Success is defined by society. Happiness is defined by our hearts and minds. I think, lottatrice, you would be much happier if you learned to value the latter.”
“Don’t call me that and don’t preach to me, capo. You’re in no position to offer me advice.”
“Am I not?” I opened my hands wide to gesture to the party surging around us. “I am a successful businessman with powerful friends who support me even when I am on trial for murder.”
“Success,” she countered, lifting her hand to show me her red fingertips as she counted them off. “A fancy apartment, probably a few ridiculous sports cars, enough money to bribe these powerful ‘friends’ to look the other way from your misdeeds.” She raised an eyebrow. “Would you like me to call you a hypocrite yet?”
I laughed, finally having fun at my own party, and it was at the hands of the most unlikely woman I’d ever met.
“Who is making my son laugh?” Tore said as he stepped up beside me and clapped a hand on my shoulder.
I watched, fascinated, as Elena’s entire demeanor changed. Her bristling, hostile energy cooled, her features relaxed into an expression of polite interest and even her stance shifted, weight distributed evenly, and shoulders rolled stiffly back.
She smiled slightly at the only man I considered my father and offered her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you officially, Mr. Salvatore. I am Elena Lombardi, one of Edward’s lawyers.”
I rolled my eyes at her deliberate use of my old name, but Tore only laughed and accepted her slim hand between both of his, turning on his mega-watt charm.
The same charm that had seduced Elena’s mama into an affair. Based on Elena’s placid greeting, it was safe to assume she had no idea she was talking to the father of her two youngest siblings.
“You are many more things than Dante’s lawyer,” Tore was saying as he patted her hand in his. “One might say we are old family friends. Please, call me Tore.”
Something dark flickered in her eyes, but her lips were plastic molded around the shape of a stock smile. “If you’d like. Of course, I heard of you in my childhood.”
There was an underlying sentence that seemed to echo as boldly as if it had been spoken.
You were the orchestrator of the nightmares in my youth.
Of course, she didn’t know that when Tore had arrived in Napoli years after his affair with Caprice, he was as shocked as anyone to discover the twin children with his golden eyes in her home. He’d done everything in his power short of losing that power to shield the Lombardis from Seamus’s dangerous dealings with the Camorra.
But he didn’t say anything about it.
Instead, he took the silent hit she doled out like he deserved it.
Anger sparked in my blood.
It was one thing for her to judge me but quite another for her to skewer Tore with her misplaced hatred.
“He did more for your family than you know,” I cut in, glowering down at her from my advanced height. “Do not cast stones when you are blind to your surroundings.”
Elena ignored me, those gray eyes thunderous as they stared at Tore. “You might not remember this, but I was there the day you dragged Cosima from my mother’s house in Naples.”
I remembered that day too. Alexander had sent Cosima back home to Italy in order to get information on Tore and me, information about our mother’s death. It was that evening that Cosima learned the truth about what happened to Chiara and the truth about her paternity.
Elena didn’t know anything about it, about Tore and Cosima’s father-daughter relationship or that Cosima had been sold to Alexander at the tender age of eighteen as his sex slave to satisfy his role in an ancient secret society, the Order of Dionysus.
Truly, she didn’t know a thing about her own sister.
Either of them, probably.
And even though that wasn’t exactly her fault, I wouldn’t have her berating the only man who had taught me what it meant to be loved.
“You should ask your sister about that day,” I suggested, my mouth a cruel sneer as I glared at her. “For a woman who values knowledge, you do not ask questions when you should.”
“Dante.” Tore tried to soothe the tension with a chuckle. “Please excuse him, Elena, as he is fiercely protective. Figlio, have some of Caprice’s tiramisu to sweeten your disposition, si?”
I shook my head at him, but I did take one of the bowls filled with sweet cream and cake from the counter. Elena’s eyes tracked me as I brought the spoon to my mouth, as I hummed a little louder than necessary at the explosion of the flavors on my tongue.
“Perfetto,” I praised, then offered a spoonful to Elena with a brow raised in a silent dare. “You could use some sweetening too.”
“Boss,” Frankie interrupted, his face pinched with concern as he stopped in front of him. “Gotta talk to you.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but Tore got there first.
“Enough talk,” he decided, a wicked gleam in his eyes as he took Elena’s hand and pressed it into my own. “This is the feast of San Gennaro! We must be dancing.”
He shot me a hard look before I could argue with him, and I knew he wanted me to get her away from whatever grim news Frankie was carrying before her curiosity got the better of her. So I tucked Elena’s stiff arm through mine and tugged her into the living room, where a number of people were dancing between it and the terrace.
When I pulled her close, she went as stiff as a board in my arms.
“Dancing typically requires coordination,” I drawled. “Are you capable of that?”
She blinked at me blandly and rolled her shoulders back as she adjusted her hands on my shoulders. “I was concerned about you. It can’t be easy to move all that weight around.”
I tipped my head back to laugh at the ceiling as I hauled her even closer, flush against my chest. Through the thin silk of her dress and the crisp linen of my shirt, I imagined I could feel the hard points of her nipples.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, struggling slightly to pull away.
I clamped my hand over her hip and engulfed her hand on the opposite in my own before I ducked down to whisper over her lips. “I am dancing with you.”
“Indecently,” she hissed, her eyes scanning the crowd for any judgmental eyes. “Yara is watching.”
“Yara doesn’t care,” I countered as I moved us fluidly to the music, grinning at my man Davide as he spun his wife out beside us. “If you know the steps to the Saltarello, we could dance that instead.”
She rolled those pretty eyes at me, but her body was relaxing in increments against mine. I was reminded of her piano playing and made a note to play music around her more often. It was evident she was moved spiritually by it, even if the words were in her dreaded native tongue.
“Only old people dance the Saltarello,” she said. “Then again, you’re basically an old man, aren’t you?”
I scowled at her, the hand on her hip moving to the small of her back so I could press her fully to the quilted muscles beneath my suit. “I assure you, I’m still incredibly virile.”
“For an old man, maybe.”
“I’m thirty-five, Elena. I’m hardly ancient.”
She shrugged flippantly, but I caught a hint of a smile at the edge of her mouth.
We danced then for the length of one song, and when she would have pulled away, I spun her back into my arms for another. I liked the way she fit there against me, tall enough I didn’t have to break my back to look down into her romantic face, slim enough I got an aroused kick out of knowing I could bend her easily beneath my hands.
Her eyes caught mine as I moved us in a bastardized version of the salsa. Our bodies moved together with a synchronicity that surprised us both. I stepped; she followed. I indicated an upcoming spin with a twist of my wrist, and she was already swirling out in a flare of red silk. We moved faster, tighter against each other. Her breath fanned against the open skin at my collar as she panted with her efforts, her chest cresting again and again pressed to mine, her nipples hard as diamonds abrading my skin beneath the fabric.
A fire built in my gut, a slow burn that built deeper and deeper than the ache in an overused muscle. Sweat beaded on my brow, but it had more to do with the effort to restrain myself from savagely taking her mouth with mine than from the dance.
“This is inappropriate,” Elena panted at one point, but even her eyes were dancing beautifully in time with me.
“Si, indecente,” I agreed.
Indecent.
And she was. Indecently tantalizing warmed with amusement and the heat of excursion. I wanted to trail the flush from her neck down her chest, discover if her nipples were pink or brown, sweet or salty with sweat.
I pressed her intractably to the swell of my cock trapped in my trousers, and she faltered, losing time and tripping over her heels to end up straddling my thigh. Her eyes were all black, the steel gray a fine frame for her blown pupils as she stared at me, afraid and alert to the presence of a predator.
I grinned wolfishly as I lowered her down the hard length of my leg, enjoying the way she shuddered against me. I opened my mouth to tease her, to enjoy the contrast between her sharp-tongued wit and her pliant body against mine when suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.
Elena frowned as I hesitated against her. “Dante? You look pale.”
I wanted to tell her I was fine, but the air seemed to have been vacuumed out of my chest. A bead of sweat dripped into my eye, blurring my vision as I angled my head to see the buttons of my shirt and shakily undo even more. My fingers fumbled on the buttons as my head swam.
“Dante,” Elena repeated, alarm in her tone as she wrapped her hands around my body, alerting me to the fact that I was swaying. “Tore!” she yelled over the music.
Her hand went to my neck, sharp tipped fingers digging into my pulse as she struggled to hold me up. “Tore, his pulse is really slow.”
The father of my heart was there, taking my other side to prop me up and lead me to the couch.
“Is Dr. Augustus Crown here?” he demanded of someone I couldn’t make out over his shoulder.
I blinked because my eyes were dry, but when I tried to open them again, the lids seemed weighted by cement. The last thing I heard before I succumbed to the blackness was Jacopo’s loud voice growling, “You, bitch. You did this!”
ELENA
“You, bitch. You did this!”
I blinked at the short, slight man who was suddenly in my face yelling at me.
“Jaco,” Tore snapped, wrenching him away from me and lightly slapping his face. “Do not accuse anyone without foundation. We do not know what happened.”
“He was clearly fucking poisoned,” Jaco cried, pointing at Dante’s pale, sweaty form passed out on the couch. “She was the one dancing with him.”
“Oh? And you think I poisoned him with a kiss?” I asked venomously. “Don’t be an idiot.”
“Both of you, quiet,” Tore demanded in a voice that brooked no argument as a large man with a dimpled chin, thick gold hair, and blue eyes pushed through the gathered crowd. “Dr. Crown, I thought you were here somewhere.”
“You’re lucky I bring my bag with me everywhere,” was his grim reply as he knelt beside the couch and removed a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from his leather bag.
“Party is over, people,” the man I knew was named Frankie called out as he stepped up on a marble side table to address the crowd. “Get out.”
“Is he going to be okay, dottore?” a beautiful woman in her mid-to-late thirties appeared over the couch, bending to sweep a sweaty lock of black hair out of Dante’s face.
Dr. Crown knocked her hand out of the way without looking at her. Instead, he addressed Tore. “Get everyone the fuck outta here.”
Instantly, Tore transformed from the suave and debonair Italian host to the mafia boss I’d heard rumors about since my youth in Naples.
Unbending, vicious, and controlled.
“You have five minutes to get out!” he ordered, his voice carrying without him having to yell the way Frankie did.
I remained where I stood as everyone quickly gathered their things and left, ushered out by a group of men who were no doubt Camorra soldiers. No one told me to go, and Yara hovered by my side, so I stayed where I was.
The sight of Dante’s massive body pale and slick with sweat was oddly impactful even though I told myself I didn’t particularly like the man. He was just so potent, so vivacious and full of passion that to see him depleted felt absolutely wrong.
I was shaken as much by his sudden illness as I was by my lapse of judgment in dancing with him. My only defense was flimsy at best, but true enough, I had to admit it to myself. I’d never known a man who exuded such raw, palpable sexual energy. Being around him, with the full glory of his attention pinned only to me in a room full of nearly a hundred affluent and beautiful guests, was heady. The walls I’d erected between myself and the male species felt battered and war-torn against the force of his charm, and before I’d known it, I was dancing with him.
Dancing like I hadn’t in years.
Dancing like sixteen-year-old Elena in a piazza in Sorrento with a man I’d thought was my soul mate.
I hadn’t even danced like that with Daniel because somehow, I’d forgotten how much I loved it.
A shiver rippled down my spine, threatening to spill my emotions all over the floor for any of these people to rifle through. I sucked in a deep breath and cleared my mind, focusing on Dante, who still lay pale and seemingly passed out on the long leather couch.
Dr. Augustus fitted a portable oxygen mask to his face, then pricked his finger with some handheld blood monitoring device.
“You think it is poison,” Tore s
urmised grimly from where he stood at the head of the couch hovering over Dante like he could protect him from invisible enemies.
The doctor grunted. “Most likely cyanide. Easy to get your hands on and fairly difficult to detect.”
“Treatable?” the same beautiful Italianate woman who’d worried about him before asked.
I peered at her, something ugly churning in my gut at the sight of her sitting on the back of the couch to be closer to the capo.
They looked ill-suited, I decided. The woman was too blond, northern Italian for sure, with the olive skin and flaxen hair of the border regions near Switzerland and Germany.
Dante wouldn’t look good with a blonde.
The doctor, too, didn’t seem to like the woman because he ignored her again as he pulled a jar of black tablets from his endless Mary Poppins-like bag and then a full IV bag. He glanced over his shoulder, catching eyes with me.
Wordlessly, I extended my hand to hold up the IV bag for him. He nodded curtly as he handed it off then efficiently inserted the needle into one of the thick veins on the back of Dante’s hand before taping it down.
“He will be fine,” Dr. Crown asserted as if he had a direct line to Death.
I knew about cyanide poisoning because one of my first cases as an associate at Fields, Harding & Griffith had been defending a woman who poisoned her abusive husband over the course of a few months until he died. We’d plead guilty for a reduced sentence of five years with the possibility for parole at three.
I knew cyanide was deadly, especially in large doses.
My mouth was dry, and my palms were sweating. I swiped them on the silken dress Dante had bought me. A dress worth thousands of dollars. A dress I’d only ever found in my dreams.
Acid rushed up to eat at the walls of my chest.
I was shocked by it, but I truly didn’t want this man to die.
“He’ll be fine,” I asserted, an echo of Dr. Crown.
Dante’s associates, the only ones left in the messy and shockingly empty apartment, turned their black eyes to me. There were varying levels of curiosity and concern in those gazes, but I ignored them, tilting my chin up stubbornly to reaffirm my words.
When Heroes Fall Page 11