When Heroes Fall

by Giana Darling

  It wasn’t just his physical closeness that was wearing me smooth like waves against rocks.

  Of course, as a woman and an educated, strong-willed one at that, I took fundamental umbrage with the mafia. How could any woman romanticize a system that viewed families as a feudal system run by men and only men, with the women used as janitors, cooks, nannies, and the occasional matrimonial bargaining chip?

  This, I was learning, was not the borgata of Dante Salvatore. Of course, there was still a hierarchy. Dante and Tore at the top, a kind of bizarre co-captaincy you didn’t often see between mafiosos who were, as a rule, power-hungry and incapable of compromise. Then Frankie Amato, the tech whiz and right-hand man, who magicked whatever the Salvatores wanted seemingly out of thin air. There were the underbosses below that, manning their own mini fiefdoms, but they were not, I’d learned, exclusively male.

  Frankie’s wife did work for the family.

  Yara was their consigliere, a woman, and a non-Italian.

  It was obvious that Dante had flouted the traditional norms that had ruled the Camorra and other Italian organizations like it for decades.

  And it seemed to be working, financially at least.

  No one seemed to want for anything. I’d seen the matte black Ferrari 458 Spider in the garage, secretly lusting after it; the Rolex, Patek Phillipe, and Piaget watches on the wrists of Dante and his men; the sheer size and expensive furnishings of the apartment I lived in temporarily. Dante and his crew of merry criminals owned hotel chains and construction companies, an incredibly lucrative and innovative energy company, and restaurants and bars across the company. The sheer scale of their legitimate or at least legitimate-facing businesses was staggering. In combination with their illegal dealings, the loan sharking, gambling, and fraud I never caught wind of, I could only guess at the billions of dollars coming in.

  It also seemed evident that this new-fangled way of doing things did not go over well with important members in other organized crime families. I eavesdropped without shame, the lawyer in me unable to resist, and Dante didn’t try as hard as he could have to shield me from things.

  I knew the di Carlo family was after him. The same family that had wrapped Cosima up in a drive-by shooting and put her in a coma.

  When Gideone di Carlo called me, not once but twice, I didn’t answer, and eventually, I blocked his number.

  In short, I knew too much.

  Too much about the men behind the criminal masks, Chen’s quick mind, Marco’s humor, Frankie’s charm, Adriano’s quiet kindness, and even Jacopo’s bursts of good-natured ribbing. It was so much more difficult to hate them for their crimes when I knew more about their personalities than their illegal activities.

  I had always found, if you could understand something, it was almost impossible to hate it because then you could empathize with it.

  The same, of course, could be said for their boss.

  Slowly and irrevocably spending time around Dante’s heat had thawed my icy demeanor toward him. I found myself bantering with him instead of trying to cut him to pieces with the sharp edge of my tongue. After going back to work from my surgery, I spent my late working hours at the living room desk or coffee table instead of the office because I liked the company.

  His company.

  One month of our forced proximity, and I was dangerously close to capitulating to his game of corruption.

  Giving in to the lust I felt swelling tsunami strong in my gut. A sensation I had never in my twenty-seven years felt before meeting Dante.

  The thaw he’d instigated with that simple neck kiss and extraordinary show of masturbation had never made me more aware of my body and its yearnings. I felt almost sensually alive, aware of the taste of food on my tongue, the very air on my skin, the cashmere I pulled on my body to ward against the deepening winter chill. I found myself craving things I’d eschewed for so long, chocolate and whiskey, dance and song, but most of all, sex.

  I wanted him so badly even my teeth ached with it.

  The last few mornings, I’d even woken up with wet between my thighs from dreaming of the ways a man like Dante might touch me there.

  I squeezed my thighs together beneath the table on the patio that morning as Dante and I sat drinking coffee, both of us reading our respective newspapers before I headed into work. It was an oddly domestic scene, but I didn’t allow myself to linger too long on that.

  “You seem…agitated this morning, Elena,” Dante noted in that smooth, accented drawl he used when he was teasing me.

  I glared at him, irritated with us both for the interminable dance we were locked together in. “I slept badly.”

  “Bad dreams?” he asked with a quirk of a black brow.

  I pursed my lips and arched one of mine. “About a bad man.”

  “Oh.” He folded his paper in his lap and leaned forward with a wolfish grin. “Do share with the class.”

  I snorted. “Not likely.”

  “Va bene. Then I will tell you about mine,” he offered, leaning back to cross those thick arms over his chest.

  I pulled my stare from the bulging muscle only to land on that square jaw still ink-stained with stubble from the day before. Unbidden, I imagined what it might feel like under my tongue.

  “That’s unnecessary.” My starched delivery was ruined by my breathiness.

  Those eyes, twin galaxies, glittered. “I think it’s very necessary.”

  He reached into the fruit bowl set between us and selected a red pomegranate. I watched avidly as he gripped it between his two mighty hands and easily cracked it in half with his thumbs. He smoothed a finger down the inside of the fruit almost sensuously, then brought a kernel of the bright fruit to his mouth. It summoned the memory of him trailing those fingers through his own cum and painting the liquid on my lips.

  He hummed as he swallowed it.

  I reached for my water glass and drank heavily.

  “I dreamed that I was with a beautiful woman,” he began, still holding the fruit and feeding himself intermittently. There was red juice on his lips I wanted badly to lick off. “She was naked but nervous. I gentled her, stroking down all that creamy skin with just the tips of my fingers, the edge of my rough knuckles until I made her tremble.”

  I blinked, so absorbed in the rolling cadence of his voice that I completely forgot myself.

  “She didn’t want to get on her knees for me when I asked…” He pulled a few seeds of pomegranate onto his fingers and then inclined forward slowly to raise them in offering to me as he said, “So, I got on my knees for her. And when I put my mouth on her pussy, do you know what she tasted like, Elena?”

  I didn’t answer because I was too busy telling myself not to take those thick fingers into my mouth with the proffered fruit.

  He read my hesitation, and his eyes went from liquid ink to intractable obsidian. A moment later, he pressed the fruit to my closed mouth, painting my lips with the tart juice. When I opened my mouth, to protest surely, he slipped the seeds onto my tongue.

  “Like pomegranates and red wine,” he finished, returning to a comfortable lounge in his own chair where he proceeded to suck the tips of his fingers clean.

  “Are you flirting with me?” I asked, proud that my voice didn’t shake the way my thighs did beneath the table.

  “Will you hit me if I say yes?”

  His playfulness was infectious. I tamped down my urge to smile and nodded somberly. “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said with a wink, “then hit me. I like it rough.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” I said, giving in to my laughter but sobering slightly when I caught the look he was giving me. “What? Do I still have pomegranate juice on my mouth?”

  “I’ve never been so proud to make another person laugh,” he told me seriously.

  I swallowed the mass of emotion that rose in my throat. “Don’t say I should do it more often.”

  “No, the rarity of it makes it more beautiful. I’m becoming rather possessive
of the sound.”

  I blinked at him as more of me unraveled, rolling across the space between us as if I wanted him to take the unspooled length of me and reassemble it in his hands.

  It was hard not to wonder what the Elena Dante saw could be like if I let her out of the shadows.

  I cleared my throat, dabbing my lips with my napkin as I stood up to leave. “I have an appointment on Staten Island at nine.”

  He stood too, dropping the pomegranate to his plate and wiping his hands before he came around the stone table to corner me against the door. One hand went to my hip and the other braced on the door beside my head as he crowded me. The sheer size of him shouldn’t have excited me as it did, but all the things I had once found horribly savage now seemed to light me up like kerosene-soaked tinder.

  “One day, Elena,” he practically purred, the sound a rough vibration that hummed through me. “I am going to kiss you until you melt, and then I am going to lick up every inch of you.”

  A shiver rattled my shoulders against the glass door. I was reaching some kind of boiling point, my blood gone to magma beneath my skin, and I was desperate for something to finally rip the cap off my control and send me bursting free. I wanted him to kiss me now against all of my better judgment, but I wasn’t ready to ask for it. He had to be the one to take it so I could blame him later when my cooler head reigned.

  I canted my chin into the air and challenged, “Don’t hold your breath.”

  The hand on my hip moved up my side, his thumb dragging over the underside of my breast beneath my lace blouse as it traveled up to my throat. I swallowed hard against his palm as he cupped my neck and squeezed just firmly enough to feel my pulse kick against his skin.

  “No, lottatrice,” he murmured as he angled his nose over the shell of my right ear. “I’ll hold yours when I finally fuck you. Eat it off your tongue when I kiss you as you beg me for more.”

  There was a cool breeze moving over the balcony, but Dante was an inferno against me, my resistance evaporating with every second I remained caged within his heat.

  “You’re everything fire, and I’m solid ice,” I protested because nothing about us made sense, and he needed to remember that.

  If I couldn’t make things work with Daniel, a man seemingly perfect for me, nothing could ever amount to anything between Dante and I.

  “Si,” he agreed gruffly. “That’s why I know I’m the one who will finally make you melt.”

  “I’m already risking my career by just staying here.” I was throwing grenades blindly, hoping one of them hit the target.

  He was wholly unperturbed, his eyes so focused on mine I could almost read what he was going to say in the black screens before he spoke. “So, make the risk worth something.”

  “I’m not a gambler.”

  “No, but I am, and I rarely lose.” He ran the tip of his nose down the side of my ear and feathered his lips against the sharp edge of my cheekbone. “Let me show you passion, Elena. Let me teach you how to love again.”

  My heart stopped in my chest as if he’d reached through the cage of my ribs and gripped it tightly in one of those powerful hands. For one breath, I was paralyzed entirely by the fear of what he was hinting at.

  Love.

  There was no way I could love a man like him, a mafioso, a criminal like the kind who had played the villain in my life for so long.

  It was impossible.

  But when my heart started to beat again, it did so with a bone-rattling bang like an engine backfiring, and then it set to racing.

  I’d promised myself I would never love again.

  “The contents of my heart are confidential,” I told him archly as if to suggest that he might ever read about the private agonies of my heart was ludicrous.

  In a way, it was, but not in the way I made it sound.

  It was ludicrous because, for one moment, I thought if anyone could understand what was written there, it would be this man with the black eyes and shockingly kind heart.

  “Not all love is romantic,” he pointed out rationally, staring into my fearful eyes. “I don’t think you’ve had enough of it to know that, but I’m offering the love of a friend and the love of my body. The love of a man who can see you are not hateful. You are not villainous. You are misunderstood. And Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m fucking undone by the beauty of you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” I insisted. “You don’t know half of the bad things I’ve done.”

  “And you don’t know mine,” he agreed. “But we are more than our flaws and our mistakes. Who told you that you were hard to love? Give me a chance to prove them wrong.”

  “I don’t want to be loved,” I asserted, almost baring my teeth at him because I’d never felt so threatened in my entire life. Not when I’d hidden under the sink and watched mafiosos beat my father. Not when Christopher forced me to do unholy things with my body. Not when he showed up at Giselle’s art show and assaulted her, and I’d stepped in to fight him myself.

  None of the boogeymen in my life held a candle to the power Dante seemed to yield over me compared to the length of time I’d known him.

  One month of constant contact and I was in danger of throwing away everything I knew just for one single kiss.

  “Let me love you anyway,” he suggested.

  And then he was moving.

  They say there is a thin line between love and hate. The moment Dante Salvatore twisted his hand in my hair and yanked me in for a savage kiss, I knew he had just pushed me over that invisible line into something infinitely more dangerous than hate.

  But all I could do as thoughts swirled into one furious tornado of sensation in my head was curl my hands into his silky cotton shirt and hang on for dear life.

  The kiss tasted like the smoke, but not because of my anger. It tasted like the ashes of my once solid self-control. Because I knew this wouldn’t be the last time we kissed.

  It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.

  The way his mouth sealed over mine like a stamp of possession, his tongue parting my lips as if it was his right to claim this kiss and he’d already been patient for too long. The scent of him, bright as a citrus grove with an undertow of masculine musk was in my nose, the sound of his low, throaty growl vibrating from his tongue across mine. When he brought the long, impossibly hard length of his body flush against me, I couldn’t breathe from the feel of the hot erection pressed to my belly.

  At that moment, every single atom in my body was owned by him.

  One kiss.

  For one kiss, I risked it all.

  My career, my family, my freedom.

  And my life.

  But, Dio mio, I’d do it again and again if it meant feeling like this.

  So alive I burned.

  Only the sharp vibration of Dante’s phone on the patio table cut through the smoke and reminded me of myself.

  Of my rules.

  I tore my lips from his, my chest heaving with the effort, and pressed myself tight to the door as if doing so made me less conspicuous to that dark and hungry gaze.

  “This is on pause,” he growled, his thumb stroking possessively over my thudding pulse point as if each beat spoke his name. “Now that I’ve had that red mouth, I’ll need it again.”

  I just blinked at him as I tried to regulate my body, harness its wild impulses with the cool rationality of my mind. It took longer than it should have, than it ever had before, but finally, I found my voice.

  “My meeting,” I reminded him weakly, shoving him back with two hands to his chest, trying not to luxuriate in the feel of his steel muscles beneath the soft fabric I’d left irreparably wrinkled. “I’ll be late.”

  He let me push him away, putting his hands in his pockets as he followed me into the living room instead of answering his cell phone. I watched as he crossed to the desk while I collected my coat and purse, narrowing my eyes as he suddenly sent something flying across
the room at me.

  Instinctively, my hand reared up to catch the object. When I brought it down and uncurled my fingers, a bright red key fob with a silver horse rearing on it in silhouette stared back at me.

  I gaped at him. “What is this?”

  “Any Italian girl worth her salt knows what that is.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “But why did you just give me the key to your Ferrari?”

  His grin was spectacularly wicked, and I realized with some degree of awe and concern that Dante didn’t have to have me pressed up against the wall to continue his seduction of me. “Addie told me you’ve been eyeing her. Why don’t you take her for that drive to Staten Island?”

  My fingers curled around the key. Even though I didn’t want it to mean something that he trusted me to drive his million-dollar car, my heart panged like a plucked instrument in my chest.

  “Thank you,” I muttered, my focus on putting my coat on so I wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of his megawatt grin.

  “That sounds almost as good as please,” he told me in that smoky voice that made me high. “Not quite as good as your laughter, though.”

  “Stop it, Dante,” I said firmly, shooting him my best schoolmarm glare. “Forget this happened. It was a momentary lapse in judgment.”

  He nodded somberly, his lean hips against the desk, one hand playing with the chain of the ornate silver cross he’d taken out of his shirt. He looked like an invitation to sin on an altar, the worst decision a woman would ever make, but the wicked gleam in his eyes promised he would make it worth her while.

  “I’ll try my best to make sure your judgment lapses again,” he called as I turned on my heel and started for the elevator. “Frequently.”

  I shook my head but didn’t turn around.

  Only when I was safely ensconced in the elevator on the way to the garage and that gorgeous car did I hit my head back against the ornate gold scrolled metal wall and curse myself for the smile that broke free across my face.

  When I touched my lips to force the expression off my face, I traced the feel of his kiss echoed there in my flesh and closed my eyes on a groan.