“Because she loves you, silly,” Ivory laughed as I stood up, walking around the counter and handing her daughter back. I closed my laptop, grabbing it and moving toward the hall where Matteo’s office was located. “You have to let someone love you one day!”
That’s what I was worried about.
I’d hide in Matteo’s office until my death if it meant keeping that woman and her child at a distance. They were already too close, had already burrowed their way inside me to the point that I worried what would happen to them if I was gone.
Already so ingrained that I felt responsible for them.
Love was out of the question for men like me. For men who were so broken that there was nothing left worth saving.
“Is she pushing you again?” Matteo asked when I stepped into his office, not bothering to look up from his computer screen. But a smile curved his lips, because, unlike me, he found his wife’s antics highly entertaining.
“She’s relentless,” I grunted. “You couldn’t have married someone less aggravating?”
“One of these days, you’ll find your Angel. Then you’ll understand,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the desktop twice. Just the mention of his wife and daughter was enough to drive him out of the office, wanting to spend all his time with them.
He ran the city with an iron fist, and it wasn’t often that his instinct was wrong, but in this, he was.
Because no woman deserved to be stuck with the likes of me.
8
IRINA
Day drinking wasn’t usually in my repertoire.
It wasn’t something that I’d ever had a desire to do, or would have risked one of my kids spotting me doing. There were better ways to deal with my problems.
Not to mention the risk of side effects when I combined it with my meds.
But some days were worth that risk. Some days were just worth the drink. Getting the call that one of my boys had been found dead that morning where he walked to school?
That required a fucking bottle and something reckless.
Zachariah had been far too young for me to spend the rest of my afternoon making funeral arrangements for him. And I’d been the one to tell him to go to school. I’d sent him somewhere I’d suspected he didn’t want to go, hoping he’d just tell me if he needed help.
He hadn’t, and now the weight on my chest was just a little bit heavier. Another boy gone, another failure to stain my hands.
I lifted the tumbler to my lips, inhaling the scent of the Glenfiddich before tipping it back and drawing a sip into my mouth. The masochist in me loved to dwell on the memory of my mother, thrived on the reminder of just how useless I was when it came to love.
Everyone left. Everyone died. Until there was next to nothing left.
Shadows chased away the dim glow from the pendant lights hanging above the bar at Indulgence as a figure took a seat next to me even though the club was mostly empty. I squeezed my eyes shut as I swallowed the scotch, letting it burn a path down my throat before I opened them and turned to face the stranger who’d invaded my moment of grief.
My eyes landed on a broad torso encased in a perfectly tailored suit. It took far too long to pull my stare away from the thick muscles of his biceps and the way the black fabric seemed to barely contain him. I forced myself to stop staring with a shake of my head, lifting my gaze up.
And up.
And up.
Fuck.
He had to be at least a foot taller than me, and I was one of the taller women I knew at 5’6”. Being that tall...it was something otherworldly.
Like an ethereal creature from the shadows, he turned his head to face me and pinned me in place with eyes as dark as night. They held mine, never leaving my stare as I felt my bottom lip drop open.
I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t turn away.
There was nothing else but him, and there was no doubt in my mind that this man was nothing but dangerous.
He lifted a hand, brushing it through the cropped dark hair on top of his head and shaking himself out of the trance between us. With the moment gone, I was finally free from the way he seemed to trap me in place, how he seemed to see straight inside me in a way that no one ever had.
Like he could see all the broken pieces, the jagged edges where I’d never been able to put myself back together.
“You have good taste,” he said, his voice deep as he cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry?” I asked, my cheeks flushing when his lips quirked up at the side and he cocked a brow at me.
“Your drink,” he said, taking the tumbler from my hand and placing it under his nose. He took a deep breath in, letting the notes of pear and butterscotch permeate his senses. He placed his lips on the exact spot where my lipstick stained the glass, tipping it back until a sip of the amber liquid slid between his lips.
I watched him intently, huffing a laugh at his audacity to help himself to my very expensive scotch. “Oh please, do help yourself,” I said, uncrossing and recrossing my legs and watching his eyes fall down to the bare skin revealed by my pencil skirt.
“I plan to,” he said, holding the glass out in front of me. I reached out, the tips of my fingers brushing against his skin for a moment before he pulled his hand back sharply and sloshed the liquid in the tumbler.
He smoothed the lines of his face back out immediately, relaxing after the extreme reaction. Glancing down at his grip on the glass, I really studied the tattoos that covered the backs of his hands that seemed far too big to be human. Even those seemed chorded with muscle, the ink covering the raised white scars underneath them.
“Let me,” he mumbled, raising the glass toward me and spinning it so that my mouth would touch the same exact spot we’d both drunk from. He lifted it to my mouth, tipping it back slowly and pouring the smallest sip into my mouth in a move that felt so perfectly seductive I melted.
This man would ruin me if I let him. It was a good thing I was already ruined.
When the tumbler was empty, he lifted two fingers to the bartender who quickly refilled it for him. He didn’t pay, didn’t reference my tab or anything along those lines.
The nod between them felt more than casual. They knew one another, and I knew enough to recognize that a man who wore scars like armor and was covered in tattoos hanging around Indulgence?
He was a Bellandi man, through and through.
“What should I call you?” he asked, turning in his seat until he faced me completely. His hands came down on the stool outside my legs, not touching me at all but gripping the wood as he turned me. His legs engulfed mine, the sheer length of his thick thighs enveloping me in an embrace.
“Does it matter?” I asked, chuckling at the look of amusement that crossed his face.
He reached forward, tucking a loose strand of my dark hair behind my ear without ever letting his skin brush against mine. There was only the movement of the air between us to hint at the contact that could come if I chose to be reckless.
And a reckless evening with a stranger sounded pretty damn good after my day.
“Okay, Butterfly,” he murmured, leaning in until his face hovered over mine. The scent of scotch on his breath tickled my cheek, a tormenting tease that came so close to being where I wanted it.
It made no sense, this drive to feel his lips on mine. And yet, there it was, staring me in the face like the obsidian eyes watching every thought cross my face.