“Just fact checking,” I countered, ignoring the condescending looks from the other, older men at the table. They assumed the only thing I was good for was seducing the women of Sicily. “What would happen if we made sure the girl didn’t arrive at her wedding a virgin? What if someone got there before Tommaso?”
“The girl would be killed, and the unification of the Bruno and Vitali families would be dead in the water.” Don Amato cocked his head to the side, peering down his nose at the rest of us. “They’d assume the Bruno family had either deliberately fucked up or that they couldn’t even control their own family.”
I grinned, the expression slicing across my face almost painfully. “Win-win for the Amato family.”
“Assuming we can actually get to the girl. Paolo Vitali locks her in his fortress and barely lets her out of his sight after what happened to the sister,” Uncle Gaetano remarked.
I made a mental note to look into Carlotta Vitali. I hadn’t seen her in years, but we never ran in the same circles and I’d never bothered with petty gossip.
“Maybe you can finally put your dick to good use,” Angelo sneered, always up for an opportunity to take jabs at me and never succeeding.
He was the same age as me, but that was where the similarities ended. He was stupid and bitter for it, greedy and gluttonous, but without the wherewithal to attain what he desired.
He’d hated me since we were children.
I didn’t hate him at all.
Hating him would have implied he was worthy of my notice.
I rolled a pen between my fingers and let a smile tug one corner of my mouth. “Oh, my dick is good for plenty. If you worried about your own sex life as much as you worried about mine, little Angelo, maybe you’d get better results, hmm?”
His fleshy face screwed up, the blood rushing to the surface of his skin as if he were about to pop. “Where the fuck is your respect, Francesco?”
He thought calling me Francesco like the rest of the elders got beneath my skin. It didn’t. I went by Frankie, because Francesco was a mouthful for women to scream when I was balls deep inside them.
“You’ll get my respect when you earn it.” I didn’t bother hiding my amusement. “Just like everyone else.”
“And what have you done to garner our respect?” Don Amato’s words cut through the air with the force of a whip landing across my back. I flinched at the cold anger in that tone. “The Amato family’s reckless Casanova and homewrecker. You flagrantly ignore the rules of this family and its men of honor, Francesco. Maybe it’s about time you proved yourself worthy of the Amato name.”
They obviously didn’t understand the irony of their chastisement.
They accused me of being good for nothing but getting my dick wet, yet they were now asking me to prove myself by doing exactly that.
I didn’t point that out to them.
They were family, sure, but le mafie wasn’t about family.
It was about an inbred army. Though these were my uncles, cousins, and brothers, they only saw me as an underperforming soldier.
I’d take this as an opportunity to prove that I was so much more than that.
Than them.
The hot swell of anger in my chest cooled and hardened like lava after the flood. I tossed my pen at Angelo, stood, and addressed the room, “Consider Liliana Vitali mine.”
And she would be.
At least, her virginity would.
CHAPTER ONE
Francesco
Stalking Liliana Vitali was dull as fuck.
Usually, I got a thrill from following someone. That animal delight that comes from stalking your prey.
Not so this time.
Liliana was pure as freshly driven snow. As fucking boring, too. She bought produce at the market with her mother once a week, visited her equally vanilla, vapid teenage girlfriends, and spent long hours in her room reading on her bed.
At least she was beautiful, though not in a way I was used to. She was fresh-faced, freckles the only adornment to her glowing, golden tan. She had no curves to speak of, just long, delicate bones that made her seem deliciously breakable.
All that purity excited the darkest recesses of my brain. It conjured images of my big hand around the long column of her fragile throat. Of bruises pressed and punctured into that flawless skin, purple and red around her neck and wrists like exquisite jewelry.
I wanted to bend that little body and sink into her until I broke her mind.
My dick kicked in my jeans.
Directly across from Paolo Vitali’s house, I sat on a folding chair on Maria Louisa's roof and watched his daughter through the open doors of her bedroom balcony.
I’d just bedded the plump and deliciously curved Maria Louisa. She hadn’t uttered a word of protest when I told her I was going to the roof with a glass of grappa and an after-sex cigar.
Liliana’s long spill of black hair caught the dim yellow light of her bedside table lamp. She stood up to accept someone into her room. I watched her smile and take a package from the woman at her door.
The thin thread of her giggles reached my ears like the distant peal of church bells. I wondered what noises she would make when I impaled her on my cock for the first time. She seemed like the breathy moans type.
Liliana bent over her bed to open the large, flat box. Her curtain of hair shielded her expression from my view, so when she removed a white lace corset from the tissue paper, I was not prepared for it.
God, the thought of that little, pristine body in white lace was enough to make any man’s dick hard.
She bit her lip and turned to face the mirror in the corner of her room, offering me an unencumbered view of her body as she held the corset up to her chest and posed. A finger touching her pink lips. A hand to the subtle curve of her hip, pert ass jutted out.
Try it on for me. Show me what’s under that loose, ugly dress.
As if alerted by my thoughts, her gaze darted out the doors, stopping just shy of my place on the roof. I was in relatively full view of her door. If she looked a bit further, she’d see me.
I didn’t bother to make myself hidden. It was a far enough distance that she would have had a hard time discerning my features enough to make me as an Amato. A small part of me wanted my prey to sense her hunter.
She bit her lip again. Then, slowly, hesitating like a virgin on her wedding night, Liliana Vitali undressed.
A moan caught in my throat at the sight of her little fingers plucking at the buttons on her dress. The material fell to her hips, caught on the flare. Her nipples furled like tightly closed rosebuds, the color of crushed raspberries. I wondered, when I eventually took them between my teeth, if they would taste just as sweet.
She shivered, studying herself in the mirror. A hand slid up her flat stomach over the minute curve of her breast and feathered over the tip. Her mouth fell open on an inaudible gasp as if she was surprised by the sensation of touching her own breast.
Fuck me, she was innocent.
I’d never gone for that before. My women were lush, sensual, and experienced enough to bring me pleasure without coaching.
But suddenly, the idea of teaching the waif unwittingly putting on a show for me was entirely too enticing.
I thought of the way she would look on her knees, big eyes peering up at me as I guided her small hand over my cock, watching her warm to the idea of exploring my flesh until she finally took me past those sweet, pink lips.