It was that look in his pale green eyes.
A look that said, I dare you to sin.
A look that welcomed your darkest desires.
A look that hooked through my gut and pulled me just a little step closer so I might smell his scent—smoky and warm—so that I might trace the exact path of the scar puckering the skin from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.
“Have you ever heard of personal space?”
I blinked, momentarily mute and dumb, the sight of him dominating every other one of my senses. So it took me a second to realize he was insulting me in a voice dripping with poisonous disdain.
I blinked again as my mouth dropped into a shocked “O.” “Excuse me?”
One inky brow rose, thick and slashing so that he had a perpetual expression of aggravated contempt. When he spoke, it was slow and overly enunciated as if he were addressing an imbecile.
“Per-son-al sp-ace.” One tattooed hand, the one with the shiny watch, gestured dismissively between our bodies, his knuckles brushing my chest. There was a tightening to his flat mouth that made me wonder if it was as accidental as it seemed.
My nipples beaded beneath my hoodie, but the fabric was too thick to betray me.
Anger sparked through my blood like a delayed fuse, heat racing out from my heart to set my entire body on fire. I didn’t move back. In fact, I took one daring step closer and fisted my hands on my hips. My head was forced back at an awkward angle to maintain eye contact with the tall beast of a man, but I didn’t care.
This jackass was not going out with my mother.
I bared my teeth at him. “If this is how you normally greet your girlfriend’s family, it’s no wonder you were still single when you met my mother and it’s even less of a wonder why you’ll be single again after tonight.”
A slow grin, somehow more vicious for its calculated movement, claimed his handsome face and made it acutely beautiful. “You are operating under the assumption that Aida cares enough about your opinion to end our relationship because you’re embarrassed I caught you making a pass at me.”
My mouth flapped open, then closed. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. Never in my entire life had I faced such a rude, horrible man.
“Making a pass at you?” I almost stomped my foot in outrage and just managed to resist the urge. “You show up at our doorstep and speak like this to a teenager? What kind of man needs to put down a little girl in order to make himself feel big, hmm?”
“At least you acknowledge you are a little girl,” he said with faux pride. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t give a single fuck what you think of me. I’m dating your mother. Not you.” His pale gaze, a green so light they glowed almost unnaturally, seemed to burrow into me. Past my dark blue eyes straight into my brain, reading my thoughts like an X-ray machine read bones. “Though, it’s obvious you wish things were different.”
Outrage crackled in my chest, my lungs steaming with it, my ribs creaking as they threatened to cave in on the fiery rage in my heart.
I was a fairly good-looking girl though I knew I was no Aida Belcante. Still, enough of her boyfriends had hit on me when she wasn’t looking. They cupped my ass while I reached for a cereal bowl, complimented me lecherously at the pool, watched me walk to my room when I came out of the shower. They were all the same, eager for some woman to make them feel like a king. So, his comment rankled me more than it should have.
I’d dealt with innumerable men in my mother’s life, but never someone like him.
A demon in a suit more expensive than three months’ rent.
I gathered myself, rising to my full five-foot-three height as I pinned him with a look I wished ardently had the power to kill him.
“I wouldn’t date a jackass like you if you were the last goddamn man on the planet.”
He stared down at me, utterly unmoved, his perfect, stupid face a study in symmetry. “I don’t date little girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with me and I don’t have the patience to teach bumbling virgins. Now, be useful and go get your mother for me.”
“You know I’ll tell my mother you treated me this way,” I warned through my teeth.
His blink was a slow-motion condemnation of my character. “Yes. I expect little girls to tattle.”
“Oh, you’re here,” my mother called in her breathy tone from somewhere behind me. “Bianca, don’t make the poor man stay out in the cold.”
I hesitated, staring into those fathomless eyes as cold and pale as the Arctic tundra and I wondered what kind of monster my mother was asking me to invite into our home.
“Bianca!” she reprimanded.
I was seventeen, nine months away from freedom, but years ahead of my peers in maturity because I’d stopped being a kid the moment my little brother was diagnosed with epilepsy four years ago. I had been Brando’s primary caregiver since he was born because Aida wasn’t exactly maternal and we didn’t have the money for a nanny the way we did when I was young, yet the law said because she was older, because she had spent a few hours pushing us out of her vagina, she deserved to make life choices for the two lives she barely noticed most days.
Which was why I’d started referring to her as “Aida” instead of “Mom” in my head when I hit puberty and realized I had to take responsibility for Brando and me.
She brought men into our lives without any thought to us.
Men who hit on me. Men who ridiculed Brando for peeing his pants after some of his seizures. Men who treated Aida like pretty garbage, something to own and use without any need for niceties.
It was irritating and deeply unfair.
But I was used to it.
So, I didn’t argue with her even though I wanted to slam the door in the cold, arrogant face of the man at our door because I had that feeling. The kind you get in the base of your belly when you know something is wrong, the kind that raises the hairs on the back of your neck when a storm is an electric beat in the air minutes before it descends.
I shot one more glare at her latest conquest and stepped aside to let him into our home.
Into our lives.
The grin he shot me was a brief, brilliant flash of white teeth between firm lips. It was…triumphant. Mean. The smile of a marauder invited warmly into the village he intended to pillage.
A shiver bit vicious teeth into the base of my back and rattled my spine.
“Aida,” he said, shifting his focus from me to my mother, his entire face suffused with new warmth. “You look beautiful, but I do not know why I am surprised. You always take my breath away.”
I turned to watch him approach her, kissing her suavely on both cheeks, one tattooed hand light on her hip. The inked hands were such a contrast to his otherwise civilized veneer that I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, trying to discern the black ink patterns. The only image clear to me was the outline of an exquisite rose planted in the center of his left hand, the same hand that held a rose for my mother.
Aida blushed like a preteen girl at his praise. “You’re a dangerous man. If you aren’t careful, I’ll develop a complex.”
I snorted before I could curb my reaction, drawing their attention to me.
Aida frowned at me, then quickly affixed a smile to her face, addressing her boyfriend. “You brought me a rose?”