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Nico shakes his head and drags a hand down his face. “Of course, you feel bad for the duck,” he mutters under his breath.
“Is that somehow a problem?” I ask, weighing the situation. He doesn’t look poised to attack. He looks… uncertain, which is not a way I’d imagined a man like Nico could look.
“You’re the problem,” he sighs as he reaches me. I can practically feel the heat radiating off him. He still hasn’t stopped staring at my lip. I suppose it’s the small bump drawing his attention like a beacon.
I raise my eyebrows. “If you’re here to dole out more threats, don’t bother.” The last one about Mags had cut deeper than I’d expected, but it hadn’t scared me. He doesn’t scare me anymore. But somehow, his threatening someone I love hurt me more than I could say.
“You like to psychoanalyze me, don’t you? Well, you have the next ten minutes. Sit down.” It comes out like a command, but there’s a hint of desperation in it, a plea.
I cross my arms over my chest like armor and force an eye roll. “I thought you couldn’t stand therapy. Besides, we’ve already established that this,” I motion between us, “doesn’t work—and that was even before you threatened the people I care about.”
He looks at me for a moment, his expression closed. Who the hell knows what he’s thinking right now?
“I’m sorry, Sophie,” he says suddenly—and it actually sounds sincere, not sarcastic.
Whoa. I hadn’t expected that. “You don’t strike me as a person who’s often sorry,” I muse.
“I’m not,” he says, meeting my gaze head-on. “I’m never sorry.”
“Until now?”
He nods. “Until now,” he says quietly.
Well, damn. I’m desperately trying to hold onto my detachment, but it’s kind of difficult when the big, tough mafia guy is apologizing like he means it.
“All right,” I say tentatively. “But just so you know, Mags grew up in a house full of military men. She learned how to shoot when she was five and how to tear out a man’s throat when she was eleven. And she was the one who taught me how to use the karambit knife.”
He looks at me for a moment, then nods. “Now that’s admirable. I really like that,” he says, then walks past me and sits down on the leather sofa.
A very large, stupid part of me wants to sit down beside him. All right, that part of me wants to climb right on top of him. The man can be an asshole, but he’s also an Adonis who has a whole lot more heart than maybe even he realizes.
But wise woman that I am, I take a seat in my ergonomic chair, a safe, professional distance away while George flaps his wings like he’s about to take flight, then shoves his beak into the eight inches of water again.
I’m too curious about his statement not to ask, “You say you like that about Mags. Is that because you generally prefer your women to be tough? Women you won’t have to protect?”
“My world can be dangerous, so yes, generally toughness is always an appealing trait,” he states. “But has nothing to do with the women I fuck.”
Asshole, I want to snap, because that statement brings to mind indiscriminate fucking with nameless women. Which irritates the hell out of me.
There are so many follow-up questions I want to ask him. Like where he stashed this asshole when he gave me a much-needed physical outlet for guilt and pain and whatever other confused emotions I was feeling back in Harmony.
When he bound the hand I slashed on a whim.
When he kissed the living daylights out of me and then let me go, to the disbelief of his men.
When he sent a car to take me home because he’d dropped me in the middle of nowhere.
But I shut my mouth, waiting for him to talk. It’s his session, after all.
“Maria called you,” Nico says into the silence.
Shit. Can the woman not keep a single secret? “She did,” I reply smoothly. “She wanted to make sure I was still breathing.”
He nods like this comes as no surprise.
“And you told her she needs to do exactly what I say,” he states, though his tone is slightly questioning, as though he can’t quite believe I’d said that.
The woman probably relayed the entire conversation back to Nico verbatim. “More or less.”
