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I had to wrestle with my heart, lest it get too excited over what she’d just said. “You’d want that?” For whatever reason, I pictured Giselle simply being done with me, that she’d never want to see me again after the smoke cleared. That we’d both be on our separate ways.
“I’d never hold you back from going wherever or doing whatever you want, but… yeah, I do want that.”
Her hand was still in mine, though I’d stopped tracing her knuckles to simply hold onto it. I angled my chin toward her head, resting it against her hair. “What about the others? I think Damian’s under the impression that you belong to all of us.”
Giselle chuckled softly. “He is. Don’t know what gave him that idea.”
“Right,” I went along with her, deadpanning, “it definitely isn’t the revolving door of men who come to visit you here.”
“It’s not a revolving door, Luca. It’s just… Cade and Ezekiel.” A pause before she added, “And you.”
“What about Damian?”
“Damian is… he’s—” She stumbled over her words somewhat, and I hated how adorable I found it. I only hated it a little because of what she was talking about. It wasn’t every day the girl you liked listed off the names of the guys who so clearly wanted to keep banging her. She was like Shay 2.0, having a harem of guys all to herself, and as much as none of us wanted to share, we couldn’t quite force ourselves to walk away from her.
I knew what Giselle was saying, or rather, what she wasn’t saying: she had a thing for Damian too. The guy saved her life, technically twice now, so I really couldn’t hate the man. I did decide to bring up the other guy in the equation, the one I hadn’t seen for a while now. I’d purposefully avoided his calls because Giselle had asked me to. “And Zander?”
“Zander is complicated.”
“How?” As far as I knew, Zander was the one who’d been in love with her the longest. He’d known her longest, spent the most time with her, and made his jealousies the most known. The guy and I did see eye to eye when it came to Giselle, but that’s about it.
Giselle was silent for a while. She shifted her weight, but she didn’t pull her head off my shoulder. “He was Miguel’s man for a long time. He followed orders. He…” She sighed. “He’s the one who shot me, Luca. I met him at a park and confronted him about it. He admitted it.”
I tensed up. None of this I enjoyed hearing. Zander shot Giselle? The fucking gall… I should shoot him to see if he liked how it felt.
“He said Miguel told him to kill me, but he couldn’t. He also said he knew if he refused, Miguel would’ve gotten someone else to finish the job, and that someone wouldn’t have hesitated, so he did what he had to.”
Fuck me. I guess, if you knew men like Miguel, men like my father, you knew how they operated and the lengths they’d go in order to get the job done. It didn’t matter how you got there, just that the job was done. I was upset at Zander for hurting Giselle, yes, but I could also understand where he was coming from, logically.
If he wouldn’t have done it, if he’d refused, Giselle might not be here right now. She might be dead, and everything would be different and terrible—emphasis on the terrible part.
“You believe him?” I whispered.
“I… I do. I hate that I do, but I know what Miguel is capable of. I know now that he’s not my father, he’s hated me my whole life, so it doesn’t shock me to know he wanted me dead. And the reasoning behind Zander’s decision, I get that too. I just, I still feel betrayed—which is stupid, I know, but that’s just how I feel.”
“This whole thing is a crazy situation, one big mess on top of another mess. I don’t think it’s stupid to feel betrayed, even knowing he did the only thing he could. You’re allowed to feel whatever you feel, Giselle.”
The sigh that came from her then was one full of wistfulness, and she was slow in pulling her head off me, though she left her hand in mine. “And you? What do you feel, Luca?”
The corners of my mouth tugged into a smile, and I met her warm, amber stare. “I feel,” I started knowing there were a million different things I could’ve said, a thousand different ways to say it. Maybe I’d stick to the simplest one. “I feel like I’m falling in love with my wife.”
Her breath caught, her lips parted ever so slightly. She said my name again, “Luca,” only this time, she said it in a bare whisper, so soft I almost didn’t hear it. Like my name itself was a prayer on her tongue.
“I mean it. I… I think it’s been happening for a while now, and it’s okay if you don’t feel the same. You’re getting pulled every which way, all the time, so I understand if you don’t—” I was trying to be comforting, trying to say she shouldn’t feel pressured or anything like that to say it back, but I couldn’t finish what I was saying.
Why? Oh, because the girl in question had smashed her mouth against mine, stopping any other words from getting out.
It happened fast, too. Like so quick my mind couldn’t register what was happening right away. I sat there like a dummy, my eyes wide open, for at least five seconds after she started to kiss me.
And then it finally hit me: Giselle was kissing me. Whether it was to stop me from rambling or her way of saying she felt the same, did it really matter?
My eyelids closed, and I reached for her, pulling her onto my lap and wrapping my arms around her as I returned her passion tenfold. I held onto her like I was afraid to let go, and I kissed her like I had something to prove. And I did, in a way: my growing love for her.
Her mouth was just as soft as I remembered it being, only this time I got to know the smoothness of those lips much more intimately. They locked against mine perfectly, as if they were always meant to fit against me. She moaned into the kiss, the sound a soft, fluttery thing that only served to kickstart my heart.
The desire in me to have this girl utterly and completely grew to be too much to ignore. My cock twitched in my pants, aching to be set free, and it was all I could do to ignore it, to focus on the mouth colliding with mine and the body that fit so well in my lap.
And then Giselle pulled her mouth from mine, leaving me wordlessly questioning why she pulled back. The look she gave me right then was heavy-lidded and full of need, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one having difficulties controlling their breathing.
