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Had she already?
Aurora woke up in just as much of a mood, if not more so. Dante had greeted her sweetly as if the conversation the previous night had not happened at all, and had offered to take her out for the day. She’d tried to act aloof, but he’d been so excited about the itinerary he’d planned for their outing that she had decided to go along with it.
For now.
If he thought she was going to forget about things completely though, he was sorely mistaken. The fact that Aurora seemed to be wet one hundred percent of the time she was around Dante was not making her even the tiniest bit less pissed at him. In fact, it was making her considerably more pissed.
Who the fuck did he think he was?
Sure, she’d agreed to marry a man of her uncle’s choosing, and in theory had been compensated for that with room and board through college, her first car, and various and sundry other bits of help over the years, but agreement or not, Aurora pretty strongly suspected that her uncle would have done his best to arrange a marriage for her anyway. So first of all, it wasn’t so much that she was getting married off in exchange for those things as much as she was getting married either way, so she might as well get those things. And Dante damn well knew that.
Secondly—Aurora used bullet points in her head when she wanted to get herself really, really worked up—she’d agreed to marry Dante in the modern sense, not to marry him in 1950 and be his kept wife. There had been no mention of her school prospects being curtailed. Perhaps she should have known she would be expected to live in the same state as her mob boss husband, but she was prepared to overlook that in order to enhance the righteousness of her irritation.
Living arrangements aside, there had definitely been no mention of him spanking her whenever he felt like it, let alone threatening to take off his belt and use it for that same purpose.
Dante, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Aurora was well on her way to making a comprehensive list of all the reasons she was going to kick him in the dick later, was jovially mansplaining the sights of Milan to her, despite the fact that she’d been here for the last month.
That was bullet point number three… or was it number four? Anyway, fuck him.
Angry as she was, Aurora had a deep and disturbing suspicion that if she were to confront Dante right here in the city, she’d be put in her place—or at least what he felt was her place—right here and now. She wondered for a second if perhaps she should intentionally provoke him in hopes of earning herself the promised belting and therefore maybe eliciting the involvement of the Carabinieri and teaching him a lesson that way. Not that she really wanted to see him in jail, if she was honest with herself, but the look on his face when she paid his bail—or did whatever you did to get your asshole future husband out of the slammer after you called the cops on him here in Italy—would be priceless.
More importantly though, she couldn’t completely be sure that if the Carabinieri showed up, they wouldn’t be in on it, since Dante seemed like a big shot, and the absolute last thing she needed was a belting in the back seat of an Italian police car or some holding cell in an Italian jail.
Putting aside thoughts of provoking him, she considered other options. After a few moments, she settled on one. She would run away and get lost in the crowd. The fact that her plan had the hallmarks of both a teenage girl running away after she got a scolding from her daddy and a two-year-old girl getting lost in the supermarket didn’t faze her. It didn’t even matter where she planned to go, or even if he caught her.
She just really, really needed to get even with this fuckface.
For the next few minutes, she played along wonderfully. So wonderfully, in fact, that when Dante started to get suspicious, she had to start acting a little grumpy and sassy to get him back to his neutral, tourist-showing-off-in-Milan-to-his-bored-fiancée mode. Then, picking her moment perfectly, she informed him that she needed to use the restroom, and that she had seen one just a block or so away. To her chagrin, he insisted on accompanying her to the location she’d indicated. Fortunately, Aurora had prepared for this and had waited until an actual restroom was at hand.
Sigh.
Attempt One had failed. But she remained undeterred.
A few minutes later, a real opportunity presented itself. An elderly woman who seemed like a lost American tourist had dropped her purse on the ground and was desperately trying to pick up its contents on the crowded sidewalk.
Yes!
Whatever else she knew about Dante, she suspected strongly he was exactly the kind of man who would insist on helping out during that kind of situation—in fairness, that wasn’t something to which she necessarily objected, it just happened to be useful in this moment—and he almost immediately proved her right. Nudging him and pointing, she sent him on his do-gooder mission, pretending to stand there on her cell phone, bored and waiting.
When he was fully absorbed in his white-knightery, Aurora made her move.
Slipping into the crowd that was swarming the sidewalk along the Duomo di Milano, Aurora broke into a fast walk and then a jog. She didn’t look back until she’d reached the large mall adjacent to the plaza. Not wanting to attract undue attention, she slowed to a leisurely stroll, weaving deftly through the throngs of shoppers until she reached an exit on the other side of the building. In an effort to make absolutely sure she wasn’t being followed, she walked another fifteen minutes through the tourist-filled streets before stopping to hail a cab. Once she was seated comfortably in the back seat of the vehicle, she allowed herself to feel smugly proud of herself.
Now the only question was, what next? She probably should have planned this better…
Dante could not fucking believe it. She had run away again. He was going to absolutely blister her ass.
The worst part was, he’d taken her bait so thoroughly that he hadn’t even seen which direction she’d gone. So here he was with his dick in his hands, in the middle of a city with which she was more familiar than him. After pondering his options for a moment, he decided that the humiliation of calling in a favor to catch his runaway bride here in Milan would be significantly less than the embarrassment of having to launch another worldwide hunt for her. So, fully aware of the mockery that would ensue, he called his cousin Enrico.
“Dante! I heard you’re in town, but you haven’t come to see me.”
“I’ve been busy with my new bride.”
There was a dark chuckle on the other end of the line. “Yeah, I heard you had to track her down.”
Dante didn’t bother to hide his audible sigh. “Fuck you, Enrico.”
Enrico knew all about his troubles with Aurora, of course, because he had been the one who had tipped Dante off to her presence here in Milan.
