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Chapter 5
Angelo
“She’s going to faint!”
Mark calls out the obvious just as Tilly starts to swoon.
I catch her just as she falls, her weight strangely light in my arms. I am used to handling men. Their strength, bulk, and weight is vastly different to this delicate little thing who even as a dead weight feels like nothing to me.
She is so beautiful, it hurts to look at her. If there is a soft part of me, she is in danger of finding it, even in her insensate state.
I knew she was weakening with the stress of the day, and that my domestic arrangements would be a shock. I should have been more careful.
“Weak,” Bobby sneers. Mark cuffs him over the head, saving me the trouble.
“Won’t last the week either,” Bobby adds with a broad smile, dodging another slap from Mark.
“Do something to him, Mark,” I instruct as I carry my bride from the lounge, up the stairs and into our bedroom.
* * *
Tilly
“You fainted,” Angelo explains when I open my eyes.
I have teleported to a large bed in a room replete with masculine sensibilities. When I sit up, I see the hallmarks of expensive taste and style around me. Everything here looks as though it was crafted to fit precisely in this room. I would expect nothing less from my husband, who sits on the edge of the bed beside me. He has removed his jacket and tie, and rolled his sleeves up over his forearms. I expected tattoos and scars, but I don’t see anything besides the sinewy strength of an older man.
“Those men… what are they to you?”
“My captives at one time, my lovers at other times, my enforcers… my family,” he explains, drifting his fingers through my hair.
“So you have…” I can barely form the sentence. He waits for my words to emerge, but they don’t.
“Ask the question,” he urges me softly.
“You have sex with them?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
He says nothing, but allows me to digest that piece of information.
“And now we are married, will that… change?”
He looks at me with those big, dark, intense eyes, and shakes his head. “No, Matilda. Bobby and Mark are part of my life. They will remain in it.”
“Oh.”
I don’t know what to feel about that. I know monogamy is expected in normal marriages, but I am not going to pretend that this is one of those.
“You don’t have to worry about that right now,” he says. “Get some rest. There will be plenty of time for sensuality.”
“I don’t want…” I can’t finish the sentence. I don’t want sex. I don’t want to be made to sleep with a man who has abducted me from my ancestral home in the wake of my father’s murder. But I don’t think Angelo Vitali cares what I want. I don’t think he cares what anybody wants.
“I will not take you against your will,” he reassures me in what seems to be a rare display of gentlemanly candor. “You will beg me for my touch before you receive it.”
“Unlikely.” The word escapes me before I can contain it.
He smiles. Genuinely. For the first time. He is very handsome. Spectacularly so. I feel my heart race, and my lower belly perform a strange contraction. I must be tired to be thinking of… no. I refuse to entertain these thoughts.
“We will see.”
Chapter 6
Angelo
Mark is waiting for me when I emerge from the bedroom. My bride has fallen into a fitful sleep, from which I am sure she will soon awake. She faces a great deal of change over the next days, weeks, and months.
“Where’s Bobby?”
“I locked him in his room. He’s going to try to kill Matilda.”
“Yes, of course he is.”
Bobby cannot help his murderous impulses. There is something deeply wrong with the boy. That does not stop me from loving him, but it does mean he needs to be handled with care. Care, and force.
“I will deal with him.”
“Fuck you, Angelo,” Bobby hisses as I walk into the room. He’s been storing that disrespectful curse up all day I’m sure. It’s not his words I worry about. It is whatever he has planned in that dark little head of his.
He is stunning. No matter how long I have him, I never tire of looking at him. He has pale skin and big dark eyes which hold an absence of expression except for flashes of rage. He is a hollow boy. He is the kind of man good people fear. Bobby has been by my side for several years now. Or rather, he has been beneath me. I make sure my boy knows his place. I have taught him many lessons, but sharing nicely hasn’t been one of them.
He lurches up from the bed where he has been lying like the petulant brat he is, but before he can say another word or take any foolish action, I grab him by the throat and pin him against the wall, his pulse hammering beneath my fist. His nostrils flare and I feel him tense for a fight. I welcome it. It has been some time since Bobby has tested his mettle against mine. He is younger than me by several decades. That should make him stronger, but I am hardened with age, and an absence of soul.
