“I am going to take good care of you, mia amata. You never have to worry about that.”
I’m already throbbing between my legs. My nipples ache when they brush against Salvatore’s chest. I want, want,wantso much…
Salvatore trails his fingers down my back where we’re lying beneath the rumpled sheets. He scoots a little closer to loop his arm right around my waist.
“What would your perfect life be, Elodie?” he asks abruptly.
I turn my head, still a little hazy in the afterglow. Our first few attempts at hooking up were a little fumbling, but the mafia heir is nothing if not a determined lover. Today, he experimented until I came a second time.
Now he looks oddly hesitant. I’m not used to how sometimes he seems like he’s a man already, bold and unshakable, and sometimes I see the boy who’s really only seventeen.
I peer at him. “What do you mean?”
He motions vaguely to the dingy bedroom around us. “This can’t be the best thing you can imagine. Some shitty apartment in a shitty part of town, two matches who mostly want to strangle each other and another who’s got his head up his ass?” He doesn’t mention the fourth, who’s dead. “What would you really want your life to look like? If you could have anything?”
He’s kept his tone light, but I think I pick up on a trace of strain he’s trying to hide. The fear that he’s made a mistake by choosing me?
Or that I’ll decide I made a mistake welcominghim?
I’m afraid to ask. So I just snuggle closer, tucking my head under his chin, and say what’s true anyway. “Having you is better than anything I could have imagined.”
The Salvatore with me now traces his hand along the side of my breast, and I jolt out of the memory with tears already welling in my eyes. My breath comes with a hitch.
I loved that Salvatore with everything in me—and the Byron and the Cole I left behind too. I loved them so much, and here I am?—
Salvatore stiffens. “Elodie?”
He sounds so close to the man before and yet not that my tears burst out in a torrent.
I sob and press my hand to my eyes as if I can shove the deluge back in. My throat has constricted so tight I have to rasp for breath.
“Hey,” Salvatore says, his voice soothing but with an edge of panic. “Hey. I’m sorry. We don’t have to hook up. I didn’t bring you here for—it wasn’t a setup. I just wanted to do something nice for you.”
I manage to force out my own voice, ragged though it is. “I know. You didn’t do anything wrong. I—I’ll be okay.”
He doesn’t sound convinced. “Here, let’s sit on the sofa. You just relax. I didn’t mean to push too fast. The bond’s really intense, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say, which is even more true for me, for reasons he’d never guess.
He eases me down onto the sofa and just holds me. My breaths even out alongside his. The tears gradually slow and stop.
Salvatore rubs his arm up and down from my elbow to my shoulder and back. “I’ve got you. Everything about this union—we’ll take it at your pace. I never want you anything but completely into it. You got that?”
I nod and press my face against his chest, and then wonder how guilty I should feel about even enjoying his embrace this much. About the desire still tugging at me to swing my leg over his lap and dive right back in where we left off.
He’s the wrong Salvatore, but I can never explain to him why.
Just how much have I screwed him over with the way I saved his life?
Ten
Salvatore
The professor obviously thinks we’ve starring in some cliché spy movie. We’re supposed to meet in his office during lunch, but of course the plan needs to be sneakier than that, so he assigned us specific separate times to arrive.
Like anyone’s paying that much attention which students he calls in to berate anyway.
Still, I play nice and show up when he told me to. I might not see why Elodie needs any matches other than me, but fate obviously recognizes how special she is, and I’m not going to mess with that.
