Page 56 of The Mafia’s Girlfriend

Chapter 21

Luke

This was rich. This was really fucking cute. Emma telling me that I was dangerous. I was a street fighter, trying to stay afloat. I didn’t have an organization behind me.

“You’re just as dangerous as of a man.” Emma furrowed her brow as I sped back to the Tropican. “You’re a deadly fighter. You almost killed that man in the alley.”

I had killed before. She didn’t need to know it, but she was getting close to the truth that I was a ruthless man.

“I saw you at that fight. You don’t even flinch at the idea of facing off with opponents who could kill you.”

Despite the high pitch of her claims, I caught a note of the worry lying underneath her words.

She cared. She was concerned about me.

Somehow, after a month of us resisting each other, she’d come to hold me close to her heart.

“You have to be careful,” she warned. “I feel like a hypocrite to tell you that after I asked you to come with me to that party house, but, please, Luke. You have to be careful, especially around someone like Antonio.”

Hearing her say his name with such ease, such familiarity, set me on edge. While I was touched that she cared about me, I wasn’t in a good mood. I didn’t like hearing her reference one of Miami’s worst crime leaders with that kind instant recognition.

“You should. You need to be careful about Antonio Marchese,” I growled. I could handle my own. I had. I took down Orsen, and if I was expected to see through a challenge of fighting Ferris, I would.

“I don’t even know how you’re familiar with him. How you’re connected.”

“I’m not,” she insisted.

I smirked at her. “I don’t believe that for one fucking second.”

“I am not connected to Antonio.”

I paid attention to the road, wondering why my stomach knotted with her reply. It sounded like she held back on saying yet, that she would be with Antonio in the future. Or maybe hiding the addition of anymore at the end of that sentence. Like she’d had to deal with him previously.

She was a virgin, though. I felt confident that was true. If she was relatively untouched, how could he have had her before?

I hated this sensation of being duped. Of her lying to me. Since I’d met her, I worried that she was hiding something big. That she was keeping vital clues from me. After that fight, I told her—sincerely—that I wanted to know her. That I yearned to be a part of her life and make room for her in mine.

I couldn’t. Not when she wouldn’t be upfront with me. Not when she’d hide and stay in this layer of deception.

It served as further proof that this was wrong. That we had no business messing around at all. We could want each other. We could lust for one another. It no longer felt like a base, physical desire. The moment I feared I couldn’t find her in that party house, the more I realized how much she mattered in my heart.

You stupid, fucking moron. I had to fall for a woman who couldn’t belong in my life. She had no place for me in her life if she refused to explain it all.

“I’m not connected to Antonio,” she repeated. “I wish I’d never met him. Never knew of him.”

But she did. “You seemed awfully familiar when I walked in that room.”

“We’ve known of each other for a long time.”

“How?”

“Through...”

She hedged, and I pounced, too furious to play games. “If you say you know him through a friend of a friend, or some vague shit like that...”

“No. He’s not a friend.”

“Antonio Marchese isn’t anyone’s fucking friend,” I replied hotly.