Page 66 of Fastest Kill

She wasn't anxious, but her brain was running its inventory when she really wanted it to stop. She thought about the journal, Niccolò's handwriting, and the entry Dario had become so upset over.

She thought about the bee, about him saying, 'I prayed to this saint when I got in trouble. It actually seemed to help,' in a quiet, shy way, because he had kept this small private practice since he was nineteen without telling anyone, and it was the last thing his father gave him.

Frederica stared at the ceiling for another ten minutes before she gave up, got out of bed, and tiptoed into the hall.

The light under his door was still on. She knocked twice and pushed it open without waiting for an answer.

Dario was sitting up against the headboard in soft pajama pants and nothing else, the journal open across his wide thighs.

"Can't sleep?" she asked him.

"Nope."

"Me neither."

She crossed the room and sat on the end of his bed, pulling one knee up. The journal was open, but his eyes weren't moving.

"You trying to find the sexy bits?" she teased.

He looked down at the journal, then back at her. "No sexy bits. I keep going back to the Rodrigo and Leo entry. Reading them in order. I know what comes next, and I still keep reading up to it and stopping."

Frederica understood that. The compulsive return to the moment before the hurtful part. Like poking a bruise that ached too much.

"Maybe you need to give it to your brothers to read," she suggested.

"I know and I will, but I don't want to upset them more than they already are."

She gave him her sniper stare. "They need to have the same moment you just had. You don't get to keep it, even if it hurts them."

Dario set the journal on the nightstand. "It's like having a piece of him back. Except it also isn't, and that's worse because it makes me realize that I will never have him back."

"I understand that, but it is also kind of nice to have one last present from him." Frederica reached out and took the journal off the nightstand and put it on the floor behind her, out of his eyeline.

"You know what the cure is for all this pouting?" she asked.

"I'm not pouting," Dario said. She pushed him back against the pillows.

"You definitely are. Lucky you're hot enough to pull broody off properly."

His big body settled back into the bed while she moved up him and got a hand to the waistband of his pajama pants. He watched her do it with dark, attentive eyes.

"Frederica—"

"Shh," she said. "I'm helping you feel better."

She tugged the pants down and off, dropping them over the side of the bed, and took a moment to stare.

"On second thought, maybe this is to make us both feel better."

Seeing all of that muscle in the amber lamplight, and the dusting of hair on his wide chest, made her want to rub herself against him like the ginger cat had done to him in Rhodes.

She wrapped a hand around his gorgeous dick, felt him thicken immediately in her grip, and tilted her head up to look at him.

"You were obsessing too much," she stated and stroked him.

"I was," he agreed, his voice already rougher.

"This is a better way to relax before bed."