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“You’d be safer if you did.”
I tense, stepping back and breathing in deeply again. A few inches further away from him and the air is mine again, smelling blandly of furniture polish and woodsy air freshener. “Ana didn’t mean any harm,” I say defensively. “She had no idea what would happen.”
“I’m sure,” Luca says dryly. “If I’d thought she meant you harm—”
He trails off, and I can feel my eyes widen slightly. “What? What would you have done?”
Luca ignores the question, changing gears as smoothly as a Ferrari. “You still haven’t told me why you’re so dressed up. I saw the invoice from your shopping, you did pick out some more casual clothing.”
“I ordered us dinner.”
That look of surprise crosses his face again, only to be quickly smoothed away. “I planned to have dinner in my office. I have plenty of work to do—”
“We’re getting married in five days, Luca.”
He looks at me curiously. I’m not sure if it was my admission out loud that I’m going to marry him, or my use of his name, but for once Luca doesn’t look as if he’s already thought of what he’s going to say next.
“We should talk,” I say simply. “I know that you want us to avoid each other as much as possible, and believe me, I’m fine with that. But we have to go out in public occasionally, like you said. And that public will expect us to behave like a happily married couple.”
“And?” I can see the irritation in Luca’s face. “If you have a point, Sofia, hurry up and make it.”
“Happily married couples know things about each other. Their favorite foods. Favorite colors. What they like to do on the weekends.”
Luca frowns. “I’m partial to wild mushroom ravioli with cream sauce and a good red to go with it, I don’t have a favorite color, and—” he leans closer to me, as if to tell me a secret. “On the weekends, I like to go out and find the most beautiful woman I can, bring her home, and then fuck her until she screams my name.”
I know he’s trying to shock me, to get me to back down. Instead I look up at him, keeping my face smooth and blank. “Don’t you have anything more creative than that?”
Luca purses his lips. “You’re right,” he says finally. “Sometimes I bring home two. If it’s an exceptionally good weekend, maybe even three.”
“No one can satisfy three women at the same time.”
“You’re right about that, too.” Luca’s smile spreads across his face. “But two of them can entertain each other while I’m fucking the other. And then I move on to the next.” He’s still too close, looming over me in the light from the window. “Can you imagine that, Sofia? Three beautiful women in bed with me, all of us naked, tangled up in each other. Have you ever heard two women come at the same time? It’s like music. And the scent—” he breathes in, closing his eyes, and then straightens, grinning down at me as if telling me a joke that he knows I don’t understand.
“No, of course you can’t imagine that,” he says coolly. “And if you keep clinging to your innocence, Sofia, you never will.”
“I don’t have any interest in sharing your bed with other women,” I snap, before I can think that sentence all the way through. But Luca grabs onto it immediately, his smile almost mocking now.
“So youdohave an interest in my bed.”
“No, I—” I try to backtrack, quickly. “I don’t have any interest in what happens there at all.”
I’ve never told such a barefaced lie. Just the thought of Luca naked and tangled in the sheets of that massive bed makes my heart race. The thought of what his body might look like under that carefully tailored suit sends a shiver down my spine, and for a moment I can’t speak. I never thought anyone could make me feel something like this—the kind of breathless wanting that I’ve seen in movies or read about in books. I never thought it was real.
But right now, I think that if he tried to touch me, I might not be able to tell him no.
And I’ve only been here for a day. How am I going to manage until he gives me my own apartment?
Remember why you’re here. What he’s done to you. What he wants from you.
Luca has made it plain that he doesn’t plan to be a real husband to me in any way. What he wants is to fuck me once and toss me aside like any of his other women, and I refuse to be treated so callously. But anything else is out of the question. He isn’t going to love me. And I shouldn’t want him to.
I’ve never felt so confused.
“Are we done here?” Luca looks down at me, his face expressionless once again. “Or do you have any other inane questions to ask me? How I like my steak, maybe? Who my eighth grade history teacher was? Some other trivia that I suppose married couples know about each other, in whatever world you live in?”
“I grew up in the same world as you,” I say defensively, crossing my arms over my chest. “Until my father died—”
Luca’s face hardens then, and he takes a step back. “No,” he says coldly. “You did not.Yourfather shielded you from the worst of what he did.Yourfather did all he could to make sure that you would never be a part of any of this. But I was the son of Rossi’s underboss, the eldest Romano son, and my life hasneverbeen anything like yours, Sofia.” His gaze has that steely edge again as he looks down at me, and I’m reminded of the way he behaved in the dining room earlier, when I signed the papers.
