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13
Aria’s muscleswere aching by the time she reached the last row of tools. She’d come to the garden early, running through each of the beds one last time to make sure they were prepped for winter. There was no sign of Mrs. O’Rourke, but she’d spent twenty minutes catching up with Horatio Rodriguez, the garden’s coordinator, talking about their plans for spring. Then it had been just her and the garden, and she’d retreated to the shed, taking her time cleaning and oiling the clippers and shears, the hoes and rakes. She’d worked slowly, using the time to replay her visit with Damian Cavallo the day before.
What she had done was dangerous — and not just for the obvious reasons. It was out of line for her to visit her brother’s enemy. Even more out of line to ask him for a favor.
But the real danger lay in her attraction to the man who was at this very moment working toward her brother’s downfall. That Primo probably deserved it did nothing to change the impossibility of anything happening between her and Damian.
She’d been woefully careless, downplaying the attraction she’d felt at the club as lust when it was too harmless a word to describe the way he stole her breath, the way her body pulsed with need when he was close, the urge to press herself against him that was a physical ache at her core.
By the time she’d realized her mistake it had been too late. He’d been standing impossibly close, holding her face in his hand, the anger behind his eyes only adding fuel to the fire raging in her body.
He was a dangerous man. At least as dangerous as Primo and Malcolm.
And yet the danger in Damian lay not in recklessness or unfettered fury but in his cold calculation. It was no wonder she was so turned on by him. If the piercing eyes and muscled perfection of his body was cake, the refuge of his reason was the icing.
“It’s not a good idea to be in a place like this alone when it’s getting dark.”
She nearly jumped out of her skin as the voice sounded behind her. It didn’t help to turn around and realize it had come from Damian Cavallo.
Her cheeks grew heated when she realized she’d been thinking about his body the whole time he’d probably been standing behind her. She turned her back to the workbench, oiling the already clean shears she’d been working on to hide her face.
“I come here alone all the time,” she said. “It’s perfectly safe.”
“I could argue that point, but we have more important matters to discuss.”
She turned around, sufficiently under control. “You made it clear we don’t.”
He was leaning against the door frame of the shed. She was glad his face was in shadow. She could feel the heat of his eyes on her face. Not having to stare into them was a small blessing.
“That was before yesterday. Before last night.”
She shook her head. “What happened last night?”
She’d gone back to the apartment after her meeting with him. Had ordered out and sequestered herself in her room, determined to avoid Primo and Malcolm. In the end it hadn’t mattered; Primo had come home well after she’d gone to bed. She’d found him passed out on the couch with a bottle of Vicodin open on the coffee table next to him.
“I’d like to ask you a question before I get into it,” Damian said.
She shrugged. “All right.”
“Yesterday you said you came to warn me,” he said. “What were you warning me about exactly?”
“I already told you. Primo doesn’t play by the rules. He has no honor code. Once he’s determined to hurt you, he’ll do anything to make it happen. Cross any line. And he is determined to hurt you,” she said.
She waited through a long pause for him to speak.
“He set fire to a women and children’s shelter last night,” he said.
She heard the words but couldn’t quite process them. “That doesn’t make sense. Primo wants to hurtyou.”
He walked into the room and she was hit all over again with the power of his presence, the space seeming to recede behind him, as if there was no room for walls with him inside. He busied himself studying some of the tools she’d cleaned and put back on the wall.
“Some might say he did.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turned to look at her and she almost flinched. His face was all raw beauty — the chiseled jaw, the infinite eyes, the full mouth.
“The shelter is a bit of a… pet project of mine.”
