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His smile is devasting. "There is the feisty woman I am married to."
"We got married to cement an alliance between our families." There's no love in that.
"Only a fool would refuse to see you as anything more than the guarantor of an alliance," he informs me. "All evidence to the contrary, I am not fool."
"I never said you were."
"And yet, I have somehow convinced you that your only value to me is your ability to carry my child."
"If that's not true, then why send me to Dr. Hewitt?" That trauma inducing visit is certainly not evidence against Raff seeing me as a walking womb.
"I thought you were worried too but hadn't said anything." His hand runs up my side in a distracting caress.
"How can you say you love me when you don'ttalkto me?"
"I do talk to you, but I didn't about this and that was a mistake."
Wow. He's admitted making a mistake for the second time in our marriage. Is this some kind of new precedent?
Sighing, I admit, "I should have told you about the IUD." I've had a lot of time to think in my lonely bed at night since coming to New York. "If I had told you what my OB said about waiting, you would never have pressured me."
When it comes down to it, Raff hasneverbeen willing to compromise my safety, much less my health.
"No, I wouldn't have." He kisses me quickly and softly, like he just can't help himself. "You can trust me. I will always protect you."
A lump forms in my throat. "It doesn't always feel like it."
"Because of my father." It's not a question.
I nod anyway.
Guilt flashes across Raff's eyes. "I made more than one wrong assumption."
"Okay, this whole admitting to being wrong is weirding me out. But also, what do you mean?"
He smiles. "I expected you to know how important you are to me. I thought you would see my father's meddling in our lives as harmless, like I did."
"You're not a tolerant man." Which is one of the reasons I believed I wasn't important enough to Raff to push back against his father. "Why let him meddle at all?"
"It's complicated."
"I'm sure I can keep up."
He kisses me. Again. "No doubt. When I returned to Las Vegas after training with your father for four years, my own was ready to hand over the reins, or so he thought."
"Patrizio is too controlling for that."
"He assumed that I would continue business in his image."
"But you didn't."
"No. While he was out golfing with his buddies and romancing his latest mistress, I instigated a major shift in how we operated both our legitimate and mafia businesses."
"Those changes made things better." Capos talk. So do their wives.
Profits have steadily increased in the past few years and many of the wives have said they feel their families are safer with the new direction the mafia business is taking. Not a single made man in the Mancini mafia has gone to jail, much less prison, since I moved to Vegas.
The Cosa Nostra in Nevada isn't as big as the Five Families in New York, but there are enough made men to make that an impressive statistic.
