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Dante chuckles. “You’re staring, kitten.” She closes her mouth, but her narrowed eyes remain fixed on me.
“Are you okay, Kat?” Mia asks sweetly.
“Of course. It’s just…” Kat frowns, her gaze flicking to the jewelry at her cousin’s neck.
“It’s a collar?” Mia finishes for her.
Kat frowns. “It’s… I mean…”
“Katerina,” Dante says in a firm tone.
She turns and glares at him. “It’s just unexpected is all.”
I don’t buy it, and neither does my brother. He rolls his eyes and turns back to me. “Congratulations to both of you.”
* * *
“I havea little business to take care of, sunshine. I won’t be long. Go wait for me upstairs,” I tell Mia after dinner.
“Don’t be long, will you?” She presses her curves against me and makes my cock twitch at the thought of fucking her while she wears my collar.
“I’ll be real quick,” I assure her, giving her a soft kiss on the lips before smacking her on her ass and sending her upstairs.
Sitting down at my desk in the library, I fire up my laptop and read through emails while I wait. She doesn’t keep me waiting long. “I knew you were alone so I didn’t knock,” Kat says as she makes her way toward me.
Closing my laptop, I rest my hands on the lid. “I was expecting you.”
She gives me a faint smile. “You knew I’d come, huh?”
I raise my eyebrows. “You love your cousin and you want to make sure my intentions are honorable.”
She takes a seat opposite me. “Now you’re making me sound really stuffy and old fashioned, Loz.”
“You’re the one worried about your cousin’s honor,” I remind her.
She fixes me with that famous Kat Moretti glare I’ve come to love. She is more than a match for my strong-willed, headstrong younger brother. “Not her honor. Just her heart.”
I lean back in my chair. “I wish you’d had the chance to know Anya before she got sick.”
Kat blinks at me, unaccustomed to me using my wife’s name in her presence—in anyone’s presence.
“She was vibrant and challenging and full of life.” Emotion clogs my throat.
“She was all of those things when I knew her too,” she says sadly.
“She was a mere shade of those things after we came back from Italy,” I recall with a faint smile. “But before the cancer took hold, she was really something. A force of nature.”
Kat brushes a tear from her cheek.
“Dante told me how when you first met the two of us, you thought she was afraid of me.” I laugh at the absurdity of that notion.
She gasps, eyes wide. “He told you that?”
“Yup.”
“She just seemed so…so small in your presence. At least that’s what I thought at first.”
“Our relationship changed as she grew sicker.” Icy fingers of regret clamp around my heart. “It became necessary to take a greater degree of control. Perhaps too much.”
