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I closed the remaining distance between us and placed my palms against his cheeks, grazing downward, through the blood, through the scuff of his five-o-clock shadow. Down his neck to the buttons of his blood-soaked shirt. As I unfastened them, blood coated my fingers. I had no doubt it was the spider-man’s blood. The blood of the man who’d claimed to be my uncle. The blood Amadeo had spilled in retribution.
When I’d finished with the buttons, he didn’t stop me from slipping the shirt off his shoulders, but he took hold of my hands then, pulling them up between us where he glanced at the bandages I’d put on after taking care of Vito’s wound.
He took hold of the edge of one bandage and carefully unraveled it, then the other. The shackles had cut deep, slicing through layers of skin when I’d tried to yank them off. I’d treated them with a lidocaine and antibiotic ointment, so when he brought them to his lips and kissed the ugly, raw wounds, I felt nothing more than a light tingling from the contact.
He raised my hands above my head when he was done, then took hold of the hem of my shirt. I cringed a little as he lifted it over my head—not in pain, but because the wound wasn’t a pretty sight. I’d closed it with surgical glue, and covered it with a waterproof, transparent dressing, but it ran from just below the hollow of my throat to the bottom of my sternum, just beneath my breasts.
He dropped my shirt on the floor, then raised a hand like he was going to trace the wound between my breasts but then stopped, following it with his gaze instead. He swallowed hard, and I could see the pain in his eyes.
“You should see the other guy,” I tried to joke, though I also tried very hard not to envision what that “other guy” might look like now.
“He’s dead,perla,” he said, finally settling his hand on my bare breast, directly over my heart.
“I know.”
There’d been no doubt in my mind what Amadeo would do to him, and I’d grappled with my own feelings about it, or more accurately, I’d grappled with the realization I had no feelings about it. No guilt, no sorrow for the loss of a human life.
“Sinclair wasn’t lying,” he went on. “He was your father’s brother, and I killed him too, Heidi. I killed a man whose blood runs in your veins.”
“I know,” I replied again. I’d already made peace with it. To say that murder was wrong was too black and white for a world I’d come to discover was filled with more shades of gray than I’d ever imagined possible. “I don’t know if I could have done what you did,” I admitted, “but that man has haunted my dreams since I was nine years old. I’m not sad that he’s gone, Amadeo. I’m… grateful.”
He sighed and lowered his forehead to mine. “I’d rip a thousand men apart with my bare hands for you,perla,” he said, leaning away just enough I could see his lips move.
He meant it. It should have revolted me; a few weeks ago, it probably would have. But now, my heart swelled and filled with so much warmth, I could feel it in every fiber of my being.
Love was a chemical reaction—that’s what I’d always told myself. The complex interactions of various neurochemicals and hormones in the brain and body, and nothing more.
But this wasmore.So much more.
“But that’s not all I would do for you,” he said, and this time, he leaned fully away and put his hands on my shoulders. “I’d let you walk away,perla,” he said, conviction etched across his features even as his hands gripped my shoulders tighter like his body was railing against that conviction.
“I thought about it,” I confessed, “while I was clamping Vito’s artery. He was shot because of his involvement with me. And so was Aurelio. And you… you were trapped in that basement with me… because of me. But I suppose I’m a selfish woman, because no matter how I tried to convince myself it was the right thing to do, the truth is I don’t want to walk away, Amadeo.”
“Nothing that’s happened was your fault,” he said, shaking his head. But then he gripped my shoulders a little tighter, his gaze boring into mine. “But Heidi, you’d better be sure, because I don’t think it’s an offer I can make again. If you choose to stay… you’remine.”
Not surprisingly, his words sent hot and cold shivers down my spine, a feeling to which I had not only become accustomed but addicted.
I shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, tilting my chin up.
His lips quirked in a smile even as his eyes flashed with a possessive heat that ignited my insides.
“Last chance,perla.”
I stared back at him.
When I made no move to leave, the heat in his eyes grew brighter. Hotter. And when his lips descended on mine, it felt like more than a kiss. The crushing pressure of his mouth was a brand. The sweep of his tongue along the seam of my lips, a claim to his territory. And when I parted my lips and let him in, I hadn’t a doubt that I’d just sealed my fate.
“Can you shower?” he asked when he eventually let me up for air, nodding in the direction of the wound on my chest.
I nodded, but I’d barely managed the movement of my head when he grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me beneath the hot spray with him.
“Hands against the wall,” he said right before he spun me around.
The hot water cascaded down us, washing away the blood that covered him as he hooked his fingers in the waist of my scrubs and panties and dragged them down.
He’d no sooner gotten them off my feet when I felt his lips against the backs of my thighs from my knees all the way up my backside, kissing and nipping as he went.
When he’d left every inch of me tingling and stinging sweetly, he grabbed hold of my hips and pulled them back so that I was nearly bent right over at the waist, my hands still hard against the wall. And then it was his tongue I felt, gliding along my slit, lightly at first like he was sampling me, and then harder, parting my lips and tasting me at the source.
