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To the man who made it a point to tell me he’s no good for me.
For just a split second, he inches closer, and I can practically feel my resolve leave, along with my decision-making skills. His breath is hot against my lips, and my brain screams at me.
He’s going to kiss me.
But something shifts.
He straightens his spine, putting distance between us and causing me to realize I’m dreaming a worthless dream.
Fuck me, and fuck my brain that won’t quit.
“I get it. You don’t want to be stuck in a locked house all the time. We can figure that out. But can you just agree to let me protect you? Just for a little while.”
“Until when?” I ask.
“Until you agree to marry me,” he says with a smirk and then immediately winces.
There’s something more to this. I can feel it. Something he isn’t telling me. Maybe it’s the way his eyes darken around his pupils or the deeply etched lines in his forehead. But I’m not a moron. And I wish he wouldn’t treat me like one.
“What are you protecting me from, Niccolò?”
He stands from the toilet, effectively forcing me backwards as he backs me up against the bathroom wall and looks down at me. He towers over me, crowding my space, but I’m not sure I mind it. I can’t pretend, at least not with myself, that I don’t want to feel something again. Feel something the way I did the night of the accident as I straddled him inside that car.
“Someone was willing to spend a lot of money to get you, as you noticed the night you were bought at the auction, and everything else ensued. What you don’t know,” he says, stepping even closer to me, until we’re toe-to-toe, effectively sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, “is that the person who wants you is part of my family, and they will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
He takes the gun from my hand, and I realize I never put it down. Not even when I was cleaning his wound.
“I’m not that bad, viper,” he says. “I’m decent-looking. You’re fucking sexy as hell. We’d make a good-looking couple.”
He smirks, and I roll my eyes, but my heart picks up pace in my chest.
“You won’t need this here, but I don’t mind teaching you how to use it. Just in case,” he says.
I laugh in his face. Laugh at the fact that he thinks I don’t know how to use a weapon.
“No need, Niccolò,” I tell him as I push past him, knowing I can just get another gun if I want one or need one. “I’m a woman. That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to handle a weapon. It sure as hell doesn’t mean I don’t know how to take care of myself.”
I learned how to shoot guns when I was younger. After everything unfolded with my sister and I couldn’t sleep at night.
I’d be lying if I said I don’t have desires.
Desires that involve guns and my ability to train other women to be just as able to protect themselves as I am. Maybe even take it a step farther and do something about these fucks who think they have one up on us just because they have dicks.
I walk to my room, and he follows slowly, tucking the gun into his side.
He looks at me as I spin around, grab a book I was reading earlier, and relax onto the bed. He can stand there and watch me all he wants.
It’s only quiet for a moment before he interrupts my reading, although I think I was reading the same sentence for the third time.
“Put on something you can shoot in. We’re going out.”
33
NICCOLÒ
“Holy fuck!” Dom stares at Evelina and then looks to me, wide-eyed. “She just fucking shot a bull’s-eye ten times over.”
I stare at the paper target across from us in the warehouse, and then I, too, look to Evelina.
