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“I mean, it wouldn’t be my first pick,” she snaps back. “But what am I going to do? Cry for the next six months?”
So it’s not that she’s okay with it, or at peace with it. It’s that she’sunafraidof it, and she’s facing it onherterms.
It’s…foolish. But admirable, in a way.
Tempest starts to fix herself up a little more, turning to mess with her hair in a mirror. I start to get dressed again too, but as I’m tucking myself back into my pants, my gaze lands on the bit of blood on my dick.
I’m notbotheredby it. But still…
“Tempest, what I want from you for the next six months is honesty. I mean it.”
She looks puzzled, but she nods. “Okay?”
“Just now, when I fucked you.” I walk over to where she’s standing by the door. I reach out and cup her jaw, my eyes burning hotly down into hers. “Was that your first time?”
Tempest is silent for a moment. Then she reaches up and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and it’s like she brushes a sly smile to her face at the same time. Her hand reaches behind her, opening the door to my office.
“It is now.”
She slips out the door without another word, shutting it behind her.
17
DANTE
Two nights after the wedding,Tempest moves in. I know she was stalling on that, and I’d have been fine with delaying too, except for the image problem of my new wife living ninety miles away.
The dons, the capos…they’re not stupid. They understand what this is. But the whole point of me getting married was to showcase an image, so I intend to uphold that image.
But there’s another reason I’ve put my foot down about Tempest moving in with me: the fact that I know her dark secret now.
I’m not even really prepared to ask myself what it is about that makes me possessive of her in a way I haven’t been up till now. Makes me want tokeep her safe—to lock her in a box, like some sort of overprotective psycho. Outside of Bianca, that’s never something I’ve ever been before.
So what the fuck changed?
Tempest isn’t wrong: sad as it is, her…passingwould slap a neat little bow on this whole situation. I’d no longer be fake married,and, come on. What’s better than a nice married man running Club Venom?
Awidower, that’s what. It’s neat, it’s efficient, and it’s bulletproof.
…It also makes me feel like a sociopath, because that “neat little bow” entails this womandying.
So I suppose that’s a major contributing factor to me overriding her excuses and demanding that she move in: I want to protect her, in some weird way.
However, Tempest, as anyone who’s known her for longer than forty seconds would understand, has a certain…bullheaded willfulness to her. In other words, she’s a headstrong fucking terror when she wants to be. And she is clearlynotdown with moving all the way from Manhattan out to the Hamptons.
I mean, I get it. It’s ninety miles from her brothers, and she’s not exactly a Hamptons gal. So in the end, a compromise is reached: we’llbothmove, to my penthouse in the West Village.
I mean, itiscloser to Venom. And, as Tempest was all too eager—and smug—to point out, the ability to compromise is a “cornerstone of any strong marriage.”
I’m also pretty sure that strong marriages involve sleeping in the same bed, but in our case, we’ll be skipping that. Which I’m more than okay with. I’ve never once spent the entire night with a woman, and I see no reason to start now.
…Even if I was her first.
At least, I think I was. I’m still not quite sure what the fuck she meant by “it is now”, when I asked her if that time in my office at the wedding was her first time.
There’s a part of me that’s more than a little pissed aboutnotbeing told that the girl I fucked so roughly in my office, still wearing her wedding dress, was possibly a virgin. Again, I’m not a monster, and taking a virginity in that manner wasn’t really ever on my bucket list.
But that said…the idea that Iwasher first is more than slightly intoxicating. Even if we haven’t so much as looked at each other since.
