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He had aged nearly a decade since I saw him last but time had done him a favor. The boyish handsomeness that I enjoyed in my teen years was replaced with classical good looks. Fine bone structure that looked good at any age. Dark locks with a few sprinkles of silver that you could only see when they caught the light. Confidence that radiated outward like a light. Alessandro Giovanni was the kind of man that only got better with age.
The waiter stirs me from my incoherence. He returns with a first aid kit and speaks with Alessandro in Italian, words flying so fast that I barely understand them. The waiter is pulling items out of the kit and Alessandro is picking shards of glass out of my hand.
I stare at the blood oozing out of my skin and realize that more than half the glass is gone. It’s shattered. Pieces linger in my chair and the waiter surreptitiously reaches forward to pick them out. The few remaining in my hand are now being carefully removed. It isn’t until a splash of hydrogen peroxide hits the open cuts that I hiss with pain and glare at them both.
“Thank you,” Alessandro says to the waiter, “I think we’re fine now.” He carefully dabs away the blood that sprouts from the irritated cuts. “Are you okay?”
How could I be okay? I just found out that the man I married for love, the man I spent the last six years with, the man who was supposed to be the father of my child, started a war that almost got me killed expressly because he didn’t want to let me go. He’s the reason that I miscarried both of our children. He’s the reason I’m dealing with a handful of men who refuse to accept a woman as their leader. He’s the reason for all of this.
I wish I could kill him. I wish that the bastard was alive and at home so I could walk into his office and stab him straight in the heart. I want to watch him suffer as he dies, strangling for breath as blood fills his lungs.
Alessandro squeezes my good hand and tries to usher me back to the present. “Willow,” he calls my name sternly, “tell me what you’re feeling.”
Ricardo would never have asked about my feelings. He would have taken great joy in seeing me distressed and never knowing why. He wouldn’t have cared. “What am Ifeeling?” The question drips off my tongue with venom. “I’m angry. I want to kill my husband. I want to see him suffer the way I suffered. I want to—”
I’ve said too much. Alessandro’s eyebrows are buried in his hairline as he stares at me. I snap my jaw together so hard and fast that my teeth ache.Calm down,I counsel myself. I spent many years in my marriage holding screaming matches in my head. Every time Ricardo forced my head into the mattress, I yelled at him. Every time he called me useless, I lashed out and threw a plate at him. Every time he said I was only good enough to wet his cock, I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut it off. All in my head, of course. I carried my anger in my thoughts and my imagination because to actually scream at my husband or push him back would be wrong. It isn’t something my mother would do.
“You want to do what?” Alessandro prods me gently after a moment. The soft squeeze of his hand in mine urges me forward.
Is it morbid curiosity that makes him ask? “I want him to feel the way that I feel,” I finish. I take a deep breath and feel a weight lift from my chest.
Alessandro’s thumb keeps rubbing against the skin of my hand. From his knelt position beside me, he smiles. “I took care of him for you, Willow. You are where you are today because of what I did.”
My husband lies in the ground in a graveyard in New York because of the man before me. Ricardo’s only friends are the worms that feast on his corpse. Nobody bows before him or does as he commands anymore. Nobody visits him, least of all me. As powerful as he was, he is nothing now.
“And now I want to take care of you, Willow.” The words cut through my revelatory state. “We were to be wed all those years ago. I swear if you had married me, you would have never gone through that. You would have been my cherished wife. You would have started a dynasty with me. Our children and our children’s children would look at us as the model for what a husband and wife should be.”
He paints a pretty picture, but he leaves out the most important part. If I would have married him instead of Ricardo, Ricardo still would have married someone. A woman that couldn’t have handled his brutality as well as me, a woman that might have succumbed to the intrusive thoughts that raced through their head when he tortured them. I’m not the strongest woman to ever go through something like that, but I took a bullet for weaker women. “I can’t change what happened in the past,” I tell Alessandro through gritted teeth.
But he doesn’t look phased. “Let me change what happens in your future. Be mine, Willow Carbone. The ravaging of your territory will stop. The senseless violence and death will stop. The war will stop,” he says with all seriousness. “Be mine and your entire life will change.”
A shudder runs down my spine. It would be so easy to say yes, to let him solve all my problems. But I just say, “Only for tonight,” instead.
Alessandro raises my bandaged hand to his lips and kisses the gauze gently. “That’s a start, Willow, but trust me when I say that I will have you forever.”
That’s what I’m afraid of. What if I’m trading one evil for another? What if Alessandro is just like Ricardo, a handsome face until he’s behind closed doors?
It doesn’t matter. For tonight, I’ll let him be whatever he wants to be. Alessandro brings his lips to mine and it’s the first time in years that I’m met with tenderness.
6
ALESSANDRO
She tastes like wine and spun sugar, the sweetest combination I’ve ever had on my lips. It takes everything in me not to jam my tongue into her mouth and taste every part of her.
“Ahem,” the waiter clears his throat from the door. He carries our appetizers on a tray, breaking our kiss with a slight upturn of a smile on his face. “Shall I return later?”
Coming up for air feels like being choked. I strangle on the oxygen as I remove my lips from Willow’s and turn to face the younger man. I want to scream at him to get the fuck out, but I give him a well-intentioned look instead. I see Willow’s mouth opening, presumably to tell him to stay, but the waiter catches my dismissive look and nods his head before backing out of the room.
“That was our dinner,” she comments as I get off my knees.
I go to shut the door to the room. “I only need one thing for dinner.”
Willow pushes her chair back through the spilled wine and shattered glass. “I’m starving, Alessandro. Call the waiter back.”
I ignore her, turning my back to the door and watching as she rises from the chair. Her body’s silhouette in that dress is practically an invitation. The way the bodice cinches to accentuate her breasts is breathtaking. “You’re afraid, little love. Why? I’ve told you that I’d never hurt you.”
Her face contorts into anger as she walks toward me. “Don’t call me that,” Willow announces with a glare.
