Chapter 0023
Chapter 0023
Layla
After work, I showered and changed, then headed down to the courtyard garden I’d discovered on our first day. The last thing I expected was to find Aldo talking to Eli. But that’s exactly what I saw when I entered the interior garden–Aldo crouched beside
my son.
I hurried down the winding white–stone path through the tangle of grass and flowers to where the Mafia king crouched beside the little boy. Heart in my throat, pulse racing. What was he doing with my son?
“Eli.” I grabbed his free hand, lifting it from the sketchbook. “Come on. We’re going upstairs.”
“Wait.” In an instant, Aldo was beside me, his warm fingers burning through the sleeve of my sweater. Stopping me in my tracks despite every shred of logic telling me to go.
I’d stopped listening to logic where Aldo was concerned, hadn’t I?
I waited.
Breath ballooning my lungs, my own hand still wrapped around Eli’s. I waited for Aldo to speak. The little boy watched us both, his gaze bouncing
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from me to Aldo and back again.
“Come to my study,” Aldo said finally, his voice strangely soft. “I want to show you something.”
I bit down on a vile retort, nodded instead. Easier, I decided, not to argue. “Fine. Let me just take Eli to his room.”
“All right.” His fingers fell from my arm.
I hurried Eli away before Aldo could invent a reason to stop us. We didn’t speak as we trailed through the halls to his sprawling bedroom. I closed the door behind us. Locked it.
Relief washed through me.
Then, in the privacy and quiet of that room, I
crouched down beside Eli and met his clear blue gaze. “What did Mr. Marcello say to you?”
Eli shrugged, but he didn’t look away. “He said he liked my drawing. He wanted to see more. I didn’t show him.”
I heaved a sigh. “Is that all?”
“He…” Eli nibbled his lip as he thought. “He asked me about Uncle Marco.”
The relief dried up inside me, leaving hot, heady anger in its place. Was Aldo investigating Marco? A man like Aldo surely had uncountable resources at
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Chapter 0023
his disposal–could know anything about anyone in a matter of a few hours.
But that didn’t give him the right to investigate the people in my life. We’d divorced eight years ago, and he’d left me. Which meant he’d given up the right to be in my life.
How dare he…
I stormed from Eli’s room and down the hall.
My feet slammed the hardwood, my anger ricocheting across the house to announce my arrival long before I arrived at Aldo’s study.
I didn’t bother knocking. Just threw that door open and marched inside like a bull seeing red, like a tornado. The sight of him lounging in a massive leather chair, impassive even as I seethed, only made my anger froth into a stormy sea.
“You have no right-”
He stood, wordless, a manilla file folder held out in front of him, and my words died halfway off my
tongue,
Maybe it was his weighted silence. Maybe it was the way he’d held out our divorce papers in exactly the same manner eight years ago. Maybe it was the way the lines of his face had pulled into such severe sobriety, I almost thought I was seeing beneath that mask again.
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Chapter 0023
Seeing something real.
I took the file without asking what it was. I knew. I knew even before I opened it what I’d see. If he was investigating Marco, he was sure to find things he didn’t like. Things he felt I—as Marco’s girlfriend—
should know.
I sat in the chair at his desk, opened the file onto the glossy mahogany. Sure enough, Marco’s image met my gaze. Marco and woman after woman after woman.
…
“Do you really think he’s a good man?” Aldo asked as I skimmed through the photos.
A better man than you, I didn’t say. Instead, I flipped the file closed and shoved it back towards him. “You think I didn’t know about this?”
“You… You knew? And still-”
“We have an open relationship,” I said, lifting my gaze to Aldo’s. So he could see that I wasn’t hurt by Marco’s alleged indiscretions. “I don’t care how many women he sleeps with.”
Aldo’s face said nothing. The mask was back, and I could read nothing of the man beneath it.
I wanted like anything to crack him open. To make him feel. So, I rose from the chair to deliver my next line, an actress taking the stage with the utmost
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drama. “I sleep with other men,
too.”
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The mask cracked. Oh, that mask fucking shattered. The way the lines of his face softened, jaw opened, eyes widened into circles of shock–it was like he was seeing me for the first time.
Satisfaction flared through me.
Satisfaction, and more anger. Did he really believe me such a chaste plaything that I’d save myself for him? My fingers curled into fists.
“You’re throwing your life away,” he said–snarled. Because the mask had cracked. He was seeing the real me, and I was seeing the real him, too. He rose from his chair. “You’re allowing one heartbreak to turn you into someone I don’t even know.”
“Someone you don’t know.” The anger made me heady, dizzy, drunk. Made my words flow without caution. “You gave up the right to know me eight years ago when you left me at the altar. And now, what, you want to march back into my life and try to control me?”
Aldo’s jaw tightened. “When you’re being
irresponsible not just with yourself, but with your
son
“No, Aldo,” I snarled. The anger ran through me in a blood–red river. The room around me disappeared; the world had tunneled down to the
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and him. “You don’t get to judge me. You don’t get to decide who I see or who I love. You don’t get to control me. I haven’t needed a man for eight years, and I don’t need one now.”
His face blanched, like I’d slapped him. Good. Fucking good. Let him feel the pain his actions, his words, had caused me. Let him get a taste of his own damned medicine.
“You really think sleeping around is going to-”
“Sleeping around.” I laughed, a cold bark of sound in the space between us. “What am I now? A slut?”
His jaw flexed, but he said nothing.
((
“You’re one to talk.” I stormed around the desk so I could glare up at him. So he couldn’t look away. You had a fiancée, but you married me. Lived with me, slept with me, for a year! So what does that make you?”
My fingers pressed against his chest as I stepped closer, forcing him back against the window. “I’ll sleep with whoever I want, and it’s not your business. My love life, and my sex life, have nothing to do with you.”
I stopped speaking long enough to realize that his chest rose and fell in shallow, hurried breaths beneath my fingertips. His gaze was expressionless, dark, but his heart slammed against my palm.
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Too hard, too fast.
Like …
I let my eyes drop.
“You’re such a slut,” Aldo muttered, but he couldn’t deny the evidence between us. I’d yelled at him, accused him, told him he had no business in
my life, and somehow, he was aroused.
I laughed.
I laughed and pushed away.
