Page 13 of Be With Me
If my luck hadn’t run out, I would have gotten out of there undetected.
I really, really wish it hadn’t run out, because I had a feeling those assessing gray eyes were going to haunt me for a very long time.
Romolo Ferraro was terrifying.
But it hadn’t been just fear coursing through me in that bedroom.
Or now.
My whole body buzzed like a live wire. I felt hot andalive.
Not the good kind of alive—like the rush after a long run or the icy clarity of a cold plunge. The dangerous kind. The kind that pointed out just how little you’ve been living up until now.
I couldn’t remember ever reacting to a man this way.
And I wanted nothing to do with it.
I stared out the window as the streetlightsblurred past, forcing myself to breathe, forcing myself to calm down. I was safe now. He hadn’t recognized me. He didn’t know who I was.
And as long as I stayed far, far away from Romolo Ferraro, he never would.
CHAPTER4
ROM
I hobbled to the bed, one hand wrapped around my aching balls, and sat down on the edge with a groan.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Tonight wasn’t going the way I’d planned. I was supposed to be sipping my future brother-in-law’s most expensive whiskey and gloating about the fact that my nightclub had been voted the number one spot in the city, beating out his.
Instead, Harper had shown up wasted and uninvited. That ridiculous love confession was bad enough, made worse when I realized someone was eavesdropping on our conversation.
Annoyance pulsed at my temples.
That girl. Something about her was awfully familiar. I hadn’t seen her earlier at the party—no, somewhere else. Somewhere I couldn’t place.
Thick dark hair, peachy skin, and lips the color of raspberries. Pretty. Very pretty. A tiny thing.
I was starting to enjoy our tussle until she kneed me in the damn balls and fled the scene.
She’d been gone a few minutes now, but her scent lingered. Floral. Sweet. Delicate. Something about it tugged at me. Like her face, it teased at the edges of my consciousness, a memory just out of reach.
I glanced down at the wrinkled duvet where I could still see the imprint of her small body.
Should I? Ah, fuck it.
I bent down and pressed my face into the fabric.
One deep inhale and…
My chest panged.
Lily of the valley.
The same flowers our old housekeeper used to leave in a blue vase in my room when she cleaned my parents’ penthouse on Wednesdays. That scent yanked me straight back to a different time—before I got made, before I became the man I was now.
She kept leaving the flowers even after I told her to stop. Even after I shouted at her that I didn’t need her fucking pity. She was the only one besides my mother who knew what had happened that summer.
