Page 108 of Forsaking All Others

I blinked and then blinked again as cold air seeped into my front when Luca stepped away to accept our coats from Bonnie, who hovered nearby.

Unbidden, Lando’s words swept into my brain.

He’s spent most of his life pretending to be Dario, you don’t think he ever wanted to stop playing pretend?

If Luca did want me so badly, so much he hungered for me, did that mean he would do anything to have me? Even turn over his own brother to an enemy?

I swallowed thickly as Luca helped me with my coat and then accepted his hold of my hand while he led me to the elevator to take us to the basement and away on our date.

Lando was right about one thing, for sure. I was living out a high-stakes game without knowing any of the rules or the real players on the board, and the men I was most inclined to trust were, perhaps, the most likely to betray me.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Luca

I had never known a woman like Fiammetta Ferretti.

To be fair, I had never had much cause to interact with society, not as a member of it myself. But I had spent years observing humanity, and I recognized the patterns of women and men, romance and flirtation, power and its many accoutrements. I’d seen models in the streets of Milan, including one memorable interaction with the famous supermodel Cosima Lombardi, and spent evenings with beautiful women from Chicago to Paris to Dubai.

None of them had been anything compared to my Sicilian princess.

From the start there had been something ineffable about her, a resistance to description that had me spending long hours perched on rooftops and hidden in shadows watching her in hopes of finally discovering the right descriptor.

I wanted to take her apart, piece by piece, like an engineer discovering the mechanisms of how something worked. I wanted to spread each part of her out on the floor, touch my fingers to every curve and edge, memorize every angle and then carefully put her back together again, something of my own self imprinted on every joint.

It was an obsession, I knew that much.

Beyond that, I wasn’t sure.

I had never had a relationship in my forty-two years of life.

I’d never desired to.

Truthfully, I didn’t want something so trite or conformist as a relationship with Fiammetta.

I wanted to own her. Every inch and molecule. I wanted to carry her in the inside pocket of every coat and only let her out when we were somewhere private, as if someone else’s regard might steal away some part of her that was meant only to be mine.

Probably, this feeling wasn’t normal.

But then, what did I know about normal, and what did I care?

The first time I spent the night pretending to be Dario, I didn’t even talk to her. I went unnoticed, as Dario interacted with her as little as possible. Instead, I watched her on the house cameras from my office, and then that night I snuck into her room and sat on the velvet chair in the shadows to watch her speak in her sleep as she dreamed.

I had never dreamed, and I found myself envying the dream itself, that it should occupy her mind so fully.

I wanted her as obsessed with me as I was with her, but that was an impossibility.

This was, as Dario reminded me often, a business arrangement.

This was, as we both knew without having to speak about it, a marriage of convenience that would only be inconvenienced if either one of us did something as stupid as fall in love with her.

Dario had fallen in love once before, when we were just young men.

To a Russian girl with no connections save for a loose affiliation with the Bratva.

When Lando had discovered them, he forbade them to see each other.

When Dario persisted, he had her sent away.