Page 85 of Forsaking All Others

I watched his tanned throat and tried to patch together the crater he was prying open in my defensive walls. I didn’t want to like my husband. I couldn’t afford to empathize with him. Not when he was as mercurial as the storm he claimed me to be. Not when I had no real reason to trust him with anything beyond my own safety.

“And voilà!” The server appeared at our table with enormous plates filled with fragrant, piled-high burgers and heaping sides of curly fries. “Our masterpiece.”

She dropped the plates unceremoniously on the table, so a curly fry fell off the plate. I snapped it up before it could slither, wasted, to the floor and caught Dario’s laughter-filled eyes.

“Curly fries,” I explained as I cradled the fry in question in my palm like something precious. “It would be blasphemy to waste even one.”

Dario laughed then, a full-bellied, head-thrown-back rumbling roll of notes that had never sounded so beautiful.

I couldn’t help my answering grin, and when he was finished, his gaze locked to mine, and slowly, so slowly I didn’t dare blink lest I miss mapping it across his face, he grinned at me too.

“Eat,” he ordered, lifting his burger, squishing it down slightly because it would be too big to fit in his mouth otherwise. “And try not to moan like you do when I’m inside you. I’m not in the mood to punch out anyone when I could be devouring this burger.”

I bit the edge of my grin as I pushed down on my own burger, noticing the juice dripping down the sides. “Noted. Though it was dangerous to come here in our finery.”

“Any burger worth eating is messy,” he noted sagely. “If you get something on your dress, we have two more in the car. It’s why I bought backups.”

Only a capo would buy his wife three evening gowns worth thousands of dollars so she could eat whatever the hell she wanted without consequence.

It was probably the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me.

I escaped Raven’s Burgers without any stains, but with a full belly and sensationally satisfied taste buds. When I somberly told Dario this was officially the best burger I’d ever had, he had only nodded as if that was its due. As we drove to the event of the evening, I couldn’t stop thinking over the quiet, easy conversation we’d had between mouthfuls of bacony, cheesy, beefy goodness.

About Akira’s dojo and what belt I’d earned in jujitsu—brown—and Dario’s own preference for mixed martial arts. About my pretend work as a graphic designer, something he had never before taken an interest in, and my friendships with Alessia and Renata, who ostensibly worked with me there.

It was, very much, like a date.

My first date with my husband.

I couldn’t help the feeling of free fall, a kind of vertigo that centered in the middle of my chest as if I was in danger of tumbling into myself, into an irreconcilable truth that hid at the very center of my being.

It was terrifying.

Being with Dario like this was everything I’d never hoped to experience beyond meeting him for the first time at the altar and looking into those cold, dead eyes.

Even with Niccolo, who I had loved with every inch of my girlish heart, I had never been allowed to truly date him or even get to know him in the visceral way a woman needs to know a man.

Dinner was just the tip of an enormous iceberg, but it was progress in a marriage that had been mostly stagnant for six years.

“You are very quiet,” Dario noted as he pulled up to the valet parking in front of the Field Museum.

“You were invited to the Edge Foundation Event?” I asked, unable to hide my shock.

EFE was one of the biggest charitable events in Chicago society, run by one of the oldest families in the city, the Claremonts. It attracted all types of celebrities to the red-carpet entrance and raised millions of dollars a year for cancer research.

“I was invited,” Dario drawled before getting out of the car and handing the keys to the valet.

I noticed Stefan and Luigi pull up behind us and had no doubt that Dario had more guards inside. After last night, extra precaution was warranted.

Cameras flashed as Dario helped me out of the car and led me down the red carpet to pose for the paps. I knew the photos in the paper and online the next day would read “Chicago billionaire entrepreneur Dario Ferretti and wife.”

I hated that generic “wife,” but knowing I held my own power, however secret, was a soothing balm and massive fuck-you to the misogynistic assholes who reported such things.

Continuing the litany of shocking moments Dario was instigating, he pulled me unusually close to his side and tunneled one hand under the back of my heavy hair to grip my neck. It was a possessive hold, not as bold as the way he’d collared my throat in the dressing room, but it still made a point.

This woman is my wife.

I shivered, even though the late-summer night was warm with only a light, sticky breeze.