Page 63 of Damiano De Luca (The Five Syndicates)
My eyes searched for Damian’s, but he’d left the main table, where I should have been. We needed a public outing apart to assuage valid concerns of favoritism, and it would have dampened the De Luca name if it were Damian who sat on the outskirts. Better me than him.
Damian and I had done our push and pull. I gave him first pick at the roundtable. He gave up negotiations in Vince’s name, knowing how much Vince meant to me. I gave him the seat at the main dining table. I had no doubt he’d do something for me soon.
I was there for him.
He was there for me.
Tale as old as time.
“How did you get into this party?” She studied me. “Vincent Romano’s death has been the hottest ticket around town. Everyone who’s anyone has been trying to join the proceedings. How are you here?”
I turned to her. Disbelief suffused me, but I didn’t let it show. “Pardon me?”
She opened her mouth to retort, and I could predict a sophomoric, stick-up-her-ass response, but her eyes widened as she caught something to the side. “Oh, my.”
Damian approached us, and he looked angry. I doubted the anger was directed at me, but it was there, and it roared. I’d never seen him like this. The woman beside me shifted in her seat. Though she’d bragged all night, she looked flustered in the presence of a syndicate boss. Despite her prejudices against the De Luca name, which she’d been trashing all night, she reacted to him in ways I hated but couldn’t blame her for. After all, Damian looked in a league of his own.
He didn’t stare at anyone but me when he reached my table. “Want to leave?”
Something had clearly happened, because this was the opposite of drawing attention away from our relationship. My eyes skimmed the room. People at neighboring tables stared at us. In the center of the room, Bastian looked in our direction, but I couldn’t quite see from here to know for certain that his eyes were on us.
Something had happened, and Damian was looking at me to be there for him. I studied him. His hair stuck up a bit, like he’d run his hands through it a few times. His eyes were dark, his cheekbones and jaw all sharp and angry lines. In his hands, he clutched his phone in a tight grip. His knuckles became a little white at the tips.
I knew that, if I left with him like this, I wouldn’t be “hopping.” I’d be leaping.
But he needed me.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Depends. Are we hopping or leaping?”
I swallowed hard and took in his angry, shaking hands and the way my instincts wanted to do anything and everything to help him. “Leaping.”
He was so focused on me—and perhaps erasing his pain—that I didn’t think he even registered the people around us as he spoke, his words blunt and unapologetic. “We’re going to the library, and I’m going to fuck you against a bookshelf until all the books have fallen to the floor and the only thing standing upright is us. I’m warning you now, before you choose to leave with me, that the sex will be angry, and I won’t stop until I’ve fucked the ten years we spent apart out of our systems.”
Marquessa gasped. Two Camerino soldiers shared insecure looks, ones that questioned their masculinity. To be fair, Damian didn’t need dirty talk and crass words to be a filthy alpha male. He had it in his eyes. That undress-me stare, which always made me feel like he was inside me, even when we stood across the room from one another.
Except now, he was here, giving me an out in the filthiest way, and I didn’t want to take it. I wanted to leap, fall, crash into him. I wanted to take his pain, bottle it up, and bury it somewhere it couldn’t hurt him anymore. I wanted him to lose himself in me.
I stood, turned to my table mates, pasted a fake smile on my face, and focused on Marquessa in particular. “It was lovely dining with you all tonight, but my American public-school teacher, non-Oxford attending ass is about to get fucked a dozen different ways.” I winked at Marquessa. “Next time you’re in Italy, feel free to reach out to my family.”
She tilted her chin up, but her eyes darted to the possessive way Damian wrapped a hand around my waist. “And who are they?”
“The Vitali.”
I caught a hint of her widened eyes before I turned and left with Damian. A few minutes later, we sat in the back of his town car on our way to the library. The divider gave us privacy as his palm rested on my upper thigh.
He turned to me. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say your last name with pride.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
His eyes dropped to the tattoo on my finger, and he nodded. “I didn’t plan on it.”
Don’t lie, because the same people who believe your lies are also the ones who believe in you.
Unknown
I sat at the edge of the night table in my little nook room. People read and studied elsewhere in the library, but it was quiet in here. Damian had promised me angry sex, and if he delivered, they’d hear. I couldn’t bring myself to care.
