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“You know nothing of these games,” he spat, pushing away from me to stalk toward the mantel, raising Booker’s discarded glass of bourbon and throwing back the remnants without a grimace.
“I knew enough to get myself out of there,” I countered, shoving to my feet and stalking across the room to push Dario in the back. “It had been four days, Dario. Four. And still you didn’t come. What was I supposed to think?”
My husband turned so swiftly, I flinched away, struck by his speed and broadness looming over me, by the brutal savagery of his expression as he snarled down at me.
“That I would come for you,” he roared, slamming the snifter glass to the marble foot of the fireplace where it shattered into sparkling gems of glass at our feet. “Loyalty to family is everything, Fiammetta. You might not be my wife by choice, but you are my wife, and I would kill a man for so much as looking at you askance if I caught him. It was your job only to survive until I got to you and to believe, always, that I would come. Instead, you endangered yourself even further by staging an escape attempt when I was already mobilized and on my. Fucking. Way. To. You.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I’ve offended your manhood,” I shouted. “Like you have done so much to win my trust and belief in the years we have been married. I barely fucking know you, Dario, and you honestly expect me to sit around and wait for you like some damsel in distress? I do not have that luxury.”
“You have every fucking luxury available to you, and I make it so,” Dario snapped. “The cars, the jewels you buy for yourself, the clothes, and the long ladies’ lunches. Who provides for it all?”
“Should I get on my knees in thanks?” I hissed, bumping him with two hands even though he was immovable. “After everything I’ve been through, you want me to fucking thank you?” I ended on a yell.
Dario gripped me by the shoulders and shook me, just a little too vigorously so my pounding head ached. “I want you to make yourself fucking safe for me!”
“Don’t pretend you fucking care!” I screamed back into his face.
The next moment, he was on me, dragging me into his body by the hands on my shoulders, then slicing one up my spine into my hair to pull my head back for his brutal kiss and the other traveling down to grip my ass cheek in one palm.
I could taste another man’s blood on his teeth.
It made me moan.
The heat of him, the taste of his violence, the headiness of knowing he hadn’t come to pick me up from the diner because he had been eviscerating the men who had taken me. That he hadn’t even showered away the discards of their torture or murder before coming to me.
That he wanted me to be safe.
It wasn’t a declaration of love, or even an admission that he liked my company in his house, in his life, as his wife.
But it was more than I’d ever had before.
And shaken from the kidnapping, filled with giddy residual adrenaline, I poured all of myself into that biting, bruising kiss so I could forget, just for a second, the pain of my reality.
My hands traveled up Dario’s bulletproof vest–covered chest, fingers snagging on a bullet lodged into the fabric. I shivered as I realized if he hadn’t been wearing the vest, it would have punctured his chest dangerously close to his heart. My fingers trembled as I undid the Velcro closures at the top of his shoulders, the protective barrier falling to the floor to reveal his red-stained white button-up. I fisted my hands in the blood-wet collar and ripped, buttons popping and spiraling off into the glass debris at our feet, but neither of us cared. I hopped up the moment Dario’s big hands cupped my ass and lifted, wrapping my legs around his torso so he could carry me safely out of the glass. When he went to put me down on the couch, I fisted a hand in his overlong hair and pulled until he hissed into my mouth.
“You sit,” I demanded, waiting for him to reluctantly twist to sit down on the cushions. “I want to ride you.”
His eyes flashed with pale fire, and he leaned back to let me settle in his lap and push the blood-smeared ends of his shirt off his chest and over his shoulders. I kept the fabric bunched around his elbows so his arms were slightly trapped and lifted my gaze to him in a silent dare for him to move.
He glowered at me, but then that was his usual expression, so I didn’t care.
Instead, I stood up to shuck off my lounge clothes, naked and bared to his gaze so he could see every mark those Russian stronzi had left on me.
A low, warning rumble worked loose in his chest.
“What did you do to them?” I asked, voice husky with desire as I stared at his broad chest and carved abdomen clenching with each labored breath. “Did you kill them for me, husband?”
It shouldn’t have been arousing to talk about death and torture while I dropped to my knees to unbuckle Dario’s belt and roughly tug his pants and boxer briefs down his legs to pool at his feet, but it was.
Because knowledge was power, and I was sick and tired of being content to stay in the dark.
I pressed one knee into the cushions and swung the other over his hips, gripping his rigid cock so I could sink down on it as I slid into his lap. Dario’s head fell back as he moaned, his hands clenching on my thighs as I took him deep in one steady glide.
I was already soaking wet, which should have been shocking after everything I had been through, but the adrenaline and the taste of my husband, blood-tinged and dangerous, was still on the back of my tongue.
“They deserved more than death for touching you,” Dario finally responded through clenched teeth as I rose and dropped onto his length, riding him so hard it made my teeth clang and my aching head slightly dizzy.
I didn’t care, as the burn of pleasure igniting in my pussy seared away the edge of pain from the bruising and the headache, from the fear that had threatened to consume, from the loneliness that lived in my bones.
