Page 13 of Possessive Mafia Vows

I place my finger on his lips. “Don’t, Kyle. You don’t need to say anything.”

“I do.” He sighs, and I already feel the outside creeping in, and the moment seeping away like water through a crack. “I know that you don’t want to be a part of my world. But I would give it all up for you, Sienna.”

“I… No.” I try to move out from under him, but he doesn’t budge. “I can’t ask you to do that. Not for me.”

“You’re not asking me to do anything. I’m telling you this is what I want.”

“It would never work, Kyle. You would always resent me. Your family would never forgive me.”

“How could I ever resent you for making me happy?”

“But I…” I’m wasting my breath. I could toss a hundred arguments into the equation, and he’d shoot every one of them down in flames. “What if I don’t make you happy?”

He smiles. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted, so it’s a no-brainer. We could relocate to Ireland.”

His eyes search for a glimmer of hope or excitement in mine, something he can hold onto and mold into a future that belongs to us both.

“Sienna, I would move to Antarctica with you if it’s where you wanted to be. I’d be happy on a deserted island, living in a roofless shack with no running water and an endless supply of watercolor paints. I’d even move to fucking Timbuktu if I could wake up to your smile each morning.”

I chuckle. “Is Timbuktu even a real place?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

The eagerness in his voice is so real that I feel a sharp stab of guilt in my chest. I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen, not if it’s going to give him false hope. He said all the right things. He made me feel beautiful again, and sexy, and desirable, but it would be wrong to drag him away from everything he knows, even if he believes it will make him happy.

It won’t.

If we shrink our world to the two of us and my art, bitterness will inevitably spread through his veins like poison. It will taint everything that he thinks he loves about me until all that remains is a shriveled nugget of bone-dry dust that once resembled affection.

“I don’t want to go anywhere, Kyle. This is my home. It’s your home too. Now that I have my gallery…” I was about to say that I have everything I want, but I can’t bear to see the hurt in his eyes. And it isn’t strictly true. “I have everything I want, for now.”

“You can open an art gallery anywhere, Sienna. You can have a chain of galleries around the world.”

He makes it sound achievable, and I wonder if there’s anything that the Murrays’ mafia money can’t buy.

“Think about it, that’s all I’m saying.”

Kyle stands and offers me a hand to help me off the table.

He pulls me into his arms, and it would be so easy to say yes. To watch his face light up with joy. To know that he would protect me with his life and that I would never want for anything again.

But the past needs more than a shit load of dollars to wipe it clean.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Thank—”

Before he can finish, the buzzer sounds beneath my desk for the front door and makes us both jump. Kyle, my nakedness, the feel of his cock inside me, the fact that we just had sex on my desk, it all evaporates as reality kicks back in, dragging me back down to earth with a skull-shattering jolt.

“Fuck!”

I grab my panties from the floor and almost fall flat on my face as I step into them, adrenaline pumping through me. Kyle grips my arm to keep me standing, but I can’t look at him.

“Are you expecting a late client?” He zips up his pants and buttons his shirt, and I don’t know how his fingers are still cooperating with his brain.

My panties are already saturated with his cum, but there’s no time to deal with it now. Not that I keep spare clean underwear at the gallery. I tug my pants up over my hips and drag my sweater over my head, wishing that I wore a lighter outfit to work, one that didn’t set my skin on fire where Kyle’s fingerprints linger.

“It isn’t a client.” My mouth is dry.

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