Page 4 of Savage Proposal

“Sit,” I said, indicating the seat in front of the large glass and metal desk. Isabella sat, and I continued to stare out at the view. “Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Lorenzo Vitali,” she murmured.

I hummed. “Do you know why you’re here?” She didn’t answer, and it made me look at her. She was staring at her own hands, clutching them as if she was trying to make herself stop from shaking, but it wasn’t just in her hands. I could see her whole body trembling. “You must know,” I insisted, and she shook her head.

“I really don’t.” But her voice was flat, detached.

I went behind my desk and opened a file on my computer before turning the screen to face her. “Press play.”

She sank her teeth into her bottom lip. “I don’t?—”

“Do it.”

Isabella lifted a trembling finger and dropped it against the space bar. The video that I’d pulled up began to play. Her father, Santino Rossi, came into focus. He was seated at a blackjack table in the casino that the Vitali family had run for decades. “My daughter can cover this,” he was saying to the dealer who had cut him off. He was drunk and wobbling on his chair. “She takes care of me. She'll pay for this.”

I reached over and pressed the space bar again, cutting the video off. Isabella looked at me. “What does he owe you?” she asked in the same flat tone.

“Nine hundred grand for the blackjack,” I said. “Another two hundred for cocaine and the girl he did lines off.”

Isabella's mouth dropped open. Her honey eyes blinked over and over. “One-point-one million?” she breathed. “Dollars?”

I chuckled, and even to me, it was a cruel sound. “Well, I would take euros if you had that instead, but that's where I draw the line.”

Panic twisted her features. “I don't have that,” she said and wheezed. “I don't have anything evencloseto that.”

Surprising absolutely no one. “I thought as much.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared down at her. “So, what are we going to do?”

Isabella's chest rose and fell hard and harder. She was panicking. “I'm in school,” she said. “I can't…I havenothing.”

I clicked my tongue against my teeth. “That’s a problem,” I said. “Your father assured us that you'd take care of his debts.”

She let out a laugh that was bordering on hysterical. “Why would you extend any kind of credit to him in the first place?”

I shrugged. “Why would it matter to me if he ran up his debt? He kept bragging about his job as a top defense attorney; I figured, at the very least, I could make him useful to me if he couldn’t pay.”

“My father was disbarred years ago,” she said, almost petulant now. “Anyone who did the tiniest bit of Googling could figure that out.”You fucking moronwas left unsaid, but I heard it, nonetheless.

It was almost a relief to realize that she was nothing like Sienna. She knew better than to talk to me like that. That made things easier going forward. “Do you think I do searches on my clientele, Ms. Rossi?” I asked, placing my hands flat on my desk now. I loomed over her, and something inside of me crowed to see her cowing beneath me. “As long as they follow my rules and pay what they owe, I don’t give a fuck who comes through the doors.”

“But hecan’tpay.”

“And when I found out just how useless he was to me, I had planned on pulling every one of his molars from his skull and making him eat them, but then he told me thatyoucould pay for him, and if you’re telling me that you can’t, then we have a big problem.”

The panicked breathing was back. “Are you—” She swallowed hard. “Are you going to kill me?”

Death wasn’t really what I had in mind when I went to pick her up: healthy, young woman who took care of herself? I could get what I was owed back and more by selling her. Death would be the more merciful option. Get rid of Sienna’s living ghost and go back to my life.

But when I opened my mouth, neither of those options came out: “Give me a reason not to.”

“What?” she asked.

I went to cross my arms over my chest but stopped when I remembered that she’d cut me. “Give me a reason to keep you around, Isabella,” I commanded.

I watched as she racked her brains for a reason: I could literallyseethe cogs turning in her mind. Then her eyes landed on my arm. “You need stitches.”

I scoffed. “I don’t.” The bandage that I’d slapped on in the car was sufficient. Amalia could glue the edges back together when I got home.

“Are you a medical professional?” she asked, raising an eyebrow in question. The fire in her honey eyes called to me.Fucking hell. When was the last time I had a woman? Too long, maybe…but no one I’d fucked since Sienna could compare.

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