Page 11 of Savage Claim

Lorenzo was starting to look frustrated now. “You’re not getting it.”

I tried to wrench my hand away. “Let me go,” I demanded. “I get it, okay? I understand that I could never be like Sienna. I get that you’re disappointed in the replacement that you bought.”

He stared at me, eyes hard and angry, for a moment, and then he leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t a nice kiss: there was nothing soft about it. Instead, his mouth mashed mine against my teeth, and I nearly bit my tongue at the suddenness of it all.

When he pulled back, there was blood on his lip from where my teeth had sunk in. “You are a very different person than Sienna,” he said. “When I look at you, I don’t see her. I tried to see her. I put you in her clothes. I took you to the places that I took her. But nothing worked; you were still Isabella.”

The clothes bit was a lot to wrap my head around, but it wasn’t shocking. They fit me too well to belong to Amalia, and what other woman had lived at the estate? “Was that disappointing to you?” I asked. “That I was just me?”

“It pissed me off,” Lorenzo admitted. He leaned in and kissed me again. I turned my head, and his lips caught my cheek.

“Don’t touch me.”

He tried again, grabbing my chin this time so that I couldn’t turn my head. When his tongue brushed my bottom lip. I bit him. He pulled back with a smirk that made me want to stab him with an ice pick. “I was more angry that I wasn’t disappointed,” he said and kissed me again. I could taste blood, but I bit him again. This time when he wrenched back, he wasn’t smiling.

“Why weren’t you disappointed?” I didn’t want to know, but I had to hear it.

Another attempted kiss, another fight, and he was truly angry now. “I fell in love with you, you goddamn brat,” he said, and the words sounded like gunshots in my ear. Everything was sort of loud and soft and far away and too close all at once. I was so surethat he was going to say that he was tired of playing pretend with me, or something to that effect.

“You don’t mean that,” I said because he couldn’t be serious.

“I want you,” he said. “I want to love you.”

My breath hitched in my chest. “And you always get what you want,” I said, and he smiled, sharp and a touch cruel and so beautiful that it hurt to look at.

“Exactly,” he said, and then we were kissing again. I couldn’t take it for long before I had to pull away, breathing hard and head wobbling. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said. “It’s weird and wrong and fuckingsickthat you tried to turn me into your dead wife.” He rained kisses all over my face. “This isn’tWuthering Heights. You aren’t Heathcliff.”

“Dolcezza.”

“You run hot and cold. You scare me.”

He hummed, and we kissed again, longer now. I let him swirl his tongue into my mouth before shoving him away. “You tried to choke me. You fucking bought me, Lorenzo.” I held his face in my hands and stared into his piercing eyes.

“Say it,dolcezza,” he ordered gently, like he already knew what was in my heart. Maybe that was what he meant: I couldn’t disguise the emotions on my face.

How long had he known that I loved him? Did he know before me?

“I’m in love with you.” The words were a confession and a plea all at once. “I’m terrified of you, but I love you.”

He kissed me again, another deep, world-darkening kind of kiss. “I’ve never put much stock into those words,” he said. “But everything is written so clearly on your face.”

“I was angry when I left,” I said. “I was so sure that I had fallen for a man who could never love me back.”

Lorenzo’s smile was twisting back into a frown now. “You hurt my brother.”

I had no intentions of apologizing. I couldn’t because I didn’t really mean it. “He lied to me,” I said. “Everyone lied to me for months.”

“Don’t be mad at them,” he said. “I’m the one that issued the gag order.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

His jaw tightened; he was clenched far too hard. I reached out and soothed my fingers across the muscle until he began to relax. Lorenzo turned his head just enough that my fingertips brushed over his lips. I felt them press kisses against my finger and hands. “No,” he finally confessed. “I wasn’t ever going to tell you.”

The revelation hurt, but not nearly as much as I thought it would. “Eventually, we’re going to have to talk about that,” I said, and he hummed in agreement.

“But for now?” Lorenzo asked.

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