Page 115 of Broken Mafia Prince
“He doesn’t deserve you.”
“Who does? You?”
“I don’t know that for sure, but I know I’ll be a whole lot better than him.” After a long pause, I finally gather the courage to ask, “Do you love him?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“And that’s not an answer, either.”
“I don’t owe you an answer. I don’t owe you anything. I left because I knew that we were nothing but a pipe dream. We are chaos personified, and there is no way in hell this would have worked out. I saved us from a whole lot of stress.”
“All that work just to find yourself back here like you never left,” I scoff.
“I needed space to get over you, and I did,” she says flatly, but never releases the hold she has on me.
At that, I can’t help but laugh. “Look me in the eyes and lie to me that you don’t feel this, that you’re completely over this.”
Her eyes look into mine. “I don’t feel anything for you, I’m completely over this.”
“Liar.”
“You wanted to hear it. Now, let me go.” Her voice is lined with ice, her face as blank as a mask.
One of my favorite things about Giulia is that I’ve always been able to read her. She thinks she does such a good job hiding behind her mask, but the truth is that her eyes are like windows to her soul. Not this time, though. This time around, there’s nothing behind her eyes, and it infuriates me. I want to make heras crazy as I am; I want to make her as desperate and needy for this as I am. I can’t be the only one so torn over us.
With that resolve in mind, I rake my hands into the back of her lush curls. Her pupils flare, and I know I have her exactly where I want.
“You’re a bad liar,” I say one more time.
“Fuck you,” she snarls. “Fuck you, Raffaele, I’ve given you what you wanted. I’ve given you the words to cut this off as clean as possible. Why won’t you just let me go? Why won’t?—”
I never get to hear the rest of what she has to say, because at that moment, I pull her forward and smash my mouth against hers. She sucks in a shuddery breath, trying to pull away, but I only deepen it, increasing my efforts and slanting my mouth over hers again and again and again until she’s surrendering to me with low mewling sounds.
“I shouldn’t want this,” she whispers between frantic kisses, her voice trembling, desperate like I am. “I hate how I can’t be anything but this around you, Raffaele. You make me so mad.”
“Then I guess,” I murmur against her lips, “crazy recognizes crazy, because I’ve been a goddamn lunatic since the moment I met you.”
And then we are kissing like we’ve been waiting for this moment for ages; we kiss like the fate of the whole world depends on it, clinging to each other like we’ll fall apart if we let go. Her scent fills my nose: flowers, her shampoo, and something new, sharp and sultry.
She moans into the kiss, and it makes all the blood in my body flow south; everything inside me is chantingyes, demanding more.
I brush my tongue against the seams of her mouth, requesting entry, and she opens for me immediately. My tongue slips into the warm heat of her mouth, and I drag mine over hers.
She makes a sound deep inside her throat, and it rumbles through me.
At that moment, the only thing I want to do is to strip her naked, push her down to the grass, and take her like an animal. But by some miracle, common sense manages to intrude, and I grudgingly pull away from the kiss. She stares at me with confusion.
“Why did you stop?” she breathes out.
“Because if I don’t stop now, I won’t be able to stop until I’ve fucked you for making me wait so long.”
“Ohh.” The small sound slips out of her mouth, her eyes darkening with lust. Ever so slowly, her tongue drags over her bottom lip, leaving it wet and shiny.
If she continues to look at me like that, I make no promises about what will happen next, so I decide that it’s time for me to get the hell out of here. I’ll save us another perfect night together that’ll end with her quietly leaving, just like before. I press a kiss to the top of her head, closing my eyes momentarily and breathing her in one more time.
“What’s between us is real, and I won’t let you marry that asshole. I won’t let you ruin your life.”
She starts to say something, but I cut her off before she can go through with it. I don’t know what she wants to say, but I know that whatever it is won’t help our situation. It’ll only leave another wound in the already messy scar tissue that is our relationship.
