Page 25 of Brutal Vows
The way he pulled me in with his eyes.
Those long-lashed, half-lidded eyes that burned and brutally mocked me.
If he’s anything less than an absolutely ideal partner to Lili, a Prince Charming she can eventually learn to tolerate if not love, I’m going to kill him.
Which basically means I’m going to have to kill him, because that insufferable toad of a man couldn’t be less of a Prince Charming if he tried.
“Reyna!Sei fuori!You’ve ruined it!”
Startled out of my thoughts by my mother’s sharp rebuke, I look down at the pot of boiling water in front of me. I’m standing at the stove in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in my hand and no idea how long I’ve been off in la-la land, brooding about Lili and the lout.
Long enough to overcook the pasta, evidently.
Leaning on her cane at the stove beside me, my mother crossly pokes me in the arm.
“Look at that soggy mess. Put it down the drain and start over.”
“Sorry, Mamma,” I say, sighing. “I’m preoccupied.”
Her gaze stays on me as I pull on a pair of oven mitts and take the heavy stockpot over to the sink. She watches me as I dump the pasta, refill the pot with hot water, and bring it back to thestove. She continues silently watching as I salt the water and turn up the heat.
This hawkish focus is nothing new. My mother is like one of those creepy paintings in a haunted house whose eyes follow you everywhere, looking right at you no matter where you’re standing.
Or where you try to hide.
“You’re right to be upset,” she says abruptly. “The Irish are despicable. To give one of them such a jewel is…” She curses in Italian, gesturing angrily.
“It’s not that he’s Irish. It’s that he’s acanagliaand amascalzonewith the manners of a barnyard animal. You should’ve seen the way he strutted around, pompous as a peacock.”
A peacock with size-sixteen feet.
Shaking off the unwelcome memory, I continue. “I’ve never met anyone so horrid. He barged in here like he was Julius Caesar at the Colosseum, expecting us to shower him with rose petals and virgins.”
Under her breath, my mother says, “Not that he’d find any of those in this house.”
I look at her sharply.
She waves a hand at me like she’s swatting away a fly. “Oh, don’t give your own mamma such an evil glare. It’s not like I’m aragazza stupida,you know.” She taps her glasses with a finger and waggles her eyebrows. “I see what goes on around here.”
I know she isn’t talking about me, because literally nothing is going on around here where it concerns me.
Unless she found my collection of sex toys and erotica.
No, that can’t be it. She’d already have had a stroke and keeled over dead if she found those.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She smiles. “No? You haven’t seen that pretty boy Lili sneaks into her room at all hours of the day and night?”
I’m scandalized. I simply can’t believe the matriarch of theCaruso crime family would allow her granddaughter to have illicit liaisons in the house, let alone with the son of the pool man.
“Youknewabout that? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“To who? Your brother? And get the poor boy shot?”
“Tome!”
“Why, so you could ruin all her fun by putting an end to it?”
