Page 84 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
I swallowed thickly, then reconsidered what he’d said before. “When did you talk to Beau?”
Dante straightened from his lean and strolled in the room on the rolling gait that made my mouth dry, stopping only when he was at the side of my bed.
“Move over,” he demanded before reaching into his pocket and tossing my cell into my lap. “You should really change the passcode on that. Your mother’s birthday isn’t exactly original.”
“Hey,” I protested, hugging my phone to my chest. “Rule number two,no snooping.”
“When you keep things from me, I have no choice,” he said in that agreeable tone that made me see red.
“You are the most frustrating man on the planet,” I muttered.
Dante sat on the edge of the bed even though I hadn’t moved over and gently reached over to reposition the pillow at my back and neck so I was close to the middle of the bed and cozier than I had been before.
If I closed my eyes to breathe in his lemon and pepper scent while he leaned over my torso, he didn’t notice.
“You are the most infuriating woman,” he countered, but his eyes glittered like the New York City nightscape outside my windows.
“What a pair,” Sebastian interjected in a long drawl.
I shot him a glare, but he only widened his eyes in faux innocence and readjusted against the pillows on my other side. “The last time I saw you two together, you were practically choking Dante out for information on Cosi.”
Seb shrugged. “We’re men. We shared a glass of wine and talked about women one night this summer when we were both visiting Cosi in England.”
“Old friends,” Dante agreed.
“Men,” I muttered under my breath, secretly wishing things between women could be half as easy.
“Done,” Adriano announced, stepping back from the TV with a little smile on his big face.
“Took you long enough,” Marco grumbled.
“You did shit all,” Chen pointed out.
Marco sniffed. “I supervised.”
Frankie threw the remote control at his head in response.
“Interesting company you’re keeping these days,” Sebastian murmured to me.
As I looked at the motley assembly of criminals in my bedroom trying to make me comfortable after an invasive, personal surgery I thought I’d recover from alone in my brownstone, I considered the fact that Seb was right.
The nightmare that had started out as Dante and Yara forcing me to move in with him to keep him abreast of the RICO case had become something surprisingly more.
For now, these interesting men had made me one of their own.
“What’re we gonna watch?” Marco demanded as he settled at the foot of the bed. Chen and Addie also took seats in the armchairs by the vanity. “As long as it ain’t vamps, I’m good.”
“I don’t know, Co,” Frankie said, winking at me before he took a seat at the foot of the bed. “You might learn something valuable.”
Everyone, even Sebastian, laughed.
And that was how I ended one of the most vulnerable days of my life, surrounded by laughing men, most of whom had probably killed a man or committed any other half-dozen felonies.
And for the first time in my life, snuggled between the two big warm bodies of my brother and the mafioso I was coming to like more than I should, I didn’t care.
Four weeks of little touches, a hand wrapped around my neck when he wanted me to focus on him, a stroke of my hair when he passed me in the kitchen, a squeeze of my hip when I stood beside him at the island making dinner, late nights spent watching movies in my room or on the couch with our shoulders pressed tight.
A few times when I’d fallen asleep on the couch following my surgery, Dante had even picked me up, all five-foot-ten inches of me, and carried me to my bedroom. I’d pretended to be asleep, too embarrassed to do otherwise when I was so close to his heart beating through the hard wall of his chest.
