Even when I could see Dante’s murderous expression across the room.
I wasn’t his.
I would never be his.
We both knew it.
We just had to accept it.
I hung my head and said softly. “Let me give you my number.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dante
“YOU CAN’T COME!” I threw up my hands then braced myself against the counter. Chris was gone, thank God, and the rest of the family had left an hour ago.
I knew Andrei was expecting me.
And if I wanted in.
If I wanted to find out what the hell was going on, I needed to go, but the little shit said girls were shared.
“No,” I repeated.
El’s face fell. “I can help you.”
“This is news to me, all right, I’ll bite, what can you do other than stand there and make the wall paper look pretty?”
She put her hands on her narrows hips. “You mean the blood-stained wall paper?”
“You’d be an improvement.”
“That a compliment, Dante?”
I sucked in a breath. Damn I loved the way her lips moved when she said my name, could almost taste her mouth when she was standing this close.
She sighed and took another step forward, until our bodies grazed one another, until I swayed toward her because I was tired — and weak, and wanted to touch what wasn’t mine.
Maybe I was more like my dad than I thought.
Because this woman wasn’t mine to want.
And that still didn’t stop me from imagining all the ways I could have her in my bed — in my arms. The worst part? I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt over the daydreams that paraded around in my head — the ones where I had her naked, panting, ready for me.
While I set Chris’s car on fire.
“Look,” I breathed. “You’ll be a distraction.”
“Exactly.” She beamed. “I’ll distract them too!’’
“The hell you will.” I growled gripping her arm only to release my hold. “Sorry, I just — that’s a really bad idea.”
“If you’re distracted with me and… things.” She gulped. “Then they’ll be distracted, when you’re talking with them I can snoop around. It’s a two person job, Dante.”
I rolled my eyes. “We don’t even know what the job is, other than Andrei clearly followed us from New York and set up camp.”
“Exactly! There has to be a reason he’s here and not there.”
The woman had a point.
“I’m going to regret this. And I’m going to get killed,” I muttered under my breath as she beamed up at me. “Go change into something black, something tight, something sexy. Yeah I’m regretting this.”
“This isn’t sexy?” She frowned down at her ripped jeans and T-shirt.
“Nice bait.” I pressed my lips together in a firm line. “I’m not taking it by the way, I have a sister I know how this conversation ends.”
“How?”
“With a knife impaled in my aorta.”
“Maybe you are smarter than you look.”
“Not taking that bait either. Not engaging,” I said in a bored tone. “Go change.”
She let out a frustrated sigh. “Fine, I’ll wear something sexy, you’ve been warned there’s a reason I don’t wear nice things.”
“Oh, why’s that?”
She crossed her arms. “It puts me in a bad mood when they get dirty and he—” She paled a bit. “He used to dress me up for his associates… and then I’d have to go wait… sometimes for hours and then the dress was never worn again.”
I tried to keep my rage in check, for her sake, so I didn’t scare her. “Why?”
“Because he was almost always covered in someone else’s blood when he came to bed.”
“I wish he was alive so I could chop off his dick and feed it to him while I cut his heart out.”
She jerked back and then pointed toward the hall. “I think I’ll go get that dress now.”
“Do that.” I gritted my teeth and braced my body against the counter. Breathe in, breathe out.
No wonder she wanted a Chris.
Chris wouldn’t dream about her husband’s death and wake up with a smile on his face.
Chris would shit himself if he saw blood.
I shit myself if I don’t see it.
I craved it.
El deserved better than my shaking hands — the same ones who imagined what bliss it would be to choke out the very man who thought he had a fucking right to touch her — with anything but goodness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dante
I KEPT MY eyes on the road.
I kept my breathing even.
With great difficulty.
I existed next to El and The Dress.
With great difficulty.
She’d taken my advice to heart, and now I referred to The Dress as its own tangible thing. It was the dresses fault that I was having trouble focusing, that I kept seeing flashes of her thighs and imagining them wrapped around my body squeezing me tight until I felt nothing but her heat pulsing with every beat of my wicked heart.
She cleared her throat.
I cleared mine.
Like a genius on his first date.
“Remember,” I pulled into campus and parked the car, my movements jerky and awkward. “Any guy touches you and you use the knife.”
“What knife?”
“The one I’m giving you.”
“Oh okay.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m really not sure about this.”
“I can do it.” She covered my hand with hers.
I finally looked at her. She was wearing makeup. She never wore makeup, her eyes were outlined, her face was soft. She’d been breathtaking before and it had always bothered me how afraid she was of her own beauty.
And now she was highlighting it for the world to see.
For me to see.
“You’re beautiful,” I whispered. I meant it. You’d think I slapped her with how stunned her expression was, like she’d never heard anyone say that phrase out loud and actually mean it, or maybe like nobody had ever said it out loud without wanting something in return.
“Thank you.” Her eyes searched mine.
The tension in the car doubled.
I took a steadying breath. “We should go.”
“Yes.” Her eyelashes were so long I wondered what it would be like to get closer, to be near them, yeah if her eyelashes were doing that much to me I was in deep shit.
It was physically painful to tear my gaze away from her face, to go through the motion of opening my car door and making sure my gun was snug in the back of my pants. I assumed they wouldn’t pat me down since there wasn’t any fighting, unless they fought every night, but campus was pretty quiet.
I gripped one of my pocketknives in my right hand as El made her way around the car and waited.
“Here,” I tossed it to her.
She caught it midair. “Do I just hold it?”
I stared, and kept staring. I think I blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Do I hold it?”
“What else would you do with it? Eat it?” Was this real? Did she really not know what to do with a knife? She’d given me the impression she did.