Page 73 of Thief of my Heart

Before I could do anything, though, Mattias Zola strode into the room, grabbed me by the throat, and shoved me against the wall beside the tiny closet that Lea shared with her sister. Solid move. Dude was quick for an old guy.

“You,” he growled. “You…here…with my granddaughter! You lousy…no-good…’nzevato!” His speech disintegrated into a torrent of what I recognized as the Neapolitan dialect my grandmother had sometimes spoken before she died. “Sicchio e lota! Vafammocc a mammata!”

I didn’t know what any of it meant, but by the way his wife’s face turned an ungodly shade of red, I knew it was nothing good.

I straightened with as much dignity as I could muster while standing bare-ass naked with a lab report guarding my dick like a fig leaf on a statue in the Vatican.

“Mr. Zola,” I said. “Mattias?—”

“Don’t think you can come in here and disrespect my family and say my name,” he gritted through his teeth, shoving his beefy forearm into my throat.

It took everything I had not to fight back. Had it been anyone else—literally anyone else—they would have been on the floor, and I’d serve up a taste of their own medicine.

Instead, I was having my naked ass handed to me by a geezer probably forty years my senior and sucking it the fuck up.

For her, of course. It was always for her.

“Okay, man.” I held up one hand—using both would have bared everything I had to the family. “Okay. You got it. But I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Zola. Honest, I don’t.”

“He has a lot of tattoos,” one of the girls remarked from the doorway. I couldn’t see who over Mattias’s hat, but I thought it was Frankie.

“I like them,” Joni said with a dreamy sigh. “’Specially all over his muscles.”

“Ew,” Marie said for the third time. “You’re so gross.”

“Get out!” Lea shouted for the second time, and this time, she crossed the room to yank her grandfather off me. “Nonno, let him go!”

“And leave you alone with him? No, no, no,” Mattias snapped, his eyes boring into me like fiery drills.

Lea snorted. “What are you worried about? Obviously, the worst has already happened, Nonno. My innocence is gone. Your good girl is ruined, okay?”

I shot her a “What the hell, Lea?” look. On the other side of the room, Kate snorted. But honestly, I didn’t need her to remind the guy that I’d been in bed with his granddaughter two seconds earlier.

My girl had some brass balls, that was for sure. Clearly, it was a family trait.

“Let us get dressed, all right?” she said, still clutching the purple sheets to her chest. “Then we’ll come down, and you can give us all the hell you want.”

I had to give it to her. My girl slipped right into boss mode, naked or not, and I’d never been so damn glad for it. Everyone in the family seemed to respond to her simple commands like they always did—even the man in charge.

Mattias didn’t move his gaze from mine, but his jaw tightened even more as I watched him consider Lea’s words.

“Mattias,” called Mrs. Zola before she said something softly in Italian.

Mattias’s steely anger loosened a few degrees.

“You got two minutes,” he told me. “And I’m gonna be standing right. Out. Side.”

He jammed his arm into my throat once more for good measure before dropping it, leaving me wheezing against the wall while he muttered more Neapolitan obscenities on his way out.

“Lea,” Mrs. Zola said sharply.

We both faced her as the smaller girls followed their grandfather out of the room. I expected another dressing down, this one from Lea’s nonna. But instead, Mrs. Zola silently jerked her head toward the window, then switched her sharp gaze onto me.

Her meaning was clear. My best bet wasn’t to take whatever Mattias Zola had for me like a man but to scurry out the window like a scared rat.

Lea held her sheet even tighter to her chest. She didn’t argue, though.

“Kate, come with me,” said Mrs. Zola sharply.

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