Page 42 of Stolen Sin

When I agreed to this, I pictured it as a surrogacy-type thing. Like it would be a mechanical transaction: pregnancy, shove the baby out, and boom, all done. But our deal doesn’t end there. Even if the child is raised somewhere else in the oasis, I’ll still be around. First steps, first words, first everything. How could I turn my back on that?

“I have to think about it,” I finally tell him. “But I guess it’s something I have to figure out.”

Another silence. I’m breathing slow and deep, and I keep imagining a child running around, a baby that looks just like me. How impossible it’ll be not to want to pick them up and hold them against my chest.

“Emily,” he says, and I stir, feeling sleepy, halfway to drifting off. “I want to ask your permission to do something.”

That wakes me the hell up. “Uh, sorry, I mean?—”

“I want to hold your hand. Just for a minute. So you know that I mean what I say.”

My heart’s racing like crazy because I definitely wasn’t thinking hold my hand, more like slam his cock into my mouth, but this is probably better. I reach out until my fingers brush his arm and he shifts positions until our hands are touching in the space between our bodies.

His fingertips stroke along my palm. I shiver and close my eyes, biting my lip as a smile stretches my lips. It feels good. It feels intimate. It’s what we were going for, and now I wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed in that damn guest room, because in there I never thought about the implications of giving birth to his child, and I never had to hold his hand.

I never wanted him when I was alone in the guest room.

Walls and doors are probably a good idea, but I don’t think I’m going to be allowed any of those anymore.

Chapter 24

Simon

I’m stuck working late the next night even though all I want to do is go home and get into bed with my wife.

It’s fucked. It makes no sense. I shouldn’t need to lie in bed quietly, not even touching, barely even talking, with a woman who barely wants anything to do with me.

And yet she’s all I think about.

Her lips in the morning, the sound of her laughter, the glimpse of her breasts I caught as she stretched when I came out of the bathroom before I left earlier. I’m obsessing over these moments, these little nothing moments, and hanging on them like they’re all I’ve got.

Because I’m starting to feel something for my wife.

Which is a massive fucking problem.

“The place is in good shape,” I tell Ethan as he finishes closing up the restaurant. I’m on my nightly rounds of my businesses, and maybe I’m lingering at Cucina longer than I need to because I like being in the place where I first met her. It’s silly and sentimental.

“We’ve been busy lately,” he admits. My manager’s a decent guy, a low-level associate in the Famiglia. Nobody worth thinking about, but he’s dependable enough. “Lots of guys from the organization coming and going.”

That makes sense. The rumors about the feud with my father are going wild, and it seems like half the soldiers and lieutenants want to make sure they’re in both our good graces. Which means they eat in my restaurants and drink in my clubs.

I finish up and head into the main room. Emily’s friend Rachel is cleaning up at the bar and half the lights are off when the front window explodes in a raging storm of shattered glass and bullets.

There’s a scream and the sound of impacts against the wall behind me as I throw myself to the floor. It happens so fast I can barely believe it, but the place is suddenly hell, shrapnel flying all over the place, some of it cutting my hands and face as I cover myself. The noise of the gunfire is deafening, like whoever’s attacking is standing right on the sidewalk, and when I lift my head, all I glimpse is the outline of a truck and nothing more. The shooting feels like it continues forever, the screaming so loud and so pained that it’s like the voice is right in my ear, but finally the bullets stop.

I’m on my feet a second later, gun drawn. If I were smart, I’d stay the fuck down, but I’m working on adrenaline. I crunch over glass and skid on blood—whose blood is that?—before I reach the front door and kick it open.

The truck’s peeling out. There’s no license plate, because of course not, and nothing to distinguish it from a million trucks just like it all over Chicago. It fishtails, kicking up smoke, as it leaps forward and skids around a turn, flying down the street and disappearing around the block.

I stand for a second, catching my breath.

“Help,” someone shouts from inside. A woman’s voice.

I barrel back inside. I don’t know for sure who the fuck just attacked my restaurant, but I have more than a few guesses. Whoever it was, they knew I was in here, knew I was fucking alone, or else why bother shooting the place up? I own a dozen restaurants just like this one all over town. Which means someone’s following me.

“Please, help.” That voice again. I recognize it now, even laced in pain.

It’s Rachel, sprawled over the bar.

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