Page 68 of My Merciless Don

He laughed nonchalantly, his eyes on his knife slicing through carrots. “Who else is here?”

“I don't know. Maybe you thought I was Amy for a minute?”

He put his knife down, the smile dropping from his face, and turned to face me arms crossed. He looked into my eyes. “I love you Audry-One-Name-Like-Madonna,” he said.

I blinked at him, once again caught wrong-footed, then threw my back my head and laughed and laughed.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

MARCO

Iwas sitting on the balcony of my Hollywood apartment wishing I could enjoy the view. However, there was a thorn in my side and it was pricking the hell out of me.

Having finally read Amy’s journal, I learned about how her mother wanted to coddle her and how she bristled against it. I could see that there was a quality that the twins had shared but Amy had never shown that side of herself to me. She was content mostly to go with my flow and so I never really noticed how stubborn she could be. It also made me have a great deal of sympathy for her mother.

To desire that someone is safe is not the same as coddling.

So I felt it was perfectly reasonable to put my foot down and say ‘you can't do that’, when Audry told me that she was going to meet with a certain Bratva clan member who was sniffing around, trying to find out what had happened in Los Angeles.

“He's from the motherland he said, and I think I need to meet with him and talk to him, before he resorts to drastic measures,” she had told me.

“Why you? Why not me? I'm the one who killed Yegorov.”

She sighed in irritation. “It's about the money. They want to know what happened to it. They knew that Yegorov planned to abduct me, and they knew that it had to do with money. They don't want to deal with the Cosa Nostra, but they figure I'm an independent party.”

“Clearly they don't know shit.” I said.

She narrowed her eyes at me, “I am an independent party, as far as business goes.”

“No.” I said. “You're not.”

Her eyebrows rose really high. “Who died and made you God? You don't get to decide that for me.”

“I'm not deciding anything,” I said irritably. “It's just facts. We're together and so you're no longer independent.”

“Excuse me?” She exclaimed in affront. “The fuck I'm no longer independent. Get out of here with that.”

I huffed in frustration, wondering why she was insisting on turning this into a fight. “Look,” I began trying my best to sound reasonable.

“No, you look. You don't get to tell me what to do. I'm meeting with this guy and that's final.” She stomped away, huffing with every breath, and muttering curses. I didn't follow.

Instead, I poured myself a drink, sat on my balcony and tried to calm down. I couldn't help thinking how differently this might have gone with Amy, despite her stubborn streak. For one thing she would not have even thought of meeting with a gangster, let alone by herself. She would have listened to me if I told her it was too dangerous. Our love had been such a calm and peaceful thing.

It was different with Audry.

Everything was tempestuous with her. It was a chaotic, intense and unpredictable thing, our love. I loved it and I hated it. I was constantly on the cusp of fear, wondering what crazy thing she was going to do next that would make me lose her. I couldn't even think about losing her. Not without feeling like I would lose my mind. Such a short time we'd known each other and yet she had burrowed deep within my skin, fused herself to my cells, and made herself indispensable.

I wanted to gather her up, put her in my back pocket and keep her there forever. Maybe I could make my apartment an iron cage, put her in chains and keep her there for as long as we lived. It was a nice fantasy, it really appealed to my possessive streak, but I knew that if I did that, I would lose the essence of her that made her so compelling.

She was a wild bird that I wanted to tame, but the taming of her would be the ruin of her and our relationship. Oh, the irony. I took a sip of my Campari as I contemplated the problem.

“You can't do this to me Marco.”

I jumped turning around to see her glaring at me, her eyes flashing with anger.

“I'm not some possession you can lock away whenever you feel like it.”

Even as my eyebrow rose, I wondered if she could read minds. I gritted my teeth, took a few breaths trying to calm down, and looked her in the eye. “All I'm doing is trying to keep you safe. I wasn't aware that's a crime now.”

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