Page 43 of Princess of the Mafia

“Brioches.”

But he looked like he enjoyed his brioches. A lot. I frowned at his grin. If his smile threw me off…

“So you like Benedetta?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You want to keep her?”

It felt odd to talk of her while she bustled in the kitchen, but I nodded vigorously.

“Perfetto.” Benedetta gave an exaggerated sigh. “Otherwise, you dragged me over from retirement for nothing.”

I shifted on my stool. Mamma told me never to inconvenience anyone. “You were retired?”

“Sì.” She put another brioche in front of me, and I started on it immediately. “But when Enzo comes knocking on your door in the night, you don’t say no. Sì, Enzo?”

I looked at him to catch his eyes on me again. I wasn’t sure what the look was on his face, but I wouldn’t say no to that either.

“I was his Mamma’s best friend, you know. We grew up together. In Palermo.”

His mamma was from Sicily?

“But it all changed when she—”

“Basta.” The words were uttered so softly that I would have thought I imagined it. A flicker of emotion in his eyes and a tick in his jaw were all that gave him away.

“Giusto,” Benedetta huffed as she cleared my empty plate and glass away. “Can’t talk about anything here. Can we speak Sicilian, or is that also going to piss you off?”

Why would talking Sicilian piss him off?

He must have not heard her because he leaned over, brushed his thumb along my lip, and came up with whipped cream. A warm and giddy feeling slid along my spine when he licked it off his thumb. The memory of my fingers in his mouth was too fresh not to warm my cheeks.

“Done?” he asked roughly.

I nodded.

“Let’s go then.”

“Where?”

“My office. Time to talk.”

Why did that have an ominous taint to it?

My naked feet pitter-pattered on the cold marble floor behind his shiny black leather loafers. His white dress shirt and black pants hugged him like the seamstress draped it on his body first and ran a scissor along the edges.

The way he walked pulled at something down south. In control, powerful, yet lazy. Like a predator strolling to its prey.

He held the door open for me to enter, and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to spot Benedetta following us. She hadn’t. Why would she? We were husband and wife. It was normal for us to be alone. I didn’t need a chaperone anymore. Yet distress followed me into the room and hung on me as dark and close as my shadow.

I moved past him and came to a stop a few feet away, shifting uncomfortably on my feet and tugging at my shorts. Immediately his eyes followed the movement and settled on my thighs.

Medda! We were just in his office, not the bedroom. But ever since my cuckoo break, and in all honesty, what else could I call it other than that, there was something changed about the man standing in front of me.

For one, he’d shrugged off that coat of annoyance he carried with him like dust off his shoulders. But way worse was how he looked at me. Like a man on a mission, and something told me that I was it. Unease thundered in my rib cage, louder than the thud of the soundproof door closing.

The fact that he had a soundproof door to his office didn’t bother me. Papà had had one in his office and Vitale had planned to replace the library door with one. But what he wanted to do with me behind said door was what got my heartbeat spiking like a fever in my chest.

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