Page 4 of Beautiful & Dirty

I read it. I understand it. I hate it. I hate her. I don’t reply.

I wish I could text her the long stream of expletives that always fill my head when I see her or send Alfonso and Giulio to handle it — her — but I can’t. Not just because she’s a woman and my wife, but because my marriage is the only problem in my life that I can’t fix with brute force or a gun; so, I fix it with money.

If I’d had a choice, I never would have gotten married. I was perfectly happy single, fucking whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, and then going home to my own bed and sleeping alone with my favorite pistol in my bedside table. That was the life I’d envisioned, that I’d killed more than a few men to ensure. But to finally grab the thing I’d worked for — my position at the head of The Family — I had to create an alliance, and because sometimes criminals are still just dumb fucking animals, the only way to do that was to marry the daughter of my predecessor. Never mind that her father was a violent bastard that everyone — including Flavia — hated, or that I’d killed him; all that mattered was that a few factions in the city refused to follow me unless I married her, and I haven’t had a single day of peace in nearly twenty years because of it.

I roll my eyes, throw my cell phone back onto my desk, and walk into the restaurant to sit at the small table closest to the bar.

“Ciao, boss. Espresso?” Adriana asks, placing my favorite newspaper in front of me.

“Si.” If the police are keeping notes, and they usually are, I must seem very boring, which is the goal. I leave my penthouse apartment every day by six, Alfonso and Giulio drive me to the restaurant, and then I spend the rest of the day at the same small table, drinking espresso, reading the newspaper, being visible. Nothing to see here. It’s all a façade, and the police know it as well as I do, but we all have our parts to play.

But good acting always has a grain of truth, and the moment each day when I sit down at this table with the daily newspaper and an espresso are the closest I ever get to experiencing calm. I don’t know what normal is for other people, but I think that this is what it must feel like, and I cherish it, especially after the assassination attempt.

A few minutes later, Adriana places my espresso just at the edge of the table in my line of sight and easy to grasp, without disturbing me. I reach for it just as the front door opens, and I look up as a reflex. No one gets to where I’ve gotten by thinking they’re safe, not even in their own establishment, and apparently, not even in mass. I’ve made that mistake once and paid the price, but not again. So, I look up as my front door opens to make sure that whoever’s just entered isn’t a threat I need to interrupt my morning ritual to handle.

My hand stills just around the small cup when I see her. My cock, however, wakes up. The surge of blood to my groin burns away the headache Umberto seeded and Flavia watered to blossom. There’s no room for a headache when I want this woman — whoever the fuck she is — more than I’ve wanted anything in a long fucking while.

Chapter 3

Isthe sun shining brighter in Naples, or am I just a Pollyanna? Or maybe I’m just so fucking happy to be more than one hundred miles away from Steve that this city seems better than it is. I don’t notice the trash lining the street or the old men yelling at each other in the park as I stroll across town after I leave the museum. I just feel so free that nothing bad can touch me.

I should be worried about what that says about my relationship, but my stomach grumbles, and all I can think about is pizza. I shake out of my jacket in the dim restaurant and decide to leave the existential relationship crisis for later because this mood is too good to chase away with worry. It deserves red wine and pizza.

I ask to sit in front of the window so I can look out on the square while I eat. I wish it was a little bit warmer so I could sit outside, but plane tickets to Italy in the summer were nearly twice the price, and our same hotel in Rome would have doubled as well, so Steve and I had chosen to visit late winter to preserve our meager budget. Or maybe that had been my decision, and he had just grunted and nodded while killing an orc in some game.

Maybe next time I come, I’ll be able to afford a summer trip, I think as I fall into a chair and smile to myself. I purposely ignore the silent question at the back of my head wondering if I’ll come alone or with Steve. Avoidance feels really wonderful right now.

“Welcome to La Casa Colonica,” the waitress says, setting two menus, one on top of the other, in front of me. She taps the small one on top first. “Drinks, and food,” she says, tapping the larger one on the bottom.

“Grazie,” I say in a shy voice. I know my Italian is terrible, even on simple words, but I’m trying. Please don’t judge me, I think at her.

She smiles and nods at me before turning away, something she probably does to all the tourists, and I exhale in relief.

I open the drinks menu and rub my hands on my thighs to warm them. I don’t need to read Italian to recognize most of what I’m seeing — which is great, because I can’t — so I navigate to the wine page and try and decide what looks good in my budget.

I don’t know much about wine since I’m barely past the Jägerbomb, lemon drop, hurricane stage of my life, but I do know that I like it, and I couldn’t come to Italy without drinking as much of it as my body and budget will allow. I’d imagined Steve and I at wine tastings pretending to understand food pairings, but instead, he’d complained so much that I’d been maxed out on Tylenol damn near every day, and drinking wine had seemed like a bad idea. But since I left my headache somewhere between Rome and Naples, I now want all the wine.

I look at the menu and translate what I can. I’m mostly focused on price because I don’t have any idea what might pair well with all the pizza I can shove in my mouth, but I do know what pairs well with my meager savings account. I look around the restaurant, searching for my waitress. My eyes skate past an older man with a thick head of gray hair sitting at a table alone reading a newspaper. There’s a couple sitting together in the center of the dining room, staring at one another over the table like they’re only seconds from fucking each other on top of it. I look away from them quickly, not because I’m embarrassed, but because I’m jealous; that’s how I thought Steve and I would spend this trip, looking longingly into one another’s eyes and making love all night.

I need wine.

I spot my waitress at the bar and catch her eye. I raise my hand a bit, and she nods at me. I’ve been a waitress long enough to know that if I need to know what to order, I should just ask the person who knows the menu best. I wait for her and turn back to the menus in front of me. When she’s close, I look up to see her walking toward me with a bottle of wine in her hand and a single wine glass in the other. I try to peek at the label to see what it is, thinking maybe I could order that, but then she sets the glass on the table in front of me and turns the bottle of wine, label out, toward me.

“Um…” I look up at her. “I didn’t order this.”

Her smile doesn’t falter, even though I’m sure she’s exasperated that I’ve said something so obvious. “Si. This is compliments of our owner.”

“Your… owner?”

She moves slightly to the side, and I look around her to see the older man with the gray hair and newspaper looking at me. I’d glossed over him before, but now I look — like, really look — at him. He’s wearing a pair of thin wire frame glasses perched just on the tip of his elegantly long nose, and he’s peering through the lenses across the dining room at me. And I know this sounds like a cliché, but he’s looking at me like no man ever has before, like he wants to watch me undress and then eat me for dessert. The desire in his eyes is so blatant that I gasp in shock. I feel the heat of his eyes on me in every vein in my body, but I feel how much I like him watching me in just one pulsing, needy, suddenly wet place, and shock isn’t a strong enough way to describe what that realization does to me.

I met Steve when I was eighteen. We’d been in our college dorms for four days. It was the second day of classes, and we were both lost. We passed each other in the hallway once and then again before he stopped me and asked what room I was looking for. It just so happened we were heading to the same Psychology 101 class and decided to find it together. It took us another five minutes to figure out that maze of a building. We were late. We sat next to each other that day and for the rest of the semester. I thought it was love, and maybe it was.

But what it wasn’t was lust.

I didn’t know that then. I didn’t even know there was a difference between affable growing attraction and an intense burning, clenching need. I didn’t know I could feel the latter. I had no idea what I’d been missing, but I know now, because when I lock eyes with the older restauranteur, I feel hot, everywhere. Hot enough that I could have sat outside in the late winter chill without a care. Warm enough that I feel as if I’m wearing too many clothes, and I want nothing more than to strip them off. For him. Or, even better, I want him to take all these clothes off me, his fingers skimming across my overheated skin. I want to look down my body at him and run my fingers through his hair. And then I want to gently take his glasses from his face before I nudge his head between my legs.

I’m so turned on, and it’s a foreign feeling. I’ve never in seven years felt anything like this for Steve, and I can’t escape the crashing disorientation of realizing that I feel more strongly for this stranger than I ever have for my boyfriend; the force of this lust illuminates that affection is not the same as love.

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