Page 24 of Black Widow's Kiss

I was sure that I thought it. And that might have been the plan. But, I wasn’t sure that the words came out of my mouth.

“Anyway, how was your first night as a married man? Everything nice and consummated?” he joked.

“That will be the day,” I replied way more turned on by the thought of it than I was gonna let on.

“So, when am I going to meet my new brother?”

“What is with everybody being in rush to meet him?”

“Everybody?”

“You, Matteo.”

“Matteo knows? What’d he say?” Lorenzo asked weirdly interested.

“You know our brother.”

“Huh,” Lorenzo huffed before returning to his lunch.

“He did say something interesting, though. He said that Ma was gonna expect me to bring him by for dinner.”

“Ha! That is a dinner I would come for,” he said amused.

“Yeah. Imagine that?”

“There’s no imagining. He’s right. Ma’s gonna make you do that,” he said casually.

“You think?”

“I know.”

“Huh,” I said thinking about that. “Matteo did say something else.”

“He was just full of interesting thoughts today.”

“Yeah. He said that maybe I should invite Kuroi to have dinner with someone from the family first. You know, to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

“What could go wrong?” Lorenzo said with a laugh.

“Exactly. So, what do you think?”

“What? With me? I would love it. It’ll also give me a chance to figure out if he’s the one who tried to kill you.”

“I don’t think he’s trying to kill me,” I said dismissively.

Lorenzo looked up at me amused.

“Who would have thought, Dante Ricci, blinded by a pretty face? Ha!”

I didn’t respond. First off, I didn’t like my brothers thinking they could comment on my husband’s looks like that. Let’s have some respect. Bat-shit crazy or not, he was still my husband. They were gonna have to understand that.

Second, they weren’t wrong. I could feel a blind spot developing for Kuroi. Anyone else do to me what he did and I would have ended their life right there. I wouldn’t have just choke the life out of them, I would have tossed them off my balcony.

It was more than needing things to work out between our two families that kept me from killing him. The man was a live wire that I wanted to touch.

Drawing out things at work as long as possible, eventually I headed home. Driving in my rental, I could feel my palms sweat. None of this was me. I didn’t get nervous about anything. So, why was I feeling this way now?

Parking and heading into the lobby, I was reminded what I was walking into by Franko’s replacement.

---