Page 113 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

“I was just thinking about how lucky you got. How luckywegot. Everything that happened. Even where the knife hit…”

The blade somehow managed to miss the seemingly infinite number of nerves and delicate bones in Ren’s hand, slipping right past anything important.

He shrugs.

“Doesn’t matter. As long I can still pull a trigger.”

I smack him on the arm because his days of pulling triggers are supposed to be far behind us. I put him under me, straddle his waist and take both scarred hands into mine.

“Excuse you. I also have a vested interest in your fingers.”

Ren’s smirk darkens the corners of his smile, shows those pretty teeth.

“Is that right?”

His thumb brushes my lower lip, until my lips part and I wrap my mouth around his fingers.

“Don’t worry, baby. I’m not letting anyone cut out my tongue, either.”

He flips me under him as I yelp, and he uses his fingers and that devilish tongue on me until the past melts away and traps me in the hot, immediate, melting present.

“I don’t want you thinking about it anymore,” he says, as he works his fingers softly between my legs. “Promise me.”

“I’ll try, Ren.”

He doesn’t ask for more than that. He leans his head against my leg as he gazes down at me, the two of us tangled lazily in a heatless foreplay, his motions so automatic and familiar, they don’t hold his attention. I grin at his obvious distraction.

“What?” I finally ask him, giving him a bump with my leg that shakes him back to reality. He grins. That grin that tells me my pretty, broken boy is up to something he probably shouldn’t be. His thumb swirls between my legs until I draw my knees up, sucking in on my lower lip.

“Impatient,” he teases me.

His hand rubs warmly between my legs, slow and steady.

“You’re the one getting sidetracked.”

His silence stretches for a moment, his hand going still.

“What?” I press again, more serious this time, as the heat in my belly gives way to sheer curiosity.

“I just…I want to give you a life that’s worth our past, Nadia,” Ren admits, “Until you never have to look back at it and regret anything that happened. But with a past like ours, something that makes it all worth it is…that’s a hell of a price tag.”

“You are worth it, Ren. Just being like this—”

He shakes his head, as if he’s not enough, but he is.

I push up off the mattress until we are both sitting up in bed, meeting in the middle where I can kiss him. This is my favorite kind of arguing with him now. The long, heavy kisses until one ofus comes out on top. It’s usually him. But not this time—I won’t let him win this one.

We tangle over the covers, the fight turning heated in all the right ways.

“Let me convince you,” I beg him.

“It won’t work,” he admits, breaking the kiss to look into my eyes. “Not for me. Everything that happened, Nadia. Your family. I can never give you back what I took. What I’m still taking—”

The mood cools steadily as I realize he’s serious. Something is actually bothering him, throwing the mood off entirely.

“What are you taking, Ren? Because I feel like there are a lot of things up for grabs right now, and you’re kind of missing out—” I tease gently, searching his face as I crawl into his lap to straddle him. “You were the one who said it, right? That we can’t undo what happened between us. We can’t ever put those pieces back the way they were, so what’s the point in trying to repent for it over and over—”

He waves a hand. “No, I know. And I know better than to think I can make up for that, no matter what I do. I just…” his expression flickers briefly. “I suppose I just don’t understand. I thought you knew what was going to happen to my family,” he says, forcing the words out. “But now, I know that wasn’t true. You really had no idea. No involvement at all.”

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