Page 53 of Brutal Legacy

“I mean, clearly you have been trained professionally. What do you do for Renato? Are you a hit man… or maybe a bodyguard?” she continued. “Hello? I’m talking to you.”

“Oh, are you? I thought you just loved to hear yourself speak.”

Her mouth hung open; she was outraged. “Well, it’s polite to make small talk, you know. It’s an asshole move to make others fill the silence all the time.”

“I’m not making you fill the silence. And if you think calling me an asshole will hurt my feelings, I can assure you, I’ve been called much worse.”

She snorted softly. “I’ll bet.”

I shook my head, and the movement seemed to catch her attention.

“What is it?”

“Just… you seem awfully curious about a man like me. I can only warn you that is a very bad idea. Curiosity killed the little mouse, didn’t you hear?”

She sighed. “I told you not to call me that, and I can’t help it if I’m curious.” She was studying the side of my face intently.

“I’m not him,” I told her, once again, and dropped her arm.

She nodded. “I’m starting to see that. He’d never be a man like you.”

I set down the knife I was working on and looked at her, wiping my hands on the rag.

“Considering your terrible taste in men, I think it’s for the best,” I told her.

Her hands balled into fists. “My what? I don’t have terrible taste in men.”

“Of course you do. You didn’t know what was really going on with your dad. You married a man who started out rich but was so piss-poor at managing himself and his money he left his widow at the mercy of a loan shark, living one step above a cardboard box on the street. You have poor taste in men.”

Her eyes grew glassy, like my words had actually upset her. The look bothered me.

“Yeah, well, you think that, and you don’t even know about my first boyfriend… the one who asked me to marry him and told me he loved me, just to run away. The one who broke my heart. If you knew about him, then you’d really know how shitty my taste in men was,” she murmured.

Venom laced her tone, but her words, her words made me see red.

I tightened my hand on the knife I was holding, the dull edge biting into my palm as I squeezed it. She was trying to get a rise out of me. She wanted me to give myself away. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

“He sounds like a real monster,” I ground out.

She stared at me for a long time. She seemed vaguely disappointed.

“He wasn’t anything as grand as that. He was just a man… a thief. A grifter. And none of that would have mattered… except that he never loved me like I loved him. That’s the truth.”

Like fuck, it was.

The words to disagree with every falsehood she’d just uttered consumed me. I burned with the need to remind her who had been the one lacking love, but that was dangerous. Lifting the lid on the past wasn’t something I’d ever allowed myself to do. I wasn’t changing that now.

I stood suddenly, the chair scraping back, and her eyes widened. I was hard as hell, my cock straining up my belly, and the whole fucking room smelled like her skin. I couldn’t stand it. She needed to get back to fucking bed, and there was only one way I could think of to convince her of that fact.

“If you’re cold and lonely in bed, just ask me to join you, Signora Conti. Don’t go about making meaningless small talk in the middle of the night. You wouldn’t be the first desperate housewife to want to fuck a monster.”

Her eyebrows flew up, and red tinged her cheeks. Her mouth fell open, incredulous and outraged. I enjoyed her anger.

“You think I want you?” she managed to get out. “I don’t!”

I glanced down at her hard nipples meaningfully. “Tell your tits that.”

My hand was reaching toward her chest before I could stop myself. Her soft breast filled my palm and sent a jolt of electricity through me. I burned.

---