Page 5 of Deception & Desire

Because when has anything in my life gone entirely to plan?

“You’re marrying me off tohim?” Mia hisses to her father, but she makes no effort to prevent the rest of us from hearing.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Teo flinch. The Guild’s don has never seemed particularly thrilled by the arrangement either, but he’s somehow convinced Marco of its merits.

Enough for Marco to bring his daughter here personally—a feat I’m sure is impressive, but one I decidedly don’t care enough to ask about. I’m only here for one thing. Everything else is Teo’s mess to sort out.

But it’s Cassandra Moretti who speaks up first. “Mia, please.”

The redhead turns on the woman in anger. “Youknewabout this?”

“I tried to warn you! You never picked up the phone.”

“You could have come toCandelabraat any point.”

“She couldn’t.” Teo throws Cassandra a tired look. “She shouldn’t have tried to contact you at all.”

Cassandra folds her arms across her chest, a strikingly formidable creature despite the softness of her features. “She’s my best friend. I wasn’t going to let her get married without me.”

Teo sighs, gesturing to the man next to her. “Rocco, we really need to have a conversation about confidentiality.”

The heavily tattooed ex-don throws an arm around his wife’s shoulders and shoots Teo a lazy smile. “I’m retired, remember? I don’t answer to you.”

“You’re on sabbatical.”

The two continue to bicker about semantics, but my attention is quickly recaptured by the woman before me.

If it weren’t for the fact her eyes were darting around so quickly, I would have sworn she’d frozen entirely in shock.

They hadn’t told her. They’d dressed her up likethatand dragged her to this hotel without so much as a heads-up. There was a part of me that would have probably felt sorry for her if I weren’t in an equally dire position.

As if sensing my gaze, Mia Chiavari finally lets her eyes rest on me again.

“Why? Why you?”

For a moment, it’s hard to look away from the open vulnerability on her face.

She is beautiful. But that much I knew already; it was an objective reality that one tended not to forget.

The clothes she wore only accentuated that fact. The shade of her dress perfectly complemented her slightly bronzed skin. Her fiery hair—cascading over her shoulders in subtle waves—drew the eye away from her generous cleavage to where it softly framed her face.

Mia Chiavari was objectively beautiful, but it was her expression that drew me in.

I liked the stubborn set of her jaw, the determination in her alarmingly bright, emerald-green eyes. I even liked themeasured elevation of her brow as she assessed and reassessed her environment. She took the measure of me, like she was plotting five separate ways to kill me.

She was a fighter. Andthatwas what set my heart to racing.

“Natali is in need of an heir, Mia—” Teo begins to answer for me, only for Mia to cut him off.

“I wasn’t fucking talking to you.”

My eyebrows raise at that. The don of the Guild doing as he was told is new. Everything about her spiritedness calls to me like a siren song.

“Honey.” This time, it’s Marco who speaks. The older man holds onto her arm more firmly. “This is the last step in securing the alliance. He will ensure your safety as long as you provide him with a child.”

Mia suddenly looks very close to vomiting. “You’resellingme to him.”

“This is not a negotiation.”

---