Page 27 of Sin City Obsession

She drew a deeper breath, then relaxed into him. “This … doesn’t feel like … whatever I thought we were doing last night.”

Rocco dipped two fingers into the suds lathered up on her skin and gently rubbed them around her nipples, not wanting to drag the coarser material of the bristles there. He felt her quiver, but she made no move to stop him. “Maybe you misunderstood my intentions, then, beautiful,” he murmured over her ear. “Last night was never a one-time thing for me.” He moved the brush lower, keeping the back-and-forth scrubbing motion as consistent as he could, and dipped it between her legs.

Her head dropped against his shoulder as he worked the brush along her inner thigh. “Anything more,” she said on a soft gasp, “complicates … everything.”

He switched hands in order to repeat the process for her other thigh and pressed a single, soft kiss beneath her ear. “I don’t give a fuck. We’ll figure out what needs to be figured out.”

Alessa laid a hand over his forearm, her grip just firm enough to stall his motion. “Rocco.”

He lifted his head and let her straighten, let her reclaim the brush, let her turn to face him.

The confliction was as evident in her eyes as the desire.

Rocco quietly pulled her arm forward until the bristles and their remaining lather were pressed over his own chest. He didn’t look away from her eyes. He made no effort to hide whatever showed on his face. The raw truth was that she was right, and for as thoroughly as he understood that, he couldn’t find a single part of him that still cared. He was on the precipice of becoming the Don, there were a thousand things he ought to have been focusing on or at least concerned about. And theonly one he could even identify was the woman in front of him.

The woman who’d matched him, surprised him, and unraveled him from the moment he’d laid eyes on her.

He waited until she had finished scrubbing away what had transferred onto him, until the brush was rinsed and set aside and they were standing together where the multi-angled spray met. He trailed his fingers up her arm, careful not to directly touch the wound they really should have kept dry.

“I might not even be here tomorrow, you know,” Alessa said, her voice still a whisper.

His stare snapped to hers, only to find her gaze turned downward, to where her fingers rested on his chest. He couldn’t quite tell if she looked sad or was just trying to avoid getting the water in her eyes. So he smoothed her hair away from her face and tilted her chin up just enough to see those orbs of milk chocolate again. “Since it seems I didn’t make this abundantly clear last night, I’ll spell it out for you.” He stepped closer, crowding her, his larger frame dispersing some of the water that had been falling onto her face. “You are mine, Alessa. Complications and consequences be fucking damned.”

The housekeeper had of course shown up before they could slip out—thereby putting faces, and of course names, to the cause of the white, smudgy smear on the center window and accompanying drips on the floor. Before Alessa had figured out how not to implode from that, Rocco had whisked her into the elevator, insisting on taking heroutfor breakfast. Suddenly his family’s in-hotel, free-for-her, award-winning restaurant wasn’t good enough.

He even had the nerve to call it a date.

Alessa tried very hard to pretend she was mostly flustered and confused by the behavior instead of flattered. But one thing had become immensely clear. Rocco Cavallo II was a kind of threat she had never anticipated.

Again, her mother’s words whispered through her memory.“You need a nice, strong, Italian man…”Mama Adimari would be so thrilled to learn Alessa even had the eye of a man like Rocco. She would need no less than a month to realize that anything serious between them would require a choice.

Alessa felt her stomach lurch, twisting in a strange way that she suspected had nothing to do with the coffee finally in front of her. She dragged in a breath.

“I can see you drowning again.”

Her head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

Rocco lifted his own coffee to his lips, but she could see his expression was calm. Patient. “Let’s pretend we’re normal people while we’re here. Tell me something about Alessa. Likes, dislikes.” He paused and his eyes warmed with a smile as he took a slow sip. “Another fond family memory, maybe. Whatever comes to mind.”

She curled her fingers around her standard, plain mug. “I don’t really know how to be normal,” she said. “I grew up …in.” She shrugged. “Mom married and became a stay-at-home-mom after high school, and it was assumed when I was born that her little girl would follow more or less in her footsteps. She taught me the basic things. Cooking, cleaning, sewing—standard domestic, housewifely things modern feminists rage about. With an emphasis on the cooking, of course.” Alessa felt her lips twitch as flashes of time spent in the family kitchen danced through her mind.

Rocco chuckled. “So you’re saying we should’ve stayed in for brunch? I could get behind tasting your cooking.”

Heat rushed to her face and for a split-second Alessa would have sworn she heard a masculine-toned rush of air from the booth behind her, where Emanuele sat. She swallowed hard. “I’m better at dinners,” she heard herself say, as if having a brief out-of-body experience. She took a long gulp of coffee. “And no, what I was saying was that I kind of defied my parents pretty severely. I mean, I obeyed house rules like ‘do your homework’ and ‘wash your hands’ and I didn’t start breaking curfew until I was maybe fifteen, but in the grander sense….” Her voice trailed for a beat as she remembered her mother’s wordless disappointment the day Alessa had declared her semi-secret interview a success.

It was one of the few times she’d seen her parents argue, and she’d felt so guilty. Her father had known, of course. Her father had had to vouch for her just to get her the opportunity. But also, because of her father’s particular standing in the family, and Al’s still fresh joining, her willingness and aim with a gunhad been about all she’d needed to be welcomed in as more than one of the women the others had to protect.

In her eyes, she’d seen herself as becoming a protector of those she loved. Like her father before her.

Alessa shook the memory away. “Mom didn’t say a single word to me for fourteen days.” She let her lips lift with a smile. “And for an Italian woman, you can imagine the feat of that.”

His laugh was louder this time, and his eyes twinkled with the amusement that carried in the sound. But he kept it brief before containing himself. “I’m glad you can joke about it today,” he said, “but in the moment, that must have hurt.”

Alessa let her gaze drop to what remained of her coffee. “It did. I had been so proud of myself for doing something that I felt could make a difference, directly in our lives.” She licked her lips before looking up again. “You see, my father … he used to work for Lady Eleonora’s security detail. She was the boss’s wife at the time.” Rocco inclined his head, so she continued.

“When we were maybe pre-teens, there was an incident, and Dad did his job. He saved her life. But he took three bullets in the process.” Alessa paused, replaying what was necessary in her mind. “One cracked his femur, the other two got him in the torso. It took him years to be able to pull himself up and shuffle around just in the house after, and he can’t do it without at least a cane, let alone for long. So of course he had to retire after that.” Even as Rocco frowned, Alessa felt the usual smile warm her cheeks. “It was terrifying when it happened, but once he was home again, and starting to heal … I understood what he’d done. And ever since, to me, he was a hero. And that was what I wanted to be.” It was so ironic that she had started out her job hoping to protect the family—to be a hero to someone else—and yet it was her brother, who’d never expressed that thought, who’d died on a security detail.

Her throat closed and she gulped down the rest of her coffee before sliding the mug to the outer edge of the table.

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