Page 6 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“Across the field.” I gestured vaguely to the black abyss beside us. “I left my car, my luggage, my passport ... everything.”
“Nothing is worth the price of your life or sanity,” he declared, as if I shouldn’t worry about all my material possessions and my means of leaving the country being lost to me. “You say you are unlucky, but from where I stand, you should count your lucky stars.”
“And how is that?” I asked, limping toward the side of the car just so he would be forced to face the light. After the events of the evening, I wasn’t comfortable with a faceless stranger.
He didn’t turn to me at first, his head dipped to look at the snapped strap of my sandal in his big hands. When he finally turned to face me,the light slapped across his features almost violently, sending them into stark relief.
I gasped and took a step away from him.
“Because,” the beautiful man before me practically purred. “Tonight, I feel like playing the hero instead of the villain.”
Chapter Two
Raffa
If there was ever a night not to hit an American girl stumbling into the middle of a country road on my way back to the house in Toscana, it was tonight.
My week in Rome had been arduous, to say the least.
I disliked being away from home, even though my best friend and soldiers were more than capable of protecting my mother and sisters. It didn’t seem to matter. Ever since I’d received the call that changed my life four years ago, I’d been on the knife’s edge of fear. I refused to let it conquer me, but in order to control it, I had to have my finger on the pulse of every aspect of our operations in the region.
If I knew what was coming, I could head it off at the pass.
I’d been successful at doing just that with the head of the Roman Mafia Capitale, yet unsuccessful in avoiding this slip of a girl who’d appeared like a deer frozen in the headlights of my speeding car.
The irritating truth was, I couldn’t just leave her there, as much as my cold, dark heart assured me it would be the easier option. The man I’d been before taking over my father’s criminal organization still lingered in my soft tissues, reminding me that she was just a girl like any of my three sisters.
Would I want a stranger to leave them alone to fend for themselves in a foreign land, without anything to their names?
The frustrating answer was, of course, no.
So I sighed heavily and walked toward the American girl, who flinched at my approach. I raised a brow as I slowly opened the passenger side door.
“Get in,” I ordered. “I will circle around to where you have left your car and see what can be done.”
She bit her lip, and I noticed for the first time that though she was young, she was fairly pretty for an American. Petite in a way that made me feel as if I towered over her, but with a femininity that cut through my annoyance like a knife, eviscerating it with a single look from those long-lashed eyes. In the harsh yellow light cast from the Ferrari, they seemed dark as ink and filled with feminine mystique.
“What’s your name?” she asked finally, as if knowing it was the key to lessening her fear.
I understood, in theory. It was much easier to trust a face with a name.
“Raffa,” I said, but offered no more.
She peered up through those lashes, a streak of dirt painted along her sharp cheekbone and a cut on her chin. “Guinevere,” she said, sticking her hand out between us. “It’s good to meet you.”
My other eyebrow joined the first high on my forehead, but I decided to indulge her silliness and clasped her delicate hand in my own. It was cold, the palm badly abraded from her fall. I could feel the wet smear of her blood against my skin.
Without thinking, I turned her hand over in my hold and retrieved my pocket square with my other hand so I could use it as a makeshift bandage for her wound. She gasped as I tightened it but otherwise didn’t protest.
“I think you just ruined your designer hankie,” she pointed out.
“It is a pocket square,” I corrected, because a grown man didnotcarry a ... hankie. “Now, get in the car.”
She moved gently, face pale and tight with pain. A hiss streamed through her clenched teeth as she lowered herself sideways into the low car. Before she could spin forward, I crouched down and grabbed her slim ankle. She tried to jerk away, but I only hushed her as I slipped the broken sandal over her foot and deftly tied the leather pieces together.
“It will do for now,” I declared.
She swallowed thickly and whispered, “Okay.”
