Page 78 of Cassio (Belles & Mobsters 3)

I was envious. And I hated it! I have never been the envious type, and I certainly shouldn’t give a damn about any member of the King family. The only objective was to destroy them all. Yet now, I hesitated.

“Nice to see you again, Áine,” he purred in his deep voice and it felt like a gentle caress by the wind. A tremor went through my body at the thought of him touching me.Shit!

Now that everyone cleared out of the office, his face wasn’t a cold, unmoving mask. He seemed more approachable, relaxed. I found that I liked him relaxed, despite everything, which was insane.

He studied me just as curiously as I studied him. And there was that sinfully arrogant smile. Like he knew something I didn’t. All my bravado melted away as we stared at each other, this chemistry between us burning it all to ash. Truth was, I wanted to explore this attraction further. Enemy or not. It was what had kept me going for the past six weeks, and I thought he wanted to explore it too. The question was who would be the victor in the end.

“So,” I started, my voice raspier than I’d like.

“So,” he repeated with a small quirk of his lip. I had a sense this man rarely smiled.

“What should I call you?” I questioned him. We might as well start with easy questions. “Hunter or Cassio? Or King?” I added the last bit sarcastically.

“Only my mother called me Hunter,” he replied. “You can call me whatever you’d like.”

Oh, I could come up with a few creative words.

I chuckled despite myself. “That’s leaving the door wide open for interpretation. You know that, right?” He didn’t seem concerned. “I could start with... douchebag,” I added. I had to stop myself from saying hottie. Good God, I had to exercise some self-control.

But then his words hit me. He said only his mother called him Hunter. While the information on Cassio King was scarce, or nonexistent, there was one article that stood out. It was about his mother, the beautiful Penelope DiMauro.

It clicked then. His mother; I bet he was going against his brother Marco because of his mother. I recalled a picture of a beautiful woman that accompanied the article. She had a sad smile on her face, an infant in her arm and holding a little boy’s hand. He couldn’t be older than six or so. It had to be Cassio. The column said she killed herself, driven to madness.

“How old are you anyhow?” I asked him when in fact, there were more important questions I wanted to ask.

“Forty.”

My lips parted in shock. He surprised me. He didn’t look forty. Not at all!

“Hmmm,” I muttered. “That’s a significant age gap.”

But then he wasn’t expecting to marry me, was he?I’m not his first choice.There it was again, the little green monster in my heart. Maybe the problem was that I got a taste of him and how delicious sinning would be with my perfect stranger. And since that day, I had been dying for another taste of him.

If I had known who he was, would I have ever let him touch me? Maybe he preferred women like my cousin and now he was stuck with me?

Margaret was twenty-eight. Even that was quite an age gap. But between me and him, fifteen years… yeah, that was quite significant.

Regardless, my body liked Cassio’s touch. The incident in the elevator from Las Vegas flashed in my mind. I was in such a panic that his touch actually calmed me, which in itself was bizarre. Usually when panic hit, it was hard to pull me back. My mother had never been able to do it. But this man did it almost effortlessly.

“Your father killed my dad,” I blurted out.

“I’m sorry.” He seemed sincere. Our phone conversation flashed in my mind - when he spoke of his father hurting the families of his best friends. “Thomas Evans was a good man.” I nodded. He was a good man. He sacrificed a lot to fight crime on flesh trading. “He intercepted quite a few of Benito’s shipments. So Benito retaliated, in more than one way.”

How many ways? I wanted to know everything. I knew Benito had been after Dad for years until he finally got him. A bullet in the skull and my dad perished forever. I heard Benito got a bullet too, and I couldn’t help but think of the irony. He got what he deserved, and the only regret was that I wasn’t the one that put a bullet into his skull.

“When is the wedding supposed to happen?” I rasped the question.

“This weekend.”

“Isn’t that kind of pushy?” I retorted dryly. “You two were going to get engaged only today.”

“This has been planned out for a while.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course.” Well, this was going swell. “What if I had plans for the weekend?”And every other for the rest of my life!

“I guess they have changed now,” he retorted with dark amusement in his tone.

Easy for him to say. I had a secret life I led and nobody besides Margaret knew about it. It was the main reason I insisted on my own apartment. It allowed me to go in and out as needed without additional explanations.

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