Page 107 of Made to Sin

“No,” I sharply said.

“Then what is it?”

I’d been a direct person almost all my life, but I found myself having a hard time saying how I felt. I swallowed the lump stuck in my throat. “Why are you avoiding me?”

She momentarily froze— a sign of guilt— before continuing to pick at the bedding, still not meeting my eyes. “I’m not…”

“Bullshit. Since the charity event, you’ve been avoiding me. We live together, and I see your face for less than an hour a day. I’ll ask you again, Katarina, what’s going on? Did I do something?”

At my bluntness, she finally lifted her gaze to mine. I could practically hear the cogs turning in her head as she ran a sweeping look down my face.

Throughout this confrontation, I wanted her to stare back at me. But now that she did, my skin itched at places I couldn’t pinpoint. For the first time in my life, I felt like a fish on a chopping board, waiting for the razor cut.

“No. You did nothing wrong.” I heard her suck in a small breath. “Just… I can’t keep doing this anymore.”

I had a feeling I knew where this was going, but I asked anyway. “This?”

“Us.”

I clenched my jaw, forcing myself not to react. “Why?”

She sighed. “I think we should stay roommates and nothing more. I just got out of a broken marriage, and you have your issue with Sofia. We shouldn’t complicate things further with whatever we had going on.”

The false notion she drew in her head pissed me off morethan I would have liked. Like the rest of theCosa Nostra,she believed there was something between Sofia and me.

I held in the instinct to raise my voice, fearful I would retraumatize her life with Marco, and calmly explained, “Katarina, what is there to complicate? Nothing is going on with Sofia and me, and there won’t be anything. Wherever you got the idea that Sofia and I were together from, it couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

“But… But I heard you confess to her the other day at work.”

My brain racked for the timeline of when I possibly did that.

Then, it hit me, her first day when Sofia confessed to me.

“You misheard me turn her down. I told you, she is nothing more than a childhood friend to me. If I wanted to date her, I would have a long time ago. But no, I don’t. If you were home more, you would have even noticed she moved her things out.”

“You guys looked happy at the gala,” she countered.

“Again, I went to reject her. If I’m not mistaken, it was you who sent her in the first place. What were you thinking?”

Red rose up her cheeks. “I guess Laura’s words got to my head more than I could admit. She was so pretty, and you were so handsome…”

I didn’t feel like joking, but for her sake, I pretended to lift the corners of my lips. “You thought I was handsome?”

“You know I did,” she mumbled.

“If you saw yourself through my eyes, you would know Laura was just jealous. It was us that looked perfect together.”

Relief sparked in her eyes, but not more than three seconds later, she was back to biting her lip. Whatever she was thinking just then, she shook it away with a slight downturn of her head.

“Maybe, but I still don’t think we would work out.”

My smile dropped. “Why not.”

With a small frown, she muttered, “I can’t be with another man who can’t promise me more than a quick fuck.”

“I wanted to show theCosa Nostrayou were mine, Katarina.What part of that is a quick fuck?”

“So did Marco. I know you guys are nothing alike, but I can’t take that risk, Luciano. Can you promise me more?”

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