A Hunger for the Forbidden(35)

No matter there were still five hundred people in the room. No matter that he’d had her against a wall an hour earlier. Still she challenged him. Still she made him react like a teenage boy with no control over his baser urges.

Yes, think about that. Remember what that looks like.

Blind rage. Two young men, still and unmoving, blood everywhere. And then a calm. A cold sort of emptiness. If he felt anything at all it was a kind of distant satisfaction.

And then he’d looked at Alessia. At the terror in her eyes.

And he’d done what he’d sworn he would never do.

He’d wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into his chest, brushing away her tears. He’d made her cry. Horrified her, and he couldn’t blame her for being horrified. It wasn’t the kind of thing a girl of fourteen, or any age, should ever have to see.

When he pulled away, when he looked down at her face, her cheeks were streaked with blood. The blood from his hands. Not the only blood he had on his hands.

He breathed in sharply, taking himself back to the present. Away from blood-soaked memories.

Except it was still so easy to see them when he looked at Alessia’s face. A face that had been marred with tears and blood. Because of him.

The gap between them continued to shrink, the crowd thinning, until they met in the middle, in the same group. And there was no excuse now for him not to pull her against his side, his arm wrapped around her waist. So he did.

Alessia’s body was stiff at his side, but her expression was still relaxed, her smile easy. A lie. Why had he never noticed before that Alessia’s smile wasn’t always genuine?

He’d assumed that it was. That Alessia displayed and felt emotion with ease and honesty. Now he wondered.

The last of the guests started to file out, leaving Alessia and Matteo standing in the empty ballroom.

He looked around, at the expansive room. This was his hotel, separate from his family dynasty, and often, looking at it, at the architecture, the expanse of it, filled him with a sense of pride. He had hotels all over the world, but this one, back in Sicily, a hotel that belonged to him and not to his family in any part, had always filled him with a particular amount of satisfaction.

Now it just seemed like a big empty room.

He picked up his phone and punched in a number. “Delay cleaning until further notice, I require the ballroom for personal use for a while.”

Alessia looked at him, her dark eyes wide. “What do you need the ballroom for?”

He shrugged. “Anything I want.” He walked over to the edge of the stage and sat, gripping the edge. “It is my hotel, after all.”

“Yes, and you’re a man who takes great pride in the ownership of whatever he can possess,” she said.

“And why not?” he asked, loosening his tie, trying not to think of Alessia’s fingers on the knot, trying not to imagine her fingers at the buttons of his dress shirt as he undid the collar. “That’s what it’s always been about in my family. I go out of town—” and off the grid “—and my bastard cousin has taken over my office. My younger brother has managed to charm his way into the top seat of the fashion houses for Corretti. So you see? In my family, ownership is everything. And if you have to stab someone to get it, all the better.”

“Metaphorical stabbing?” she asked, wrapping her arms around her waist, as if holding herself together. He hated that. Hated that he might cause her pain in any way.

“Or literal stabbing. I told you, my family has a colorful history.”

“You said you and your brothers weren’t criminals.”

“We’re not. Not convicted, anyway,” he added, not sure why. Maybe because, in his heart, he knew he was one.

Knew he could be convicted for assault several times over if evidence was brought before a court.

“Why are you saying this?”

“What do you mean, why am I saying this? I’m telling you the truth. Was what I did that day near your father’s gardens legal? Answer me,” he said, his words echoing in the empty room.

“You saved me.”

“Maybe.”

“They would have raped me,” she said.

He remembered it so clearly. And yet so differently.

Because he remembered coming upon Alessia, backed up against a tree, a stone wall behind her, two men in front of her, pressing her back to the tree, touching her, jeering at her. They had her shirt torn. They were pushing her skirt up. And he’d known what they intended to do. The evil they meant for his angel.