“Come back tonight,” he urges, still holding her hand. “Sneak out after he’s asleep, or whatever. We’ll go dancing and have a good time. You can’t be enjoying your vacation with him, not if you’re here, flirting with me.”
“Is that what this is?” Gia gives him a small smile, still biting her lower lip, and I can’t contain myself any longer.
“It certainly looks like that’s what it is,” I growl as I stride forward, nearly knocking over a barstool.
Gia jumps, snatching her hand back from Blake’s. Her eyes go wide, her cheeks instantly flushed, and I can see the guilty look in her eyes. “Salvatore, it’s not?—”
“Don’t bother.” I reach out, my hand gripping her upper arm as I pull her up off of the stool. “We’ll talk when we get back to the villa.”
“Salvatore—”
“Hey, man. Maybe take your hands off of her—” Blake starts to speak, only to blanch, flinching backward as I turn towards him with a vicious expression on my face.
“Listen carefully, son,” I growl, narrowing my eyes at him. “You’re only in one piece because I have more important things to do than take you apart joint by joint for touching my wife. But there’s a hell of a lot of security around here, even though you won’t have noticed them, and they all do my bidding. If I tell them to, they’ll mince you into so many pieces even your dental records won’t be enough to tell who you are. Do you understand me?”
The boy looks so pale, I think for a minute that he actually might pass out. “Yes. Yes, I?—”
I snort. “See this, Gia? One threat, and he’s practically on his knees begging. This is what you prefer?”
“No, I—” She swallows hard, looking fearfully at Blake and then back at me. “It was just a flirtation, Salvatore. It didn’t mean anything. Just harmless fun.”
I know she’s frightened because she’s not snapping at me, not arguing, not yelling, and demanding I take my fucking hands off of her. I want to feel bad that I’m scaring her, but I can’t, because I know that she’s not afraid for herself. She’s afraid for him, and that makes me even more furious.
“We’ll talk about it in private.” I pull her away from the stool, towards the door. “And you, Blake—I suggest not sleeping too soundly for a while.”
He stammers something that I don’t hear, because I’m already hauling Gia towards the door. Unsurprisingly, the moment I get her outside, she tries to wrench free of my grasp.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she hisses, trying to pull away. “You can’t just come grab me and take me wherever you want—ow! You’re hurting me. And how the hell did you know where I was, anyway?”
I whirl her to face me, both of my hands on her upper arms. “You’re lucky I don’t have Vince kill that bartender on sight,” I snap, glaring down at her. “Not another word until we’re back.”
For once, she actually listens. Her mouth is set in a hard line, her eyes snapping fire, but she follows me as I keep my hand wrapped around her wrist, taking her back to the villa. She doesn’t say a word until we’re inside, and I’ve marched her all the way to the bedroom, closing the door hard behind us.
The moment I let go, she yanks her hand away, crossing her arms over her chest as she backs up.
“You’re overreacting.” She tilts her chin up, giving me a haughty, arrogant look that just pisses me off that much more.
“I’m not.” I stalk towards her, the anger still burning in my chest as I back her towards the bed. “You’re mine, Gia. Mine, and no one else looks at or touches what’s mine? Do you understand?” I reach for her again, holding her in place as I stare down at her gorgeous, defiant face. “I’ll lock you up in a room if I have to, if this is how you’re going to behave.”
The words pour out, sharp and angry, and they might startle me if I could think past my anger. I’ve never been a man given to rages. I’ve never been possessive of anyone or anything. But just the sight of that boy’s hands on Gia made me murderous. It made me want to do unforgivable things. And right now, having her here, in our bedroom, I want to do far worse than that.
I want to remind her who her husband is. I want to drive every other thought of any other man out of her head, until she’s so wholly mine that nothing and no one can take her from me. I want to devastate her, ruin her for anyone else. And the worst part of it is that I think deep down, she wants it, too.
I think a part of her didn’t want him at all. She just wanted to push me to this.
And my control is so very, very close to snapping.
“I don’t belong to you,” Gia hisses, trying once again to wrench away from me. Her hair has tumbled down out of the loose bun it was in, falling around her face, and she looks painfully beautiful like this. “You can’t treat me like this, Salvatore?—”
“I can do what I want.” I push her back, until her legs hit the edge of the bed, and I feel her tremble—with fear or anticipation, I’m not sure which. My cock twitches, thickening against my leg as I hold her there, and desire mingles with the anger until I feel like I’m going mad with it. No one has ever made me feel this way before, as if every repressed desire and emotion I’ve ever felt is surging to the surface all at once, on the verge of drowning us both.
“No, you can’t!” She twists in my grasp again. “I won’t stand for it, Salvatore! You can treat me as an equal, fuck me like a wife, or leave me alone to my own devices. But you can’t have it all! You can’t ignore me, leave me cold and push me away, and expect me to just take it?—”
“And you think your Bratva husband would have treated you as an equal?” I nearly snarl the words, and I feel her stiffen, but I don’t care. We’re too far gone for me to stop, her flirtation with another man, the spark that’s lit the fuse, about to go off.
“Yes!” She cries out. “Yes, I thought that. And now I’ll never know, because you?—”
“So what do you want?” I let go of her with one hand, grabbing the romance novel off of her nightstand that I saw this morning. “This? Is this what you want? The kind of thing written in here?”