Bastian backed away from me after he saw my face. He stared at me with this inquisitive look that seemed mixed with a little fear. I taunted him a bit, telling him to deliver the goods and the home run.
He shook his head no and told me to get ready for a night with my friends.
Our relationship was wobbling on a balance beam, and neither of us knew which side we wanted it to fall on. He’d started to become my friend, and I didn’t have a lot of those—not men, at least. If we were going to continue down this road, the lines needed to be clearer, and I was sure he felt the same.
I let my curls fall loose in the shower and air dried them after. I pulled on a cut-off sweatshirt that hit just below my breasts and some matching pants. It wasn’t a night for me to go all out. It was a night to chill, to try to relax with those that supposedly wanted to be around me.
Or it was a night I needed to feel comfortable in my clothes because everything else was going to be uncomfortable.
The first knock at the door had me jumping.
“There’s wine cooling in the cellar, Katie. Go pour yourself a glass before you scare away your friends.” Bastian waved me off before going to answer the door, and I walked through his kitchen to the oak barn door that led to a cooled cellar.
The air was crisp, the brick walls lined with expensive wines, and I was a fish out of water. Wine had never been my strong suit. Hard liquor, I knew. Not knowing what to pick, I grabbed a red one and shrugged. Then I threw two more under my arm because alcohol was going to be needed.
I reentered the kitchen to find my friend, Brey, standing there with her massive husband, Jax. His arm was draped around her as he glared at Bastian.
“All I said was that your wife looked nice tonight.” Bastian leaned against the island counter and folded his arms across his chest.
“You know better than to look at her,” Jax threw back at him.
Brey shimmied out from under his arm. “He never gets out,” she said as she took a bottle from me and then hugged me before I could back away. “I never get out either, so just indulge me.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “How’s the little monster?” I asked. Brey had the baby a few months back, and after we all got to see and hold her, their family basically disappeared. They were overprotective and in love and completely content in their little bubble.
I didn’t blame them. I didn’t aim to pop it either. Brey and I were the type of friends who could go a year or ten years without seeing one another and still drop everything for the other if need be.
“Good. She’s a little tyrant, that’s for sure. She wants to go everywhere with me and never wants to leave my side. I tried to leave her to go to the center for a few hours, and Jax showed up thirty minutes later with her screaming and a look of terror on his face.”
I laughed. “I guess that girl is just like her daddy. Neither of them can be away from you for too long. Anyway, I’m sure the kids were happy to have them there.” Brey owned a center near a reservation that housed kids in need. We’d all visit once in a while, but Brey put her heart and soul into her work there.
Brey nodded as the doorbell rang again and Bastian let Vick, Jett, and Rome in.
“Look who my hubby and I found in the elevator!” Vick announced as she pointed to Rome.
He smiled at her antics because no one could hate the bubbly side of Vick if they tried. It exhausted and excited you all at the same time.
Rome’s smile for once was genuine, like he actually enjoyed the company of the people around him. He and I had somehow formed friendships with the same damn people over the years, and it crippled me to see him looking so damn refreshed and carefree around the people I loved most.
Then his gaze fell on me, and his smile dropped off. We took one another in, and I licked my lips at his attire, the dark hoodie hiding the tattoos that I knew snaked around his muscles. The slim sweatpants that hugged his thighs in just the right way had my mouth watering too. When his jaw popped, I reminded myself that we needed to keep our distance, even if he’d kissed me in that fitting room.
We sat down for a movie that I couldn’t watch at all. I couldn’t name the characters if my life depended on it. I sat next to Bastian, and his arm draped around my shoulders while Brey and Vick sat near their husbands. Rome took the solo chair but burned holes in Bastian’s arms with a fiery gaze most of the movie.
I couldn’t stop wondering what he’d been thinking by coming tonight.
I gulped down my wine and reached to grab more when Rome murmured, “Get me some?”
His voice made me jump, and I knocked the open bottle onto the wood flooring. The swear word flew from my mouth before I could stop it. “Shit.”
Brey beelined to the paper towels in the kitchen. “I got it, Katie.”
“Thanks for saving my floors, Brey,” Bastian said, completely unfazed by the mess. When Jax tensed, Bastian smirked. “She’s one in a million.”
“You better knock it the fuck off, Bastian,” Jax growled.
He chuckled at Jax’s jealousy. “You’d think he’d get over us dancing together in a club once, honestly.”
Brey rolled her eyes as she cleaned the floor. “It’s not like I slept with Bastian.”
“Right.” Vick laughed. “He barely gives Rome shit about the fact that he slept with Aubrey.”
Rome coughed, and Jax growled at him. “Thanks a lot, Vick,” Rome said, but he was smiling like he wanted to taunt Jax too. Then his eyes jumped to me. “I’m not ashamed, though. Brey and I had an agreement that worked. It worked very well.”
It was like he’d stabbed my stomach with a dagger. Jealousy dug deep in the crevices of my body and festered. I hated the feeling, wanted to rid myself of it immediately.
“Oh, Jesus,” Brey grumbled as Jax stood up, ready to leave.
I sighed and wiped my forehead, trying to shake my anger. “I’ll go get another bottle,” I said to no one in particular.
Rome nodded, but when I passed him on my way to the cellar, he got up and silently followed. If our friends questioned it, they didn’t say a word.
When we got to the cellar and he closed the door behind him, I spun around and glared. “What are you doing following me in here?”
“I’m getting a moment alone with you because you’re practically shaking out there.”
“I’m fine.” I waved off his assessment.
“You’re nervous or uncomfortable. Or both? Is it me?”
I didn’t know what it was. It was all of them and feeling like I had this unit even when I really didn’t. It was him too, knowing I wanted him and knowing I shouldn’t, feeling the jealousy of another woman when it’d been years since they’d hooked up. “I’m just on edge.”
His hand went to my jaw, and instinctively I tilted my cheek into his palm. The anxiety subsided; the shakiness of the world steadied. “You’re okay, huh?”
“I’m okay.” I nodded.
“Good. Now”—he smiled before he threw out what he probably thought was a joke—“let’s make both of us happy and not have you sit with Bastian’s arm around you. It’s only fair since my mouth was on you last.”
Thinking of him with Brey, with any other woman, had me acting out. I wanted to witness his fury and inflict a jealousy in him stronger than mine.
“No, it wasn’t.” I dropped the words out one at a time as if dropping pebbles into a well and waiting for the splash.
“What did you say?” he whispered like he couldn’t believe my admission. “We were just at the boutique. We just . . . You’re telling me that since then, you let him have you?”
I looked down at my nails and contemplated whether I needed to paint them deep red. By the time we were done here, they probably already would be. Rome’s stare grew darker and darker, like a predator who was out for blood. But I was a good fighter, and I’d claw him apart before he drew any of mine. “Bastian’s a gentleman. We kissed. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“‘Nothing more,’ she says. Fuck me.” He spun away from me, and a guttural sound came from deep in his chest. When he twisted back, he was a man on a mission. He didn’t say a word, just grabbed me by the hips and turned me to face a wine fridge with a mirrored door. I saw our reflection there, how his body stood so big behind mine.
I put my hands on the door and looked over my shoulder at him. “Want to kiss me again and see if this time you can make me yours?”
“I’m not here to fall for the bait anymore,” he murmured as we both looked in the mirror. Suddenly, the hands that killed, that I knew were extremely deadly and had inflicted painful pleasure on me before, were light as a feather. His fingers danced over the sensitive parts of my collarbone, played with the chain of my necklace for a moment, and then swooped up to hold my chin high so that we were staring at one another, his chest against my back. “I’m only here for you now, woman. Not to be a pawn or play a game with Bastian.”
“Wasn’t that the game you played with me out there? You tossed your relationship with Brey right in my face.”
“That was a few years ago, and we all know it wasn’t a relationship.”
“You fucked her just like you fucked me.”
“I slept with her to fill a void. I have sex with you despite knowing you’ll probably create a bigger one. Fuck, woman, I should never have looked twice at you.”
“Why? Am I that toxic?” I whispered because I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“You’re intoxicating, that’s for sure. I’m supposed to protect the family, not lose myself in the mind-fuck that you are.”
I didn’t take lightly to the insult. “Fine. Don’t, then. You shouldn’t have come tonight, anyway. Bastian and Brey wanted friends here. We definitely aren’t that.”
“I’m their friend, though.”
I crossed my arms. “Not mine.”
He twirled me to face him. “Yes, yours. I’m your whatever the fuck you want me to be. I have been since the moment you walked in with Jimmy. Shit, probably since the moment I stood in your room staring at you wearing that necklace.”
I clutched it to my chest. “I’m not asking you to be anything to me.”
“And yet I’m yours and you’re mine.”
I bit my lip as he said the words. The room suddenly felt so small, and Rome felt bigger than life. He took up so much space with his massive muscles and broody-ass personality. I wanted to scream at him for claiming me and then rip his clothes off so he could show me just how much I belonged to him. I couldn’t stop my breath from coming faster, couldn’t stop myself from pulling him close and leaning my forehead against his.
“You’re tangling Bastian in our web,” he said. “You always think I’m trying to punish you for taking pleasure from him. You know you’re mine and I’m yours. What the fuck are you thinking?”
“I don’t want to be yours!” I yelled. “You can’t put me before the family, and I can’t sacrifice my place in the family for you. I don’t belong on the outskirts. And if I’m with him—”
“You’ll be what? What’s it matter where you are?” He narrowed his eyes like he was trying to figure me out.
“A long time ago, I was a little girl with dreams, Rome. I can’t remember a single dream now. When I lie awake at night, all I see is different men standing over me and showing me that my worth is between my legs.”
Rome’s face paled and he fisted his hand, but I held up mine to stop him from spewing something comforting I didn’t care to hear.
“All those little girls are out there feeling how I feel. I still think about the one I met at Marvin’s, how we stared at each other with not on flicker of emotion in either of our eyes. We’d been stripped of life and were dead inside and out. What if my dream gets to be stopping the men from standing over us? Maybe I get to change something, and isn’t it better to have a dream like that than nothing at all?”
“You should never have had to go through any of it.” He sighed. “But that has nothing to do with Bastian and you.”
“Sex trafficking is big business and at-risk youth are perfect targets. We’ve pulled our family’s business away from it, but the Armanellis could do more.”
He shook his head and shut his eyes in frustration. “You can’t change the family. Even with Bastian. You’ll be just another girl on his arm. Family is blood, Katalina.”
“I deserve that family title just as much as any of you.”
“Maybe.” He sighed. “You’re as close to them as any woman will ever get.”
“And that should be good enough?”
“No, it should be motivation for you to leave this shit behind for somewhere you’d get equal respect.”
I turned around and poked him in the shoulder. “And where would that be? Give me one good place where I got a shot at that.”
His stare was desolate. We both knew the only place I could be comfortable now was with all of them. I found myself longing for him to make me feel at home for just a second, to make all the nightmares disappear.
He leaned away just as our lips were about to meet. “Not this time. You need to figure this out, Katie. We can’t kiss in the dark and then you have motivations with him in the light.”
“Oh, really? It’s not like you’re about to tell the family we’re exclusive. So why not?”
“Because remember—the man who kissed you last isn’t the man who can fuck you into oblivion, am I right?”
I licked my lips, thinking about our time in the bar. I didn’t answer him one way or the other.
“We’re two very different men,” he said.
“You’re kidding me, right?” I said in frustration. I wanted Rome’s lips on mine. Didn’t he want to taste me the way I wanted to taste him? Hadn’t he missed my lips as much as I’d missed his?
“Did you know he told me to choose if I wanted you in that boutique, Katalina? Me. Not you.” His hot breath moistened my mouth as he let go of the breath he was holding. He shut his eyes as if the pain of what he was about to say was too much. “Shouldn’t Bastian know by now it’s not my choice, but yours? Me or him, right?”
Then he gave me what I wanted. He took my mouth in his and seared his heart there. I wanted to melt into him, get lost in him forever as his tongue roamed my mouth like he owned it.
“Choose me, Katalina,” he whispered. “Let me consume you. Pick our destruction, not his safe haven.”
“Pick you, how? How, Rome? All you want is the family’s safety. You won’t change that. So what? We hide in the shadows forever?”
“Shadows are better than the light sometimes,” he responded, but he was already backing away and nodding like he knew he couldn’t have me. Like, all of a sudden, he didn’t really want me.
“I don’t want just little corners of darkness. I want it all. I want your darkness and your light if there’s anything left. And if not, I want the monster in you because it’s the only thing that saved me so long ago. If I can’t have that, I’ll take a dream with Bastian.”
He winced before he spun and left me.
I stood there so long the light turned off in the cellar. The darkness swallowed me up as my heart thumped, pulsing rage through my veins at being left behind again by the only person I wanted.
