Shadow Keeper

by Feehan, Christine

  “Your life is fascinating.”

  The car stopped, and Emilio opened the door for them. Giovanni slipped out first and then reached for her. Gathering her into his arms, he cradled her close to his chest. Sasha put her arms around his neck and leaned into him. Inhaling his scent. He smelled like home to her now. He carried her as if she weighed no more than a feather. As if she was a princess. She knew he carried her because her feet hurt. He was like that, paying attention to every detail.

  He carried her through the house, right to the master suite. She loved the way the house was set up, and she’d already been adding her own touches here and there. She would be bringing treasures she had put in storage—thankfully—things that had belonged to her parents and brother. For now, it was little things, like arranging flowers in large vases and scattering them around the house. Her mother had loved flowers. She grew them in the garden and then cut them for the house. Sasha had always thought it was a little silly since the flowers were right outside, but now she really wanted to surround herself with the things that reminded her of her mother, and she wanted her own garden.

  Giovanni deposited her in the armchair right in front of the fireplace and went on through to the bath to fill the square, oversized tub. She picked up the remote and started the flames so they flickered and threw out dancing shadows. Putting her head back she looked around the room with its high ceilings and beautiful appointments. She had never thought that she might be living in luxury. She still had a difficult time coming to terms with it. She wasn’t certain she would ever actually do so.

  “Baby?”

  She turned her head almost lazily. Her man stood in the doorway, watching her. She smiled at him, the feeling of love so strong her heart felt shaky with it. “Right here, Giovanni. I don’t know if I can move.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll undress you and get you in the bath. The hot water will help.”

  “It’s strange to think that someone would try to kill us. Both of us. Not because we did anything to them, but because they wanted to hurt someone else. That kind of thinking eludes me. Do you think we’ve got it wrong? I mean, really, that’s so bizarre.”

  “Unfortunately, people kill for all kinds of reasons, Sasha. They hurt each other and steal from each other. I’ve always found the useless robberies to be the thing I find hard to understand. Killing for five bucks. Or a candy bar. How does a person do that?” He shrugged. “I don’t want you thinking about it anymore. We’re home and we’re safe. I know your brother is because I just checked on him. We’ve tightened security there and no one is going to get near him.”

  “Thank you.” She flashed him a small grin. “I was just sitting here thinking I could never get used to this, but that right there, being able to make a phone call and have someone actually talk to you and reassure you that Sandlin was in his room and sound asleep, an actual person reassuring you at this time of night, that I could get used to.”

  He laughed. “I suppose I’m spoiled. I would expect it. In fact, if someone didn’t get their ass in gear and tell me immediately, I might get them fired. I’ve had that since I was very young.”

  “You were spoiled.” She stretched lazily.

  He walked over to her, and she watched him come, his muscles moving beneath his tight shirt, his dark features so beautiful to her. He scooped her out of the chair and took her into the bathroom. It was every bit as luxurious as the bedroom. The fireplace in there was lit as well. Flames flickered, licking at the logs.

  Sasha kept her eyes on Giovanni’s face as he slowly pulled her club uniform off and tossed it aside. He kissed her. Slowly. So hot. Perfect. Taking her breath and her heart at the same time. His hands moved over her body, gentle. Tender even. All the while she could feel possession in his touch. He helped her into the large tub and then inspected her shoulder carefully. He pressed a warm cloth over the spot that was throbbing. “I added some salts into the water. They should help. Scoot down until your shoulder is underwater. I’ll put a pillow behind your head.”

  She did so and then he joined her, pulling her feet into his lap. “I’ve got to wash that man’s touch off your skin.”

  “It really bothered you, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t want anyone touching you. Family hugs. There will be kissing on the cheek. But no one else. I don’t share what’s mine.” He looked around the room. “All this, Sasha. It doesn’t mean anything without you. Nothing I have in my life means anything without you. I live hard. The things I have to do are sometimes very difficult. I do them because it’s my duty, but I’ve never had what I needed to make it all worthwhile until I found you.”

  She heard the sincerity in every word. No one had ever made her feel so wanted—or needed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I worry you will. I practically railroaded you.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Honey, I’m not someone who can be railroaded. I’m here with you because I want to be with you. I’ll always choose you. I had one moment of freaking out, and after I realized it wasn’t about you at all, or even your world, although no sane person wants to be in your world, I knew I wanted to be with you. I was losing my mind over things I had no control over, like someone trying to kill us. It was convenient to think it was about you or how you live, but it wasn’t. I’m ashamed I even had that moment.”

  She knew he would dismiss it, and he did, with a single wave of his hand and the best foot massage of her life. After, he made love to her, so tenderly he stole her soul along with her heart. He woke her in the middle of the night and delivered her “punishment,” which just so happened to be the hottest thing she’d ever experienced, and their erotic tango turned so wild she was certain it might take weeks to recover. It was morning when she woke him for his “punishment.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “I tried to get bail posted for Aaron,” Tom Mariland said. “I don’t know why I couldn’t make it happen. I tried three bondsmen. All said the same thing, they couldn’t get him out until Monday. There’s no way we can take out all the Ferraros at this wedding and get away with it.”

  “We can get away with it,” James Corlege said. “We just can’t blame it on Aaron.” He paced across the room, his hand beating a little tattoo rhythm on his thigh. “Fucking bitch lied to me, said her engagement to that moron wasn’t real and all the time she planned a wedding behind my back. I hate them. I hate her most of all.”

  Tom gave a snort of laughter. “You sound like the bitch belonged to you.”

  “She would have if Giovanni moneybags Ferraro hadn’t enticed her away. Women are so easily led by their tits straight to the money. Dangle cash and they’ll spread their legs and do whatever a man wants.” James turned and smashed his fist into the wall. “At least Aaron’s going down for the fire and the stalking. Getting Marita to screw the bastard and get his condom out of the trash for us was a stroke of genius. There is no way Aaron can explain how his sperm was all over Sasha’s underwear when they find it’s his DNA.”

  He began pacing again. “There has to be a way, Tom. All the Ferraros together. Sasha. Her brother. We could take them out with an explosion. Something going wrong with their heating system.” He tapped his thigh over and over. “I hate them all. They walk around thinking they’re all so superior to the rest of us.”

  Tom shrugged. “A good fire after the explosion. I like fire. It’s beautiful and deadly, greedy for anything in its path. I like watching it eat people alive.”

  James turned and faced the other man. “You’re so good at using fire. Maybe you’re right. I should listen to you, Tom,” he flattered the man. “How would we do that? Start a fire in a place that big so they couldn’t get out?”

  Deliberately he pulled out a chair and sank into it, leaning toward the other fighter as if eager to learn from him. Tom preened, just as James knew he would. Tom would have to die, of course, he knew too much, but he would have one last use. If he could be the instrument of death to the Ferraros, it wo
uld be James’s finest coup. His revenge on the fucking rich. He’d been getting rid of his enemies since he was fifteen when he’d killed his rival, leaving his body in a manhole. It hadn’t been discovered for months. He’d relived that first kill over and over.

  Over the years, he’d been very careful to make certain others were blamed for a death or he made it look as if it was an accident. He’d made the mistake of beating the hell out of his first wife instead of letting her go, watching her and then killing her later when no one would suspect him. She’d taken money from his wallet with the intention of leaving him. He didn’t put up with that shit. If she wanted his money, she had ways of earning it. He gave her lots of opportunities, she was just lazy.

  Tom droned on and he tuned him out, thinking of his second wife. She’d been a fun one, willing to do anything he wanted, so eager to please him. He’d loved that about her. Then he’d lost a major fight, and she’d had the balls to tell him he drank too much the night before. He’d beat the fuck out of her. She’d left him, and he actually missed her. If he could have, he would have found a way to get her back, but she wouldn’t even take his calls.

  His last girlfriend had been a joke. He beat the shit out of her on a regular basis, but she liked it. She wanted him beating her so that wasn’t any fun. Then, when he split up with her, she wanted to press charges against him. He visited her in the middle of the night and let her know he could have cut her throat and would if she didn’t drop the charges. Poof. No charges.

  He’d watched Sasha for some time when she was first hired and working the main floor. She was really beautiful and had the kind of figure he preferred. He decided she would be wife three. He’d made the mistake of telling Aaron. Aaron bet him that she would fall for him because he was the better fighter.

  Aaron brought Tom in on the bet to make things interesting. That was what he always said, he liked to make things interesting. James wanted to kill the fuck, but that wasn’t good enough. He wouldn’t suffer enough. And now, Sasha, marrying Giovanni Ferraro, needed to suffer, too. They all did. Every damned one of them.

  He’d liked his little game though. It was fun. If he could have, he would have fucked with them a lot more. He thought of them as puppets dancing on his strings. He sighed. The fun had to end sometime, and if he could pull this off, killing every Ferraro, Sasha and her brain-dead brother, all in one final blow, it would be such a thing of beauty.

  He leaned back in his chair. Tom had seated himself across the table from him, drawing something on a piece of paper. Tom sat up straight, still talking, but something shimmered in the shadows behind him, distracting James from hearing him. His eyes were deceiving him.

  Tom’s head was in the shadows, and for a moment a man seemed to step out of the shadows to stand behind him. He wore a pin-striped suit, just like the Ferraro brothers. This one was beautiful. James liked nice clothes. The suit was dark charcoal with the thinnest stripes. The shirt beneath the vest and jacket was lighter charcoal. The tie was a dark charcoal to match the suit.

  The man caught Tom’s head in his hands. At the same time, James felt hands on his head. The man in the shadows snapped Tom’s neck and murmured, “Justice is served.” Then James’s world went black.

  Sasha came to Giovanni on the arm of Stefano. Sandlin couldn’t walk her down the aisle, but he was there, standing between Vittorio and Taviano. She couldn’t help shooting him a quick glance as she walked past him to her man. Sandlin beamed at her, clearly happy, and that brought her own happiness up a notch.

  She noticed the cousins from New York there, all three brothers, handsome in their pin-striped suits. Their suits were dark charcoal with thin lighter charcoal stripes, while Giovanni and his brothers wore gray with black stripes. All of them looked so handsome. Giovanni took her breath away, just that look on his face. Stefano placed her hand in his brother’s and leaned in to brush a kiss on her cheek before taking his place beside Francesca.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Giovanni whispered. “Thank you for being mine.”

  She couldn’t speak, afraid she’d cry and ruin the makeup Emmanuelle had spent hours on. Emmanuelle had worked hard to pull the wedding off. Of course, money talked, and she’d gotten the planner she wanted. Strangely, Eloisa worked with her, putting together the reception for those at the Hendrick Center as well as the town reception. That was the bigger reception, the one at the hotel where the people the Ferraros had known most of their lives would be guests.

  She heard the preacher speaking and then Giovanni was looking into her eyes and she found herself falling like she did when he looked at her like that. She answered in the affirmative when he asked her, just as Giovanni had. His voice had been firm. Hers trembled. She still meant every word, as if the vow was sealed into blood and bone. She would be his. He would be hers. She truly felt as if they’d been born for each other.

  Then Giovanni was kissing her, and everyone receded. There was only him. That mouth of his could always command her. Always make her laugh. She was lost there with him until Stefano started the clapping that pulled them back from the edge of that cliff they always seemed to fall over.

  Giovanni danced for the third time with his wife. They didn’t have too much more time before they would have to leave, but she was having so much fun and he liked watching her have fun. He kept his eye on her brother. Sandlin moved through the crowd a few times and then he retreated, going to his new favorite spot.

  His favorite couch had been moved into the larger common room and put in a quiet corner where there was still plenty of light for him to read. He was on the couch now, but he was smiling sweetly like he did, a genuine Sandlin smile—and it was Eloisa beside him. Her body was turned toward Sandlin, her posture and position indicating she was open to him and enjoying the conversation, which made no sense to Giovanni.

  His mother abhorred weakness. She had always been hard on Ettore because he’d been born with weaker lungs and had respiratory problems. No amount of her driving him could cure his problem. She’d acted as if she despised him from the time he was born, yet here she sat next to Sandlin acting like what might be considered actually human. On the one hand he was grateful, but on the other, he found himself angry with her that she couldn’t have treated her own son with as much compassion.

  Henry, the man who oversaw their fleet of vehicles, was dressed in a suit and seated beside Eloisa. His body posture screamed protective. All three were eating small slices of wedding cake and drinking punch. Giovanni had never seen his mother drink punch. She preferred very fine wine or champagne.

  “We’re going to have to leave, Sasha,” Giovanni said, reluctantly. “Emmanuelle has been signaling frantically for the last ten minutes. It’s one thing to be fashionably late to our wedding reception, it’s something altogether different not to show up at all.”

  “This is our wedding reception,” she pointed out.

  Sasha was gorgeous in her wedding gown. It was Emmanuelle who had found the perfect dress for her. The silk slip was a nude, fitted silhouette that clung to every curve. Over the slip was the designer’s contrasting translucent signature elements. Scattered into the embroidery were sequins that shimmered when she walked or moved. The sequins glimmered down the long sleeves and around the neck and tracked down the dress and across the trailing fishtail hem. It was breathtaking. The designer was one of Emmanuelle’s favorites.

  He knew, because Emmanuelle had told him, that once he was alone with Sasha, he had only to undo a couple of hooks and the silk slip would fall around her ankles, leaving her in the translucent embroidered outer layer. Giovanni couldn’t help thinking about that as she’d walked down the aisle toward him and as he’d whirled her around the dance floor. It kept him in a constant state of arousal, which he wasn’t certain he would survive until they got home.

  He glanced over to Nicoletta. Taviano had leaned down and was whispering to her. She shook her head. A look of impatience crossed his face. He took her hand
and pulled her up, gathering her to him for a dance. The two moved across the dance floor in perfect rhythm, but Nicoletta was holding herself—or trying to hold herself—away from his brother.

  Giovanni led Sasha to the small couch where Sandlin sat with Eloisa and Henry. “We’re going to have to go. We promised Goodman we wouldn’t be here more than three hours total. He felt it would be too disruptive to the patients.”

  “He’s getting paid far more than he should have,” Eloisa snapped. “He can wait.”

  “No, Eloisa, he really can’t,” Giovanni said, exasperated. “He did us a favor, and the crews still have to clean up. That’s more time disrupting the patients. You can see that Sandlin is tired.”

  Eloisa smiled at Sandlin. “I suppose you need to rest now, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “I enjoyed meeting you as well.” She stood up, hands on her hips, glaring at her son. “You neglected to tell me that Sasha was capable of producing riders. I noticed her brother’s shadow and made certain my shadow connected with his. I was shocked at the strength there, and even more shocked when he recognized my shadow. She comes from a very strong family. Have you looked into her background?”

  “Eloisa, Sasha is standing right here. At any time, you could have asked her. Of course, I know her background. I asked her and she told me. Had you waited to be introduced that morning at Stefano’s, I’m certain you would have seen her shadow at some point.”

  She ignored that. “I suppose she must be pregnant. All the gossip columns are speculating. Public relations reps have been asking repeatedly for an answer. I do wish you could have waited, Giovanni, and been just a little more responsible.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sasha snapped and whirled away. “I’ve had enough. Are we going, or what?” Ignoring Eloisa and Giovanni, she reached for her brother’s hands. “Sandlin, thank you for coming to my wedding. I’ll be back in a few days. Giovanni and I are going on a honeymoon. When I get back, I’ll show you pictures and tell you all about it.”