Russian Bad Boy's Princess: A Mafia Romance

by Bella Rose

  “Independent?” She forced herself to be flippant. She couldn’t show fear now. To do so would be to give ground she could not afford to lose. “I’ve longed for independence all my life. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be the little princess in a family like this?”

  “And you expect me to believe that they kept you locked in an ivory tower?” There was no mistaking the mockery in his words.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to believe me,” she began. “Or to understand. I’m sure you were the darling of your parents’ lives.”

  “Then you know nothing of the Bratva,” he said bitterly. “Perhaps in some families it works that way. My father believes that every man should have to prove himself from the ground up regardless of the accident of his birth.”

  “So you had to fight off the bullies?” She waved her hand to indicate all of his scars. “It looks like you did quite the job of it, then.”

  They faced off like adversaries, and Juliet realized this wasn’t what she wanted at all. With a sigh, she exhaled long and slow to expel the tension from her body. She saw a brief expression of confusion cross his features.

  WHAT GAME WAS she playing at now? One second she was soft and willing, the next she was hard and unforgiving. Antonin could not get a read on the situation, and it was beginning to irritate him. He needed to somehow break down her mistrust of him long enough to get rid of the remaining leadership of the Cagliones. Then the two of them could begin a new life away from the negative influence of her family.

  He stared around her office. It was not lost on him that there was a certain amount of irony involved in him arrogantly attempting to gain her trust only to murder those she claimed to hold dear. He just wasn’t convinced that the bloodthirsty bunch he had observed in that meeting were in any way worth her concern.

  Antonin deliberately turned his back and walked toward the other end of her office. There were photos on her credenza. He picked one up and stared at the image of a teenaged Juliet with her father and a man Antonin only vaguely recognized as her brother. The three of them were standing on a terrace with a beautiful ocean view behind them.

  “When I was sixteen and my brother Enzo was nineteen, my father took us to Italy.” Juliet’s voice was soft, as though the memory was one of her most cherished possessions. “We stood on a beach in Sicily and saw where our ancestors used to go to catch fish every single day. It was their livelihood, but they wanted more.” She took the picture from his hands and set it back down. “On that trip I learned what drove my father and my grandfather.”

  Antonin could well understand that motivation. “To succeed where generations of your family have failed is something that feels incredibly good.” He thought for a moment. “My ancestors were peasants. Some of the other crime families in Russia began as the nobility. We did not. We clawed out way to the top during the revolution. Family legend holds that some of the young men in our family were guards at the Impatiev House where the last Imperial family was held prisoner at the beginning of the Soviet regime.”

  “Then perhaps we are all murderers,” she said darkly. “Sometimes I don’t agree with what my father and my grandfather and even Enzo wanted so badly. Or perhaps I just don’t want the cost to be so high.”

  There were tears in her eyes. It occurred to him that this spoiled Italian princess had not been raised to this life. She had been meant for other things. Her purpose was to marry and raise a family that would become the next generation of Cagliones. Yet here she was trying to pick up the mantle of leadership in order to preserve what was left of that dream that had begun on a beach in Sicily.

  “I was sheltered as a child,” she admitted quietly. “But even a sheltered girl in a mafia family knows a thing or two about violence.”

  A KNOCK AT her office door made Juliet freeze in near panic. She was supposed to be holding this man prisoner, not discussing her existential mental wanderings with him! Putting one hand on his broad shoulder, she shoved him back toward the chair.

  “Quick!” she urged in a hoarse whisper. “Sit down and let me tie your hands. If you’re caught wandering around my office, it will go badly for us both!”

  She was thankful she didn’t actually have to subdue him. That would have been an exercise in futility considering he was three times her size. He sat down and she pulled the zip ties closed on his wrists. Then as an afterthought she grabbed a black felt sack and pulled it over his head. The barbaric items had been in her brother’s “bag of tricks” as he called it. Juliet had never used such a thing, but now was the time for improvisation.

  There was a second knock, this one more insistent than the first. “Juliet?”

  It was Giovanni. Great. She sprinted to her desk and plopped into her chair. “Come in,” she called.

  Doing her best to look as though she’d been working ever since she’d left the meeting was awkward. She picked up random papers on her desk, examined them, and then filed them away. It seemed a reasonable thing to be doing with her time considering when she had parted from Giovanni and her grandfather perhaps twenty minutes ago she had been mad as hell.

  Giovanni gave Antonin a significant look filled with venom. “Please let me have him removed to the basement. We have a holding area down there that would do quite nicely.”

  “I don’t trust Reggie and his moronic pals,” she said without looking up from her desktop. “And now I wonder if you came in here to nag me about my choice to keep the Russian here, or for something worthwhile.”

  “Juliet,” Giovanni said in a warning tone. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Be like what?” She was actually very irritated with him. “You’ve been acting weird lately, and I don’t pretend to understand why. I thought you were my friend. When we talked three months ago, you agreed to support my decisions. What changed?”

  Giovanni glanced at Antonin. “Can we please discuss this elsewhere?”

  “Come closer to my desk,” she suggested. “The man has a bag over his head. I don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

  Giovanni sighed and perched on the edge of her desk. He gazed down at her, lips pursed, and she began to really worry that her grandfather hadn’t been exaggerating or mercilessly teasing when he had accused Giovanni for wanting something more than friendship with Juliet.

  “Let’s just say that this is not the role I expected to play when I said I would support you.” He took her hand. It was uncomfortable as hell to have him holding her fingers in his, but he certainly showed no signs of letting go. “I care about you deeply, Juliet.”

  ANTONIN WAS HAVING difficulty remaining still as he listened to the rubbish the Italian was attempting to feed Juliet. Antonin moved on the chair, causing it to squeak. It would be no effort at all to crush the tiny piece of furniture like matchsticks, regain the use of his hands, get rid of the hood, and murder this Giovanni person with his bare hands.

  “I am pregnant, Giovanni,” Juliet reminded the man. “I am carrying another man’s baby, and you don’t even know who the father is. How can you make ridiculous promises of love or caring to me when you know that you would be volunteering to raise another man’s child?” Antonin heard her get up from her chair and cross the room. From the noises she was making, he guessed she was pacing restlessly from one side of the room to the other.

  “I wouldn’t care, Juliet!” Giovanni assured her.

  Antonin snorted, but Juliet beat him to the punch line. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “I know how you alpha males work. You might say that now. But when the baby is born, you would be the first to be constantly suspicious of him. You would look at every single man that we saw, and you would try to find the baby’s father. It would turn you bitter over time, and I don’t want to deal with that! I can’t do that to you, and I certainly can’t do it to my child!”

  Oh, it was torture to sit here and do nothing! Antonin grunted in agitation. He knew that Juliet heard him because there was a brief pause in the sound of her pacing.

 
“Who is the father, Juliet,” Giovanni demanded quietly. “Why won’t you say? I don’t understand why the secrecy is necessary in the first place. Do you not know? Is that honestly the situation you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  “Gotten myself into?” The outrage in Juliet’s voice made Antonin flinch. “So you think I just fuck a different guy every single night, and then when I wind up pregnant there could be twenty or thirty possibilities?”

  “No.” The word was plain and simple, and Giovanni’s tone was firm. “That isn’t what I think of you at all. That is why I’m asking. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s complicated,” she told him irritably. “You don’t understand because I can’t tell you. I can’t make you understand. There are things keeping me and this baby’s father apart that I cannot speak of.”

  “Is he from another family?” Giovanni asked in a hushed tone of horror. “Did someone take advantage of you?”

  “No.” Antonin could practically hear her rolling her eyes. “Why can’t you just leave it be?”

  “Because you’re using this baby as a reason not to let me love you,” Giovanni told her quietly. “And I want to believe that’s the only thing coming between us.”

  There was a silence in the room that grew heavy. Antonin did not breathe. He realized then and there that he had been looking at this situation from all the wrong angles. He needed to rethink his strategy, and he needed to do it fast. Otherwise he was going to lose the only things in life that had ever been worth fighting for.

  Chapter Ten

  Juliet was getting a little tired of men thinking that she needed them to take care of her. Giovanni was a great guy, but she didn’t need him to put her in his pocket and keep her safe from the outside world. She tried not to be obvious about staring in Antonin’s direction, but her gaze kept wandering to the other end of her office where her “prisoner” was shifting irritably in his chair. She would consider herself fortunate if he didn’t launch himself out of that chair and wring poor Giovanni’s neck.

  “Giovanni,” Juliet said, trying to be patient. “I really appreciate everything you’ve told me. I’m flattered. Really. But I don’t—” Sheesh, this was hard. “I don’t like you—like that.” Great. Now she sounded like a high school girl. She needed him to take her seriously. “I thought you understood that.”

  “I see.” Giovanni’s tone was cold as ice. “And that’s a permanent thing. You’re not willing to consider other options or wait until after the baby is born and see if things feel different for you?”

  “You were Enzo’s best friend,” Juliet said softly. “You’ll always hold a special place in my heart because of that. You grew up with us.”

  “You were such a brat,” Giovanni said with a smile. “You followed us everywhere.”

  “I didn’t have a lot of friends.” She recalled that with perfect clarity. “The kids at school couldn’t come here because their parents knew a little too much about our family.”

  Giovanni shrugged. “There wasn’t a reason to keep it a secret.”

  “No. But it made things difficult for a girl who only wanted to be part of one of the cliques at her snobby private girls’ school.”

  It still hurt Juliet to remember how much of an outcast she had been at school. The daughters of her father’s men had gone to public school. They hadn’t liked her very much anyway. She had always wondered if they had been pressured by their parents to curry her favor. That would be enough to make any teenage girl act like a bitch.

  “Just know that I’m here for you, Juliet.” Giovanni reached out and cupped her cheek. “And when you’re ready to come clean about the father of your baby, I’m ready to listen.”

  Yeah. That was never going to happen. Especially not if her baby daddy got loose. Juliet could feel the menace rolling off Antonin from across the room. Giovanni needed to get out of her office. Now.

  “If you’ll excuse me?” Juliet gestured to her desk. “I need to do some work.”

  “Of course.” Giovanni turned and glared at Antonin. “And when you’re ready to put him in a cage, let me know.”

  ANTONIN HAD NEVER before wanted so badly to beat someone to a pulp the way he did this Italian bastard. The guy certainly didn’t know how to take no for an answer. Juliet didn’t want to tell this Giovanni clown who the father of her child was? Antonin would be happy to explain. Right before he smashed the man’s face in.

  “I can feel your aggression all the way over here, you know?”

  Antonin stilled. There was no hint of fear or malice in Juliet’s voice. In fact he might have called it amusement. Surely she wasn’t sitting over there laughing at him? No. He could not stomach the thought of any woman mocking him, and she would learn this or suffer his displeasure.

  Rotating his wrists, he felt the plastic cut into his flesh. He didn’t care. He twisted his hands and gave a sharp pull. The zip ties snapped, and he reached for the hood covering his face. Yanking it off, he stood up and turned around to face Juliet Caglione.

  Anything he had been going to say left his mind. There were big tears glistening in her blue eyes and not a hint of a smile anywhere on her face. She wasn’t laughing at him. And the most baffling part of this whole thing was how she affected him. He just wanted to make it better.

  Closing the distance between them, he held out his arms. She stood up and walked willingly into his embrace. He held her against his chest and felt whole again. What sort of sense did this make for either of them? There was surely no easy way for them to be a couple. Yet he wanted her and nobody else.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered. He brushed his fingers through the soft hair framing her face. “How can I help?”

  “Why do men have to do stupid things like that?” She made a vague gesture toward the door, which he took as a reference to Giovanni’s impassioned declaration.

  Antonin sighed. He could not believe he was going to defend that Italian piece of shit. “I don’t know him in the same way that you do, but for what it’s worth I do not believe he was trying to use you to gain a power position in your organization.”

  “You think all of that was genuine?” She pulled back and gazed up into his face. Her expression was bemused. “That’s silly!”

  “No.” Antonin pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You are a beautiful woman. He’s a man. Perhaps he feels that your shared past has created a bond, and he simply wants to feel that grow stronger. Whatever his reasons, he seems to truly love you.”

  “I don’t love him,” she whispered. “The night I met you I felt as though you were different from any other man I had ever been around.”

  “Oh?” Antonin felt a wave of excitement wash over him. Perhaps his infatuation with this woman was not as one-sided as he feared.

  “I want you,” she whispered. “I just don’t know how to make it work.”

  THE FUTILITY OF their situation was overwhelming. Juliet could not see a way out. His family would be unlikely to accept her in any capacity, and her family already wanted his blood smeared on the floor.

  “Let’s go out,” he suggested.

  “Out?” She gazed up at him, wondering what on earth he could be talking about. “What do we do? Just waltz out the front door past half a dozen of my grandfather’s men and two different capos that consistently lounge about downstairs eating us out of house and home?”

  Antonin gestured to the window. “We won’t use the door.”

  “This is a second-story window.”

  “So?”

  A thrill of excitement began working its way through Juliet’s system. “Really? There’s no balcony. I don’t particularly want to know if I bounce or not. And those bushes down on the ground aren’t very springy either.”

  He laughed and took her hand. “Trust me.”

  She watched with no small amount of apprehension as he pushed back the curtain and flung open her office windows. The big panes of glass swung out, letting in a breath of crisp fresh air. He stepped outside onto what
was presumably a ledge, and then he held out his hand.

  Juliet stared at the big callused palm for several seconds before deciding that if anyone could keep her safe, it was Antonin. She placed her hand in his, and he helped her to step outside. The air swirled around her legs and pulled her slacks taut around her calves. She shivered as the cool air teased her neck and ruffled through her hair.

  “See?” He lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed them lightly. “We’re just fine. We’ll follow this ledge all the way to where the rooflines meet, and then we’ll climb up.”

  “You’re insane!” she breathed. “Can we really do that?”

  There was more than a hint of the devil in his expression. He held tight to her and began walking confidently toward the section of the roof where two wings of the house came together. The old building had been reshingled several years ago, but the wood was still weathered and covered in moss.

  It took less time that she had imagined to reach the point where they began to climb toward the roof. She felt a moment of panic as she wondered if they were going to have to balance on a tiny peak up there, but then she saw the widow’s walk that had been added to the house as an architectural feature. It wasn’t actually functional, but it did create a platform of sorts with a railing.

  Juliet watched Antonin start to climb, his movements easy and fearless. She gazed up and caught sight of the sky above. The velvety black was studded with stars. It was so beautiful that she briefly forgot her fears.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” he urged. “Start climbing. I’m right here.”

  She put her hands on the shingles and started up the incline while using the joint of the roofs to brace her feet and keep her balance.

  ANTONIN COULD CERTAINLY appreciate a woman who didn’t let her fear dictate her decisions. How many women like Juliet would be out here on a roof late at night climbing around like a couple of kids?