Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  A man I instantly wanted to throttle for being so close to her until I noticed his pink and purple pinstripe suit and matching ascot.

  And a woman, another redhead, though this one was dark haired with a face cut into fierce angles.

  Cosima’s sisters.

  Half-sisters.

  I wondered if they knew that, or if Cosima had kept them in the dark.

  The dark, I decided, because my beauty wouldn’t want them to suffer any pain in knowing.

  The one sitting blinked once, her mouth slack with admiration, before her features closed like iron shutters and she jumped to her feet, moving around the bed to block my wife from my view.

  My fists curled into heavy hammers at my sides.

  “You have the wrong room,” she told me with her nose hiked in the air.

  A brief flash of admiration cracked my manic resolve. This sister had to be Elena, the woman with more brain than soul, the one who read everything she could get her hands on in the slums of Napoli, and who handled herself like a princess even when she’d been no more than a pauper.

  “This is Cosima Lombardi’s room,” the other sister, Giselle, told me softly.

  I looked down at her, noting her curves and the stain of orange acrylic paint left over on her right hand. This was the sister of gentle affection and dreamy observation, of France and pearls, lace and fancy.

  I’d known them for less than a minute, hadn’t even been introduced, but after years of watching from afar, their personalities labeled for me in Cosima’s own recollections, I felt as if they were my own sisters.

  In a way, they were.

  “Perhaps you are in the wrong room,” I told them coolly. “This is Cosima Davenport’s room.”

  “What?” Giselle breathed.

  “Excuse me?” Elena barked at me.

  I adjusted my gold cufflink emblazoned with my coat of arms and took comfort in knowing the same image was branded on my wife’s buttock.

  “The woman you are trying to hide from me,” I said idly, “is my wife.”

  The bomb detonated as if in a silent movie, the room so quiet you could hear a pin drop, but the sisters’ reactions were explosive.

  “What?”

  Giselle’s entire body filled with air as she struggled to suck in a breath, then exhaled loudly, painfully as if punctured.

  “Excuse me?”

  Elena looked the picture of betrayal when her face collapsed with shock.

  The dark side of my heart reveled in their reactions. I wanted them to know the truth, to feel it so acutely it would be carved into their hearts and minds forever.

  Cosima was mine, and I would never tire of demonstrating my ownership over my most precious possession.

  “Who are you?” Giselle breathed with reverent terror as if I was the devil.

  I felt high off her fear, made invincible by my legal right to be in that room with Cosima.

  “Her husband,” I told them somewhat redundantly, just to reinforce my point. “You may call me Alexander, seeing as we are family.”

  They gaped at me as I strode past Giselle and grabbed an empty chair to place beside Cosima’s bed. My arse was barely in the seat as I leaned over her, shielding her from the others with my broad back so that I could have this one semi-private moment to grieve her state.

  “My beauty.” My voice was heavy and wet with sorrow as I looked down into her tragically beautiful face, her skin too pale and too cold beneath my fingers as I trailed them down her gaunt cheek. “My sleeping beauty, it’s time to wake.”

  The sight of the most vivacious person I knew lying so still, so close to death, lit my heart on fire like a flint to stone.

  Over the crackling roar of my incinerating organ, I heard a sharp voice say, “Cosima isn’t married.”

  “She is,” I said drily, focusing on my derision instead of the calamity of grief making a ruckus in my chest. “I was at the ceremony.”

  “She would never get married without telling us,” that same voice bit out, hard and awkwardly anglicized.

  I glared over my shoulder at Elena as she stood up to shake a finger in my face. “You are some freak stalker who has seen her in magazines and fixated on her. Get out!”

  I stared at her, darkly amused that she attempted to hold my glare when I’d been outstaring men as twice as old and powerful as her since I was a lad.

  Cosima would have told me to go gentle, to empathise with her sisters who were clearly grieving, anxious, and completely derailed by the arrival of a previous unknown husband to their favourite sister.

  I didn’t give a shit about empathising.

  I wanted to be alone with my wife. I wanted to stroke her skin until it was warm and flushed, to wake her up with my Dominant voice and then kiss her so deeply that she would be able to taste the ash of my eviscerated heart on my tongue and know the horror of my despair.

  Then I wanted to leave Riddick at the door, more men at the entrance of the hospital, and set out to find the dead man who had dared to lay a hand on my beauty. I knew that Noel must have been behind the order given his whispered admission at Pearl Hall, but I wanted the man behind the gun.

  Only then, after I had blood on my hands—wet, warm, and right—would I bloody well consider the selfish, irascible feelings of the other Lombardi women.

  “I would say your goodbyes,” I suggested coldly, turning my back on them once more to take Cosima’s hand between mine. “Visiting hours are over, and I am the only one who has been granted the choice of staying the night with her.”

  “Like hell you are,” Elena snapped. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

  “He is her husband.”

  My shoulders stiffened involuntarily at the sound of my brother’s mongrel European accent. I didn’t turn to face him, hoping as I had when I’d been only a boy, that if I ignored my little brother, he would bugger off.

  “They were married two years ago in England,” Dante explained, perhaps purposely misleading them so they would think she had met me more recently than she really had. “If you press him, I am sure he will show you the marriage certificate.”

  There was a discordant, staccato pause like a note hit out of tune.

  “What the hell is happening?” Elena demanded again. I was beginning to understand why Giselle found her elder sister so bloody irritating. “First you, and now this maniac who claims to be her husband?”

  “Stop.”

  It was so soft, so hoarse, at first, we all thought it was just the rasp of the wind tousling the cheap curtains through the open window or the shift of my suit sleeve grazing the rough bedsheets.

  But it was her.

  Cosima.

  My wife’s sweet voice like the sound of fucking angels singing.

  With my heart thumping and swollen in my throat, I angled my head down to look into the golden eyes I knew would meet mine.

  Even though I was braced for impact, the sight rocked me to my soul.

  Those huge irises were the center of my universe, twin suns that I wanted to spend the rest of my life orbiting around. I catalogued the thick, black fan of her lashes and the deep bruising on the top of her cheeks. How could someone so broken be so goddamn magnificent?

  “Cosima!” Giselle sobbed, lurching forward to clutch at her sister’s leg while Elena stepped up to silently take her other free hand.

  “Bambina,” Cosima croaked, her eyes squinting against the pain in her head and the bright, hideous artificial lights. “Water.”

  Before anyone else could react, I slid a gentle hand under her neck to help lift her head as I pressed the rim of a small Dixie cup to her lips. “Just a little bit, my beauty. You do not want to make yourself sick.”

  Vaguely, I was aware of the other strange man in the room stating he would go find the doctor. I was grateful someone had thought of that. I felt as concussed as the woman in the hospital bed after the shock of seeing her wake from a coma.

  Beside me, Elena vibrated with relief
and lingering anxiety.

  “You scared the shit out of me. You terrified me, Cosima. What would we do without you?” she beseeched in a voice like a little girl.

  It seemed out of place coming from a woman I knew was on track to be the youngest partner in the history of her prestigious law firm.

  “You would survive,” Cosima responded calmly, but her eyes were on mine, and they were filled with frantic, frightened questions.

  What are you doing here? Why do I feel like death warmed over? Who did this to me?

  It was only her mouth that gave away the extent of her relief. It softened the longer she stared at me, curling at the edges like burning paper as the air between us warmed with passion.

  Elena was still spouting selfish nonsense. I decided to give her thirty more seconds before I kicked her out.

  “You will survive,” Cosima amended, cluing into the strained tension between her two sisters that had permeated the air since before my arrival.

  “Everyone needs to leave,” I demanded.

  Thirty fucking seconds was more than enough.

  I was a bloody saint for letting them breathe the same air as Cosima right now when every single instinct in my body told me to lock her away in a tower and guard her there like some kind of vicious monster against any and everything that might try to harm her.

  Even if it was the emotional harm her sisters were unintentionally doling out.

  Cosima shouldn’t have to deal with family drama ever again, let alone from the very moment she woke up from a fucking coma.

  “We don’t need to do shit,” Elena snapped.

  And essentially secured my everlasting apathy.

  “Xan,” Cosima scolded me softly, finally ignoring her sisters the way we both wanted to. She gave my hand a weak squeeze and tilted her head so that all her black hair went sliding over the pillow to frame her beloved face. “You came.”

  I swallowed painfully past the knife that was suddenly lodged in my chest. It killed me to know she would doubt me like that.

  Wasn’t it ludicrously obvious that she was my everything?

  Instead of struggling to convey the depth of my unrest, I let my voice go cold with rage and recrimination. “I am the only one who hurts you, remember?”

  Her entire face suffused with peace for the first time since waking, and she leaned even farther over to the edge of the bed. I met her halfway, our faces so close I could smell the signature fragrance I’d had made for her so long ago. One of her sisters must have been brushing the oil through her hair while she slept.

  She dragged a deep lungful of air into her lungs, closing her eyes as if the smell of me was as essential to her as hers was to me.

  “I know,” she whispered on the exhale.

  I brushed my free hand over her forehead, down the side of her soft cheek, then into her hair so I could twirl a lock around my finger. The smile she rewarded me with for the familiar gesture was worth more than her weight in gold.

  “Cosima,” Giselle said softly after clearing her throat. “I know you just woke up, but what the actual fuck? You’re married?”

  “Yes,” my wife affirmed immediately, relaxing into the bed as I stroked her hair. “I know you’re worried, but Alexander…cares for me. He is here to take care of me.” Her eyes flashed open and unerringly landed on Dante who still lingered like a tosser in the doorway. “And so is Dante.”

  The doctor pushed into the room then, frowning at the many occupants and then immediately ordering their removal. Her sisters protested, but I’d had Dr. Steele flown in specially to tend to Cosima because he was the best neurosurgeon in North America, and he wouldn’t let anything get between him and a patient.

  “I am the husband,” I told him, standing up to offer my hand.

  Dr. Steele stared at me, his face impassive but for the twinkle in his eyes.

  The man had known me for years, and when I’d called him to take care of my wife, he’d almost busted a gut laughing at the news I’d succumbed to something as mundane as love.

  “Fine, but stay in the corner. The rest of you, out.”

  “It’s okay. I’m awake now. I’ll see you again, soon, si?” Cosima said, her voice even weaker, and her lids fluttering to stay open. She’d been awake only ten minutes, and already, she was exhausted.

  I burned with the need to shout at the lingering family to get the fuck out.

  The sisters and the male stranger left before I was forced to take bodily action, but Dante lingered, leaning against the wall beside the door with his ankles and arms crossed like a lazy bodyguard.

  And he was.

  Lazy, inept, fucking useless.

  Why the bloody hell hadn’t he been with her?

  He should have stuck to her side like glue while I was away.

  I shot him a scathing look that promised retribution later, but he only smiled thinly and answered Elena’s outraged call from down the hall, leaving the room to speak to her.

  When the door clicked shut, I instantly moved. “Will I hurt you if I come onto the bed with you?”

  “It’ll hurt more if you don’t,” she promised, shifting over with a wince so that I would have a sliver of the bed.

  Carefully, more carefully than I’d ever done anything, I curled myself around her, one hand on her good side, the other over her head where I could play lightly with her hair. She sighed as soon as I settled and closed her eyes.

  “I could sleep.”

  “You can sleep, my beauty. I’ll watch over you,” I vowed.

  “I know,” she whispered. “I knew even when Giuseppe threatened to take me to Noel. I knew you’d find me no matter what.”

  Rage moved through me quick and silent as a possession. I swallowed thickly once, twice to speak through the wrath lodged in my throat.

  “Always. Know also that Giuseppe is a dead man for hurting you.”

  “Already dead,” she murmured, falling quickly into sleep. “I shot him.”

  A moment later, her mouth softened, and her breath evened out. I lay there for a long while, listening to her breath as one might listen to a symphony, letting the sound move through my soul like a spiritual awakening.

  She was alive.

  Alive.

  But she had been through too much, and enough was enough. From that moment on, Riddick and I wouldn’t leave her fucking side. Not until Noel was taken care of and put away, because no matter that it was Giuseppe’s thugs who had obviously hurt my wife, I had no doubt Noel had orchestrated it.

  There was a gruff cough from the doorway, and I looked up to see Salvatore there, dressed all in black, his face a white mask of horror. There were tears in his gold eyes as he stared at the sleeping woman who shared those eyes with him.

  “Madonna santa,” he breathed in a voice that was clogged with tears. “Look at her.”

  “Look at you,” I countered coldly. “Alive and well.”

  His expression shuttered, the wet glazed eyes turning cold as marbles. “As if you didn’t know.”

  I leveled him with cold look, but I was curious how he could have known that.

  “I was not exactly subtle as I should have been, mm?” he addressed my unspoken question as he moved into the room and into the chair on the other side of Cosima. His meaty hand trembled as he linked it gently with hers. “I could not be when my daughter was so close. I knew it was probable you and others had eyes on her, but I indulged my own need to see her more than was prudent if I truly wanted to stay dead.”

  The age-old fury in my heart eroded under the warmth of his affection for my wife. He hadn’t been there for her when she was a girl, and I resented him for that even though I knew it wasn’t exactly his choice. I wanted to believe that a true man made his own decisions regardless of the obstacles that faced him, but life wasn’t so simple and I’d had firsthand experience with the difficulty of overcoming your own circumstances.

  The truth was, he loved Cosima with a verve that led him to sacrifice his own safety on multipl
e occasions in order to see her happy.

  I could respect that.

  Hadn’t I spent the past four years doing the very same?

  But my softening was more than even that rational.

  Once, years ago before the death of my beloved mother, I had called this man Uncle Tore. We had spent countless occasions with him as boys both in England and Italy with our mother, learning Italian, picking olives out of his many orchards, and squishing grapes with our toes in the old way just because it was fun for boys to get messy. He had loved us too, not quite the same way he loved Cosima, but in his own deep way. We were the children of his best friend, and as was the Italian way, that made us family to him.

  So, there were deep fissures in the arctic glaciers I’d built between myself and my old affection for the man, and they deepened as I saw one furious tear roll down his creased cheek.

  “It was Giuseppe di Carlo and his men,” I said quietly, careful not to disturb the magnificent beauty sleeping in my hold. “That is all I got before she slept again.”

  He nodded tersely as fury flashed over his face. “Of course, it was. He has been trying to start a war since Dante took over as Camorra capo. He does not like that we will not parlay with him. He does not like that we pose a threat to his territory and undisputed rein as mafia kingpin in the city.”

  “Perhaps,” I allowed. “But it’s more than that. He made a deal with the Order, with Noel, to spy on Cosima in exchange for membership.”

  “More power.” Tore clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Sometimes these stronzo, they do not understand that all power is not created equal. The taint of some, like this, will end you.”

  “I can’t argue. He’s dead.”

  His forehead dissected into deep lines of shock. “How so? You got to him already.”

  I tipped my head toward my wife, sweeping my fingers over her crown to collect silky locks between my fingers. Her gorgeous mane comforted me as much as it did her. “This one took him out before she was shot. Or so she says.”

  “Check on that,” he said, and it was half question, half musing. I had no doubt he would check on it even though he expected me to do the same. “Still, we will kill all of the men involved.”

  I nodded. “That’s the plan.”