It didn’t matter that the vows were fake; we had still made them. Did I want to have and hold this guy until the day that one of us died? No. I barely knew him. All I wanted was to get through every day as it came, being married to his ornery, chauvinistic, macho, annoying ass.
I walked into the master bedroom and saw him lying on the bed. He was on his back, shirtless. He only slept in his underwear. I silently stole into the bathroom to shower and get ready to sleep. The bathroom adjoined to the massive walk in closet so I didn’t have to go into the bedroom when I wanted to get changed. I found it hard to believe that this was the sort of closet he had in his house when he was a bachelor. It was massive. It was like an entire room in its own right. It was like the closet that Big built for Carrie on ‘Sex and the City’ but on steroids.
My clothes went on one side and his went on the other. I didn’t have that many clothes, but I knew he would have let me convert one of the guest rooms we had around the house into a dressing room if I wanted it. All I had to do was ask. Lorenzo lacked many things. In the time that I had known him, he had not been particularly charming, nor had he been very pleasant. He was tetchy with a short fuse, and he was very busy, always in and out of the house or on the phone with someone.
I would give him one thing though. The man was generous.
I hadn’t been married before, but I knew that it wasn’t custom for the people getting married to give wedding gifts to one another. Lorenzo had given, no, he had showered me with gifts. Beautiful boxes from exclusive Fifth Avenue boutiques with dresses, lingerie, jewelry, accessories, all sorts of things in them. The man himself was always dressed to the nines, even if he was just leaving the house to go to work.
His cufflinks alone cost more than some people’s rent. The Montorini family was a moneyed bunch, and as their newest daughter, I was benefitting handsomely, with gifts I didn’t ask for or particularly need. Maybe he thought that if he kept giving me things, I would forget that I could divorce him. Maybe he had a truly generous spirit and liked to give the woman whom he was falsely telling the world that he loved, the finest in garments, jewelry, and adornments. If he couldn’t love me with his heart, at least he could love me with his bank account.
The one thing he had insisted on was that we share a bed—from the absolute start. He wasn’t going to have his wife sleep in a different room than he did. That wasn’t a real marriage according to him. I understood, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t uncomfortable for me. We had consummated our marriage the night of our wedding and had kept sharing a bed, but that didn’t mean it was getting all that much easier.
Maybe I wasn’t who he wanted as a wife. We didn’t choose each other. Nobody could say I didn’t make an effort. Since the wedding, I had made an effort with my nightwear. He had bought me tons of nightwear sets, everything from La Perla to Stella McCartney. The least I could do was wear them. There were so few concessions that I was willing to make for him, but this one wasn’t hard. It showed I was grateful for the gifts and that I was above going to bed in a ratty t-shirt that used to belong to my father. If I couldn’t please him in any other way, I was going to at least do that much.
He noticed me and propped himself up on his elbows to look at me. His face spread into a smile.
“Isa, honey, what are you doing standing there? Come here, give your husband a kiss.” He laughed then, as if he had made a fantastic joke. The laughter, the jovial mood…he was drunk. Too much whiskey.
I sighed and walked over to him, slipping off the nightgown I wore over my shoulders. His eyes were watching my movements. He seemed to like the slinky black nightie I had on. It was fitted over my breasts and skimmed my curves, stopping just before my knees. He made a lewd show of adjusting his growing erection with his hand as he watched me approach.
“Come here,” he growled. It wasn’t the first time he had made a pass at me when he was drunk. He made passes at me all the time, drunk or sober. I was the one who couldn’t stand to have him on top of me. Of course, he had been, but most of the time I was too mad at him to stand his hands on me like that.
He was drunk. The usual routine would be he would try to grope me, and I would tell him I didn’t want it. He would complain, and I would tell him I wasn’t in the mood. He would get a little steam in him and declare—like a king—that I had to have sex with him because he was my husband.
I would roll over with my back to him and tell him I was tired. He would change tack, trying to turn me on, kissing my neck and feeling me up, but I wouldn’t budge. He would give up eventually and fall asleep. If he annoyed me too much, I would just leave. There was no lack of beds in the house. Sure, this particular one was my marital bed, but some nights, most nights, I had a lousy partner. I climbed into my side of the bed and turned my bedside lamp on in order to check my phone and get a few pages read of the book on my nightstand.
“Isa... Isa Montorini,” he mumbled, kissing the back of my neck. He moved my hair out of the way nipping and sucking the skin there. I sighed. Isa Montorini. His wife. Me.
“I’m tired, Lorenzo,” I told him. I felt him inhale deeply and bury his face in my nape. His body was pressed into my back. He was long and powerful. His body was hard and lean; not a spare ounce of fat anywhere. His hard penis pressed into my ass, I knew he wanted me to feel it.
I sighed and closed my eyes. It felt good. It felt good to be desired by my husband, especially given the circumstances. At the basest level, I was just a woman and he was just a man. Legally we weren’t allowed to seek our release with anyone but each other. If I was the type who could divorce the feelings I had for a person from their genitals and the act of sex, then this marriage would be a match made in heaven.
He moved from directly behind me and pushed my shoulder down into the bed so I was flat on my back and he was above me. Just a hint of whiskey, its sweet edge was on his breath, and I could taste it when he lowered his mouth to mine, kissing me deeply. I put my hands on his face, feeling his rough stubble, and ran them down his neck and chest.
He grasped both my hands and broke the kiss.
“Your hands,” he said.
“What?”
“These hands,” he said, running his thumbs offer my palms. “These aren’t a woman’s hands. Why does it feel like sandpaper when my wife touches me?”
I felt my face heat and anger bubble up inside me.
“Sandpaper?”
“When was your last manicure?”
He looked at my hands, inspecting them. I tried to snatch them back, embarrassed, but he held them fast.
“Lorenzo, you’ve had me handwashing dishes since we got married. You can’t expect them to feel like a baby’s bottom when I’m washing dishes all the time.”
“That’s no excuse. Get some gloves or something. I want you to feel like a woman when you touch me.”
He released my hands and fell back onto the bed. Reaching under the covers he adjusted his erection.
“Look what you did, Isa,” he said. He had taken to calling me Isa when he was trying to seduce me or was drunk enough. He pushed the covers down and revealed his sizeable bulge. “I can’t go to sleep until you do something about it.”
“Do something?”
He grinned lasciviously, eyes trained right at my cleavage.
“I would ask you to hop on and take a ride, but I want you to use your mouth.”
That was it.
I threw the covers off and pulled my nightgown on.
“Fuck you, Lorenzo,” I said. I heard him call to me, asking what he had done wrong as I left, slamming the door behind me. A petulant action, but it made me feel a little better. I gripped the sides of the gown and pulled them securely over my chest like I wanted to keep myself hidden.
How dare he?
How dare he?
Sandpaper? He wants it to feel like a woman when I touch him? Fuck him and fuck his handwashing rule that got me to this point in the first place. I chose the guest room furthest from the master bed
room. It was finished in ivory, cream, and dark brown tones. Extremely masculine. I hated it, but it would do. The important thing was he wasn’t anywhere near me that night. I self-consciously wrung my hands together.
Shit. He was sort of right. They weren’t soft like the women he probably knew who didn’t have jobs or didn’t have to wash their own dishes by hand. I rifled through the guest bathroom for some lotion, the guest rooms were stocked like hotel rooms. It was ridiculous. Lorenzo probably thought it made him look generous, but it just made him look wasteful.
I resented everything about him when he wound me up. I flopped onto the bed and got under the covers. I cried. Like a baby. I was upset about Lorenzo’s treatment that night, but it was the stress, too. It had been two weeks and nothing, nothing from my life was the same. Nothing. I didn’t live in the same place. I wasn’t working. I was married, and I had made the soul-crushing discovery of my father’s hidden life. I had gone from single and independent to married and stuck under my husband’s thumb.
I was still coming to terms with the fact that I was effectively a mob wife. Before that, I was a mob boss’s daughter and I hadn’t had a clue. The man who sat at dinner with me every night growing up was the head of some of the city’s most illicit crimes. Our home, everything in it, my tuition, hell, even the restaurant where I worked…had been bought with money he had gotten through...
God. I was innocent. Why did I have to have this as part of my family history?
How many girls in New York got to nearly their thirtieth birthday without knowing that their fathers were involved in organized crime?
It was a couple days before my father had told me that I was getting married. I didn’t know the events were related, but it made sense when it was spelled out for me. I never knew the true nature of my father’s business. All I knew was that it spared us the fear of having to live in a neighborhood where we heard gunshots at night.
I had been supervising dinner service at the restaurant. There were a few VIP guests who had booked the chef’s table, and I had to come up with something special for them that was not included on the menu. I remember that day as if the events were taking place in real time. I was trying to come up with a flavor profile that would complement the duck I wanted to serve as the main course. Orange was the obvious choice, but I didn’t do obvious. I had my friend Marina in the kitchen with me, helping me come up with the special dishes. She worked as a hostess there, but I trusted her palate.
I heard some men walk into the restaurant. There were about four in their party. I heard the maître d’, John, tell them that we were not yet open but would be opening for dinner service if they could come back in a few hours.
“You’re not open for dinner tonight,” one of the men said.
John was about to say something, but the loud bang of a gunshot cut him off. The sound was deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. People sometimes compared the bang of a gunshot to the sound of a car backfiring or of fireworks exploding on the Fourth of July, but this was no firework show.
I had been knocked to the floor and had plugged my ears, screaming. What was happening? I was paralyzed. Was everyone okay? The loud bangs cut my thoughts off as they began to form. For the first time in years, just force of habit, I began reciting the ‘Hail Mary.’ I could feel tears on my face, and my heart felt like it was in my throat.
It came to an end as fast as it had begun. I stayed down, waiting to hear the wail of police sirens, of the fire department, a SWAT team, someone. Anybody who could tell me what was happening, why it was happening, and make sure it never happened again.
It never came. Nobody came.
Pierre, one of my chefs had come to get me, helping me up from the floor. Not five minutes later, my mom had come by and picked me up, taking us to her and my dad’s place, the house where I grew up. The man I had known all my life as my father had hugged me, glad that I was okay. He then, as calmly as if he was telling me about what had happened on a re-run of ‘Empty Nest,’ told me that the people who had come to his restaurant and shot the place up were sent by one of his rivals.
Rivals.
His rivals in what? Did they support the Mets instead of the Yankees?
If only it were that trivial.
They had been sent by Antonio Montorini. This man was his rival in that he controlled one of the most powerful and influential mob families in New York, and my father controlled another. They were apparently at odds, the two men. The rivalry ran deep, deep enough that Montorini felt he had to send people to my dad’s restaurant to send a message. Montorini. The same Montorini family into which I had just been married.
Antonio was Lorenzo’s dad. My father-in-law.
Lorenzo and I had been pawns used by our fathers to broker a peace treaty. As long as they were family, they couldn’t fight, or at least, they wouldn’t fight. The restaurant had bounced back, having had repairs done, and thankfully, none of my crew had been injured or killed in the shootout. I ached to get back to work. It was the one thing I truly wanted because nothing at all was normal anymore. This marriage had stolen away everything that was stable in my life and I was flailing. Where did I belong?
The position of Lorenzo Montorini’s housewife was not going to do it. I needed more to live for than pleasing him and cleaning his house. I resolved to go back. Next week. No, that was too far away. Tomorrow. I’d be back in the kitchen tomorrow. If he didn’t like it, he could kiss my ass.
Chapter Four
Lorenzo
She had ended up sleeping in a different room. It was one thing to be mad…but come on. Not only was my wife frigid, she also couldn’t take a joke? She must have been doing it to punish me. It was a miracle and a crying shame that I slept in a bed with a gorgeous brunette who was legally obligated to have sex with me and we had only gotten physical twice since the wedding.
Two times.
Both unforgettable. Both fucking incredible, but still only two.
Why wasn’t she attracted to me?
I shook my head. No, she had to be attracted to me. She was. I saw the way she would look at me sometimes, the way her body would press into mine when I kissed her. On our wedding night, we had been riding the wave of the ceremony. She looked breathtaking in that dress. That very expensive dress my family paid for. The least she could have done was let me take it off of her. It had been easy that time.
We had both wanted it, and after I had kissed her at the ceremony earlier, I couldn’t wait to get another taste. It was in the hotel before we left the next day for the honeymoon, and both of us had been drinking at the reception. For the sham of a wedding that it was, our parents really outdid themselves trying to make it look real. That fucking corset back had taken ages to get off, but her body inside the dress when I finally peeled her out of it was so, so worth the effort.
She was not a virgin, at least, at age twenty-seven she shouldn’t have been. If she had been, she certainly wasn’t one now. I had nearly torn the lacy, delicate bridal lingerie to shreds, trying to get at her. Her soft, fragrant skin and her championship figure… I had no problem whatsoever taking her down.
The second time was our first night back in the city after the honeymoon. I had gotten home before her, and she wasn’t picking up when I called her. Irritated, and yeah, maybe a little worried, I sat up waiting for her. She got back to the house just after midnight. She was smiling and happy when she walked through the door. I was fucking livid. She was my wife. She was an Montorini. That meant there were places she couldn’t afford to go strolling through any more like it was no big deal. That meant that there were more than a few people who wanted to get to me and were not above using her to do it.
She claimed she had been at her friend’s house, Marina…or Maria…or something like that, and they had just been catching up since the wedding. I had no reason not to believe her, but I was still mad that she hadn’t told me anything or called me to tell me that she would be late. When I told her she couldn’t do tha
t anymore since she was married she had told me playfully to stop being such a grouch. She had put her arms around my neck and purred sweetly that she was sorry she made her husband so upset. It was kind of cute, I won’t deny it.
I didn’t fuck around when she would get like that. We weren’t on bad terms; we just weren’t the warmest of couples if you know what I mean. She was likely still upset about the arrangement, and I was just trying to make her into the wife I wanted her to be for me, which she was strongly pushing against. When she got like that, flirty and sweet, I relished it. I got in as many touches and kisses as I could because it would only be a matter of time before she was mad at me again.
She was clearly drunk, and I had lost count of the whiskeys I had had since I had been waiting for her. She ran her hands up and down my chest, and I had groped handfuls of her perfect ass. Call it getting carried away, but right then, she wasn’t mad at me, and I wasn’t going to throw the opportunity away. We had fucked, right there on the living room floor.
Going Once, Taken Twice: A Dark Romance Page 20
