“Good, you’re awake,” Luca said in a voice that was gruff with sleep.
Realization hit me. Luca. My husband. I was a married woman, but Luca had kept his promise. He hadn’t consummated the marriage. I opened my eyes. Luca’s hand gripped my hip and he turned me on my back. He was propped up on one elbow as his eyes took in my face. I wished I knew what he was thinking. It was strange to be in bed with a man. I could feel Luca’s heat, even though our bodies weren’t touching. In the sunlight the scars on his skin were somehow less prominent than last night, but his muscles were just as impressive. I wondered how they’d feel to the touch.
He reached up and took a strand of my hair between two fingers. I held my breath, but he released it after a moment, his face becoming calculating. “It won’t be long until my step-mother, my aunts and the other married women of my family knock at our door to gather up the sheets and carry them into the dining room where undoubtedly everyone else is already waiting for the fucking spectacle to begin.”
A blush spread over my cheeks and something in Luca’s eyes changed, some of the coldness replaced by another emotion. My eyes found the small cut on Luca’s arm. It hadn’t been deep and was already scabbing.
Luca nodded. “My blood will give them what they want. It’ll be the foundation of our story, but we’ll be expected to fill in the details. I know I’m a convincing liar. But will you be able to lie in everyone’s face, even your mother’s, when you tell them about our wedding night? Nobody can know what happened. It would make me look weak.” His lips tightened with regret. Regret of having spared me and gotten himself in the position of depending on my lying skills.
“Weak because you didn’t want to rape your wife?” I whispered.
Luca’s fingers on my hip tightened. I hadn’t even realized they were still there. Make him want to be good to you, Bibiana’s words flitted through my mind. Luca was a monster, there was no doubt about it. He couldn’t be anything else in order to survive as a leader in our world, but maybe I could make him keep the monster in chains when he was with me. It was more than I’d hoped for when he’d led me toward the bedroom last night.
Luca smiled coldly. “Weak for not taking what was mine for the taking. The tradition of bloody sheets in the Sicilian mafia is as much a proof of the bride’s purity as of the husband’s relentlessness. So what do you think will it say about me that I had you lying half naked in my bed, vulnerable and mine, and yet here you are untouched as you were before our wedding?”
“Nobody will know. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Why should I trust you? I don’t make a habit of trusting people, especially people who hate me.”
I rested my palm against the cut on his arm, feeling his muscles flex beneath my touch. Make him be good to you, make him love you. “I don’t hate you.” He narrowed his eyes, but it was mostly the truth. I would have hated him if he had forced himself on me. I certainly hated what the marriage to him meant for me, but I didn’t know him well enough for real hate. Maybe it would come with time. “And you can trust me because I am your wife. I didn’t choose this marriage but I can at least choose to make the best out of our bond. I have nothing to gain from betraying your trust, but everything to gain by showing you that I’m loyal.”
There was a flicker of something, maybe respect in his expression. “The men waiting in that living room are predators. They prey on the weak and they’ve been waiting for more than a decade for a sign of weakness from me. The moment they see one, they’ll pounce.”
“But your father—”
“If my father thinks I’m too weak to control the Familia, he’ll gladly let them tear me apart.”
What kind of life was it to have to be strong all the time even around your closest family? At least, I had my sisters and my brother, and even to some extent my mother and people like Valentina. Women were forgiven weakness in our world.
Luca’s eyes were hard. Maybe this would be the moment he decided it really wasn’t worth the risk and take me, but when his gaze finally settled back on my face the darkness was at bay.
“What about Matteo?”
“I trust Matteo. But Matteo is hot-headed. He’d get himself killed trying to defend me.”
It was strange talking to Luca, to my husband like this, almost like we knew each other. “Nobody will doubt me,” I said. “I’ll give them what they want to see.”
Luca sat up and my eyes were drawn to the tattoo, then took in the muscles of his chest and stomach. My cheeks heated when I met Luca’s gaze.
“You should be wearing more than this bad excuse for a nightgown when the harpies arrive. I don’t want them to see your body, especially your hips and upper thighs. It’s better when they wonder if I left marks on you,” he said. Then he smirked. “But we can’t hide your face from them.”
He bent over me and his hand came toward my face. I squeezed my eyes shut, flinching.
“This is the second time you thought I was going to hit you,” he said in a low voice.
My eyes flew open. “I thought you said…” I trailed off.
“What? That everyone expects you to have bruises on your face after a night with me? I don’t hit women.”
I remembered when he’d stopped my father from slapping me. He’d never raised his hand against me. I knew many men in the Chicago Outfit had a strange code of rules they followed. You couldn’t stab a man in the back, but you could cut his throat that way for example. I wasn’t sure what made one better than the other. Luca seemed to have his own rules as well. Crushing someone’s throat with your bare hands was acceptable, hitting your wife was not.
“How am I supposed to believe you can convince everyone we’ve consummated our marriage when you keep flinching away from my touch?”
“Believe me, the flinching will make everyone believe the lie even more because I definitely wouldn’t have stopped flinching away from your touch if you’d taken what’s yours. The more I flinch the more they will take you for the monster you want them to think you are.”
Luca chuckled. “I think you might know more about playing the game of power than I expected.”
I shrugged. “My father is Consigliere.”
He tilted his head in acknowledgement, then he brought his hand up and cupped my face. “What I meant earlier was that your face doesn’t look like you’ve been kissed.”