He offered me a tee of his to sleep in, and he pulled on a pair of boxer briefs while I swapped my work pants for his shirt. His eyes never left my body the entire time I changed, and chills scattered across my skin at the way he looked at me.
Once in bed, he cradled me beneath his comforter, and little did he know he was still giving me the only non-naughty number on my list and the one that meant so much to me: falling asleep in his arms.
NINE
Enzo
With my sweatpants on, I went into the kitchen and chased down two Advil with black coffee, hating the harsh pain in my temples from drinking way more than normal last night. For once in my life, I’d wanted to lose control. And I nearly had with Maria.
Spotting my phone on the counter where I’d left it, I hesitantly flipped it over. The screen lit up with far too many texts I wasn’t prepared to face.
I thumbed through the notifications, then shut off the screen, deciding I wanted to see the woman of my dreams asleep in my bed one more time before my world flipped upside down.
Pocketing my phone, I went back into my bedroom armed with my coffee and mixed emotions. How was I going to leave her later?
I leaned into the interior doorframe, studying her. Part of her face was covered by her long, thick hair. She must’ve been hot, because she’d shoved the covers down, and my white tee was bunched at her hips, showing her long, tan legs and a hint of her panties.
She shifted to her side, propping her hands beneath her face, but she remained peacefully asleep, and my heart ached at the sight of her in my bed, where I wanted her to spend every night for the rest of our lives.
It was almost too painful to see her there, to know what I could have if only I . . .
I stepped back and quietly drew the door shut and settled into an armchair by the fireplace to call Constantine.
“I wasn’t drunk,” was the first thing I said once he picked up. “You didn’t need to worry.” But sleeping with Maria in my arms had been what I’d needed, though I hadn’t realized it until she showed up with all that determination in her eyes, prepared to fight my battles alongside me. My fireball.
“You had me worried,” Constantine grumbled. “You’re not one to throw back the whiskey like that.”
I set the coffee mug aside, but my gaze lingered on the words CHEF’S KISS on it with a pair of red lips by the writing. It’d been one of my gifts from Maria for my birthday. “And you?” I cleared my throat. “What’d you do after I told you what I learned and sent you the cleaner’s files?”
Alessandro probably had sex all night to try and handle his tension like I’d nearly done.
But Constantine? My brother was a question mark at times, and I didn’t always understand how he could maintain his cool without exploding like I did.
“I worked,” he answered in a steady tone.
“Oh, great. Mergers and acquisitions are more important than our—”
“I worked on Bianca’s case,” he fired back at my shitty sarcasm. “I went through all our old files from the investigation. I spent all night on it.”
His words had my shoulders falling. My anger from last night was circling back without Maria in my presence to calm me down. “And?”
“And it doesn’t make sense. She had no enemies we were aware of, and she would’ve told you if something was wrong. You two were close.” He paused for a moment. “She didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. Not even a lover. Even if she kept them hidden from us, there would have been photos when we packed up her place. Or the guy would’ve come to the funeral, right?” He hissed a deep, frustrated breath over the line. “And as for work, she’d written a few stories and articles for a magazine, but she wasn’t an Erin Brockovich who might wind up with a target on her head. And no one would be stupid enough to come after one of us, knowing our family name.”
“Not everyone in the US knows not to mess with us,” I reminded him. “But we clearly missed something back then.”
“Unless . . . well, her murder wasn’t premeditated, and it was still a crime of passion as we’d originally believed. But instead, it was committed by someone else, and he had deep enough pockets or enough power to acquire a cleaner to assist him in the middle of the night to cover up a crime.”
“What if she went somewhere after that club? Somewhere before she went home?”
“She punched in her building’s security code at around midnight, though. Shortly after we had footage of her leaving that nightclub,” he reminded me. “Unless the cleaner tampered with that, too.”