Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream 1)

Bryant would try to use the situation to wrestle control of Morelli Holdings back from Lucian, playing Bianca like a trump card against the Constantines and his own family.

Too fucking bad for them.

This was my triumph, not theirs.

I’d show them after years of their derision, their lack of respect, that I deserved the success and power of the Morelli name just as much as they did.

Maybe even more.

“Work?” Henrik asked.

“A pet project. One that requires my avid attention,” I corrected.

There was practically a goddamn skip in my step as I moved out the door onto the floor of the gambling den I operated in midtown for all the wealthy suckers who loved to throw their money at my feet.

After years of searching, employing investigators across the country, planting seeds in the ears of the right people, my patience was finally paying dividends.

The fall of the Constantine family had dropped into my lap in the guise of a pretty, innocent blonde who had no idea the deplorable ways I would use her to bring down my enemies.

Chapter Five

Bianca

I’d never been to a funeral before. I hadn’t been invited to my father’s for obvious reasons…namely, that my mother was his mistress. The Belcante family consisted of Aida, Brandon, myself, and an uncle we hadn’t seen since Brando was first born. Our little community couldn’t afford to lose a member. Yet that cold Tuesday afternoon, we were burying our mother.

Brandon sniffed beside me, his sweaty hand clamped around one of my own as we stood beside the yawning wound in the earth that would be Aida’s final resting place.

It hurt to know she would have hated to be buried here, in this random cemetery on the outskirts of some Texas town and not back in Upstate New York where she was born and raised, where she met Dad and gave birth to me. There had been a quaint little cemetery behind a white, peaked-roof church in her hometown where Dad and Aida had planned to be buried together one day. It was a pipe dream. Of course, Dad was buried in Bishop’s Landing beneath a massive marble obelisk where generations of his family were buried with him. But Aida would have liked to be buried in that quaint cemetery in the birthplace of their love story even if Dad couldn’t be beside her. She was the kind of romantic who would have wanted to be laid to rest amid her happiest memories.

Instead, she was being put in the ground of this godforsaken town we had moved to eight years ago out of necessity.

Still, there was a larger group of mourners around the wounded earth and gleaming casket than I would have assumed. A few past lovers, all with sad eyes and damp faces because Aida was the kind of woman you continued to love even if you realized she was wrong for you. Our neighbors, the Dabrowski family with their four little kids who lived across the street, old Mrs. Rhodes with her milky cataracts, the handsome biker, Brick, who Aida had tried to seduce for years without success. My friends, Zoey and Hitchcock, from school were both there with their parents along with an assortment of Brando’s friends and their families. A few people Aida had worked with at the beauty counter at the mall and some of my friends from the diner.

And one man I didn’t recognize.

He stood outside the ring of mourners in a black trench coat with a red scarf tucked under his neck. At first, I thought he was Tiernan, but he was shorter and broader, his hands free of tattoos. I thought I felt his eyes on me, but whenever I looked over, he was focused somberly on something else.

Tiernan was absent.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really, because he’d proven himself to be a jerk, but I was embarrassingly hurt by his lack of attendance.

Did he really not care about Aida even though he’d asked her to move to New York with him?

Did he really have no sympathy for her children left behind in a turbulent wake of grief?

When I’d called him from the floor of Aida’s room, he had asked me to tell him what went wrong and listened silently while I stuttered over the words. When I was done, he said in so many words that he would take care of it for an undisclosed price and then hung up the phone, leaving me bewildered, angry, and achingly alone.

But things had happened.

The police had come and the EMTs.

Of course, Brando woke up and I had to explain what had happened.

He surprised me, because he didn’t cry. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, his voice scratchy when he spoke as if he were recovering from a long sob fest, but he didn’t shed a single tear. Instead, he held fast to my hand, his Iron Man clutched in the other, and followed me around the house as I talked with the officers and the paramedics.