Delucca's Marriage Contract

Gianni appeared outside the jeweller’s shop looking left and right. Clearly he couldn’t see her in the shadows across the street. As she watched he frowned impatiently and something in her eased slightly to see that familiar impatience.

She wasn’t in love with him. She wanted him. So he’d bought her a ring? It wasn’t as if he’d pretended it was for any other reason than because she wouldn’t wear the other one.

She stepped out of her hiding place and Gianni’s gaze settled on her immediately. He relaxed visibly and suddenly Keelin didn’t feel so sanguine. He closed the distance between them and captured her close. More heat exploded, so much that she thought she might faint from it.

‘What now?’ she asked as airily as she could, as if she hadn’t just had a mild panic attack at the thought that she might be falling in love with this man.

Gianni’s gaze had dropped to her mouth. He bent his head and his tongue darted out to lick some stray drops of water. Keelin shuddered, arousal spiking in her blood.

He pulled back and saw it, and it was mirrored in his eyes. He growled softly, ‘There’s only one place I want to be right now, and it’s not in a public street.’

* * *

Much later that night Keelin lay draped across Gianni’s chest and his hand was moving idly up and down her bare back. The sweat was still cooling on their spent bodies.

Keelin was feeling a sense of bliss that was dangerous because the cause of it was the mass of hard hewn muscle under her cheek. She knew he was still awake too, because she could feel a relaxed tension in his body.

She’d been dying to ask him a question and now felt that with the darkness cloaking them that maybe she could.

She lifted her head a little. ‘Gianni?’

A half-grunting sound of acknowledgement came. ‘Hmm?’

Keelin half whispered, half spoke. ‘Why didn’t you end up in the Mafia like your father? How did you avoid it?’

The sleepy tension left his body, every muscle locked hard now. Keelin immediately said, ‘It’s okay, I shouldn’t have asked.’

For a long time Gianni said nothing and she thought she’d seriously overstepped the mark, but just when she was thinking he wouldn’t answer, his chest rumbled and he said, ‘I never got involved because I saw what it did to my mother, who lived in constant fear, and my grandfather. He stood up to my father’s henchmen once and they beat him for it. My father did nothing.’

Keelin lifted her head again. ‘Gianni...’

‘I didn’t see it as remotely glamorous or exciting. But the fact is that when I think about it now, my father never let me come near any of his activities. Not that I wanted to, but it was almost as if he deliberately kept me with my grandfather more than him, and after Nonno died, he seemed to go out of his way to antagonise me, make me despise him.’

Keelin said quietly, ‘Maybe he did it on purpose to force you not to follow in his footsteps. Maybe he was trapped somehow.’

Gianni didn’t answer. Keelin’s heart tugged at the thought of a teenage Gianni, so proud and righteous, protecting his mother, vowing to be nothing like his father.

He spoke again. ‘Sometimes I’m afraid that I have his violence inside me and some day it’ll come out and I won’t be able to control it, in spite of trying to get as far away from it as I can.’

Now Keelin tensed, everything in her rejecting his words. She moved up so that she was chest to chest with Gianni, and said with a surprising level of fierceness, ‘You wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

She could see the cynical gleam of his smile in the dark. ‘You barely know me.’

She still felt fierce. ‘I know you enough. And you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Violence isn’t wired into your DNA. You grew up with it, that’s all, so you’re more aware of it.’

Gianni moved then, suddenly, displaying his superior strength as he flipped Keelin so that he loomed over her in the dark. She wrapped her arms around his neck, feeling an inordinate amount of emotion for this man.

‘You don’t scare me.’

* * *

Gianni shook his head, negating what Keelin said—what the hell did she know of the darkness he sometimes experienced?—but something inside him felt inexplicably lightened.

It was only just now that he’d had that realisation that his father had always, always, made sure that Gianni was nowhere near any of his endeavours. Even though it was traditional for the Mafia guys to groom their sons to follow in their footsteps.

Feeling ridiculously vulnerable for the first time in a long time, when Keelin brought her mouth up to touch his, he fell on her like a starving man, and the uncomfortable revelations faded to the back of his mind, for now. And the fact that Keelin had soothed a part of him that he’d never shared with anyone else.

* * *