“Let me out of here, Ettore. Let me out right now.”
“What do you mean, let you out?” He gaped at her as if she had lost her mind. “Sweetheart, we’re going a hundred and twenty miles an hour.”
“I have to go back. Please, Ettore!”
Overcome with worry, she fumbled with her seatbelt, unfastening it and tearing it away from her body. She had to get out of the car and go back to beg Massioni’s forgiveness.
If he was still alive.
Dear God, don’t let him be dead.
Don’t let her family be killed because of her failure to protect them.
A sob raked her throat. “Goddammit, I said stop this fucking car!”
He slowed the growling sports car and eased off the empty highway to the shoulder. As soon as the vehicle stopped, she leaped out. She paused only long enough to toss her high heels into the grass, then started running the opposite way on the rough gravel that edged the pavement.
Ettore’s curse exploded behind her. “What the hell are you doing?”
He caught up to her instantly, gifted with Breed genetics that made him faster than any other creature on the planet. He blocked her path, his big male body filling her vision and all of her senses. When she tried to dodge him, his hands came down firmly on her shoulders, holding her still.
“Talk to me, Arabella. Tell me what this is about.”
“My family.” She couldn’t contain the shiver that rocked her when she thought about what they might be enduring because of her, possibly at this very moment. “Massioni promised me that if anything ever happened to him, he’d have them killed.”
Ettore’s scowl deepened. “Your father might have something to say about that. Your brother, Consalvo, too.”
She gazed up at him, shaking her head in misery. “My father’s dead. So is Sal. I guess you didn’t know. How would you, right? You left and never looked back.”
He flinched as if her words stung as much as a slap. Yet when he spoke, there was only quiet, patient concern in his deep voice. “What happened?”
“It was Sal,” she said, still wounded by her brother’s fall from grace—and the betrayal that followed. “Three years ago, my father made the mistake of turning over the vineyard to Sal. Things didn’t go very well. He was careless with the books. Worse than careless. None of us realized how deeply in debt the business was—or why—until Sal’s mate, Chiara, confided in me about his gambling. She was worried for him, and for the future of their infant son. But it was already too late. Sal got mixed up with bad people, the worst of them being Vito Massioni.”
she was even lovelier than he recalled. No longer the coltish Breedmate girl who’d been his best friend’s sister. No longer the tomboy teenager who used to delight in racing through the cultivated fields of her family’s vineyard, but a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a refined beauty that stirred everything male in him.
Not to mention his blood.
Memories of a night ten years ago came to life in his mind in vivid, erotic detail. Her warm, naked skin against his. Her sweet, breathless cries as he tasted every virgin inch of her beautiful body.
Her trusting, open-hearted gaze as he made love to her for the first—and only—time.
How she must have hated him…after.
He’d despised himself enough for both of them. If he’d been in the least to blame for pushing Bella toward another man—especially one like Vito Massioni—he would never forgive himself.
And if he wanted to pretend he had forgotten her even for a moment during the past decade, seeing her beside him now was as if all that time had simply evaporated.
He didn’t know what he was going to do with her now. She sure as fuck hadn’t been part of the equation when he’d set out on tonight’s mission, but seeing her again had changed everything. Once he had spotted her inside the villa, nothing would have kept him from making sure she was safe.
Not even Bella herself could have stopped him.
So much for a simple operation going according to plan.
Savage forced his gaze away from her and put both hands back on the wheel. His eyes trained on the road, he buried the Pagani’s accelerator and headed for the highway that would take them back to Rome.