When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

Before he could recover, I leaned back to grab a knife from the block on my kitchen counter and held it up between us.

I was panting hard, the blade shaking in my hand, but somehow my voice was sturdy when I said, “Touch me again, and I will cut you. Now, I’ll go with you but only to give Dante a piece of my mind. Excuse me while I grab my purse. You can get a head start of putting my door back exactly the way you found it.”

The three men all shared a quick look before Frankie tamed his feral grin enough to say, “You got five minutes.”

“I’ll take ten,” I bartered without waiting for him to answer as I dropped the knife and stalked from the room toward my bedroom.

“You don’t want Adriano’s dirty hand on your panties, you best pack a bag,” Frankie called after me.

I shuddered at the thought of those thugs going through my things, so I resolved to pack an extra pair of underwear in my purse just in case, but nothing more.

There was no way I was moving into Dante’s den of iniquity.

“Madonna Santa, that woman’s got balls,” one of the men I didn’t know hooted loudly enough for me to hear in the hallway.

“Wouldn’t want to be the boss,” the other one muttered.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Frankie laughed as the sound of their heavy footfalls sounded behind me, going back down the hall to fix my damn door. “I’m looking forward to the fireworks.”

DANTE

She rolled in like a northeasterly winter storm, the air crackling with static, the wind through the open patio doors kicking up a gust as she powered out of the elevator and stalked on the harsh clip of her heels into the living room where I sat waiting for the thunder and lightning to fall.

It was obvious she had cried at some point by the slight smudge of makeup under those glimmering gray eyes, but I couldn’t picture how she might have looked vulnerable with tears when she presented such a force standing before me now with her hands fisted on her hips and her flaming hair tangled in the breeze tunneling in from outside.

“You’ve got some nerve demanding I move in with you just because you want constant status updates,” she began, each word punctuated with fury, dripping with disdain. “Poor little capo can’t take the consequences of his actions? Then he shouldn’t commit felonies. You reap what you sow.”

I tilted my head as I crossed a foot over my opposite knee, settling deeper into my couch as I studied her. “How fitting because you have sowed this.”

Indignation turned her delicate, overtly feminine beauty into something hard and deadly. It shouldn’t have turned me on to see such rage in a woman. It never had before, but something was deliciously wild about her energy like this, a static restless hunger I felt echoed in my own blood.

She was fucking magnificent.

“I’ve worked my ass off on this case already,” she countered, pointing her finger at me as if it was a loaded weapon. “We just succeeded in getting Mason Matlock’s statement suppressed, and we have dozens of people working on finding out who the other witnesses might be and what else the prosecution might have on you. How the hell you think I deserve this treatment is beyond me.”

“Cursing, Elena,” I said, clicking my tongue as I shook my head. “I thought such coarseness was beneath you.”

I watched as her skin warmed with a blush I wanted to taste with my tongue. It was so much fun to rile her up. I sincerely thought I could sit here and argue with her for the entire night.

“I should have known blackmail wasn’t beneath you,” she hissed, storming forward so that she could loom over me from where I reclined against the cushions of my couch. She was a tall woman made taller by those sexy as fuck high heels she was always wearing, but I found the position more arousing than intimidating.

After all, I probably had a hundred pounds on her, and the idea of clutching her wrist to send her tumbling down on top of me was practically impossible to resist.

The only reason I did was because Frankie, Adriano, and Marco were in the doorway to the entryway enjoying the show, and I didn’t want to embarrass Elena further by disrespecting her personal space in front of my men.

“You do make me out to be quite the villain,” I told her, adjusting my cuff as if the entire conversation bored me just to feel the way the air around her went molten because of my provocation. “Maybe I’m just trying to be the hero, here, Elena?”

She snorted, inelegant, more real than I’d ever seen her. “By forcing me to live with you? Forgive me for sounding dramatic, but I can’t see much worse a fate than that.”