When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

“Don’t get off the phone,” I hastened to say, too shaken to be embarrassed by my need. The shaking in my hands had traveled up my arms into my shoulders and chest. I vibrated like a second engine in the driver’s seat. “Stay with me.”

There was a silence that felt like a hand cupping my cheek, holding me still for one long, deep breath.

“Bene, Elena, io sono con te. I am with you.”

I followed Adriano home on autopilot, my brain still under fire in the aftermath of the chase.

Logically, distantly, I recognized I was still in shock. There was a numb cold in my limbs in the wake of the fiery adrenaline, a kind of muffled quiet in my head as I slowly recognized that I was safe and alive.

It wasn’t the first time a criminal lawyer had been caught in the crosshairs of their client’s ordeals, but it was my first, and it had a profound effect on me.

Only, not the way I would have imagined.

As I clued into my body methodically, atom by atom, I realized that what I felt was not horror and weakness but exhilaration and victorious rage.

Those stronzi had come at me, trying to intimidate me perhaps or kidnap me at worse, using me as a pawn against Dante or to send a message to the Camorra in general.

But they hadn’t succeeded.

For the first time in my entire life, I felt as if I had come out on the other side of the conflict with the mafia as the winner. I felt as if the entire organization could come at me the way they had come at my family in Naples, and I could take them head-on in that fight. I could show them what it meant to battle a Lombardi, what it meant to face a woman at the end of her rope.

What had happened was more than just a car chase.

It was a pivotal point in my life.

One where I could make the conscious decision to take ownership of my flaws––the anger, the violence, the ruthlessness–– of my circumstances––Dante, the Camorra, this game of corruption–– or I could succumb to them, return to what I had always been before, unable to stand the heat of this new existence compared to my prior deep freeze.

I could give up the idea of being a hero and rise up the villain beside a man I was beginning to understand was so much more than that.

He was the kind of man who called his seven-year-old niece the love of his life and watched episodes of some cheesy vampire show to give a lonely woman some comradery. He was the kind of man to rip someone apart with his bare hands for wronging him or his, but he was also the kind of man to take the fall for a woman’s crime because she was the sister of his heart.

He was everything I’d feared and everything I’d never consciously known I longed for.

And all that, six-foot-five inches, two hundred thirty pounds of British-Italian man, could be mine.

All I had to do was be brave enough to reach out and take it.

Coraggio.

By the time I pulled onto Dante’s street in Manhattan, my breath was coming fast for an entirely different reason than it had been before. Almost blindly, I followed Adriano into Dante’s private parking garage beneath the building.

Dante was there standing on the asphalt by the elevator dressed in his requisite black, his hair noticeably disheveled, his entire body tensed like a beautifully carved sculpture in the underground shadows.

As soon as I drove down the ramp into the space, he was powering across the concrete toward me.

As soon as I parked, I climbed from the car, not even bothering to close the butterfly door after me.

My feet hit the ground, and I was off like a shot, tearing across the space between us in my towering heels, each step as sure as if I was flat-footed.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t even slow down as I neared him.

I just hurtled myself into the marbled arms that opened instantly to catch me and haul me tight into his solid body. Instinctively, my legs locked around his waist, my arms around his neck. I burrowed my face in the junction of his strong neck and shoulder, my lips pressed to his pulse beneath his skin. Vaguely, I was aware of him squeezing me tight, of his orders to Adriano and whoever else was with us in the garage to leave.

Only vaguely, because my lips on his skin were not enough. So I used my tongue to lap at his jugular, and when that didn’t satisfy the yawning abyss of desire cracking through my core like a crater, I sank my teeth into the muscle and sucked hard at the column. The bright and warm salt taste of him scoured through me, going straight to my head, fogging it with the heady idea that this skin was mine to touch and taste.