The Kiss Thief

“What do you want?” she seethed.

A loyal fiancée.

A fucking shotgun.

For this nightmare of a sham relationship to be over.

“You just broke our verbal contract, Nemesis. Not a good thing to do with a lawyer.”

She frowned but didn’t try to defend herself.

There was a guillotine inside me, and I wanted to snap her pretty head off her body.

Tonight.

I’d just wiped the tears from my eyes after telling my mother that I was starting to warm up to my husband. The revelation was bittersweet, if not completely crushing. Perhaps it was the nightly encounters in the vegetable garden, or the way he kissed me so openly in front of Ms. Sterling tonight when he picked me up.

“Is it Stockholm syndrome, Mama?”

“I think it’s just young love, Vita Mia. Love is, after all, a little mad. Otherwise, it is not love but merely infatuation.”

“Do you have to be mad to fall in love?”

“Of course, you do. Falling in love is, by definition, going crazy for someone else.”

“Are you crazy about Dad?”

“I’m afraid I am. Otherwise, I wouldn’t stay even though he is cheating on me.”

That happened, too. And it threw me off even though I should have seen it coming. It was not uncommon for the men of The Outfit to take a mistress or two.

Mom said that if it rips you apart, that means it is real.

“But shouldn’t love feel good?”

“Oh, nothing is good if it doesn’t have the power to feel bad, too. It’s all about the quantities, Francesca.”

Quantities.

The quantity of my affection toward Wolfe revealed itself when Angelo ushered me to the garden away from the throng of people. Despite my feeling completely crushed and angry at my coldhearted fiancé, I’d wanted to stay with him and brave my father together. Then Angelo sat me down and brushed a dark curl from my eyes and asked me if I was happy. I thought about it long and hard.

I wasn’t happy.

I was not unhappy, either.

I’d realized that not only did I harbor unexplainable, positive feelings for the man who’d imprisoned me, but I no longer craved Angelo’s touch the way I had before Wolfe bulldozed his way into my life. I still loved Angelo, but only as the kid who protected me from his brothers and shared smiles with me from across the dining table. Instead of his warm, familiar, soft hands, I longed for my fiancé’s strong, callous, hard palms. The realization struck me like lightning, and I told Angelo that although I felt bad about him and Emily—it was over between us.

For good.

Once I saw the look on his face, I took his hand and brought it to my chest, begging for his forgiveness. And when he stood up and walked away, all I wanted to do was find my mother and tell her. I had to wait until Angelo was nowhere near me so it wouldn’t look like we were going to the same place.

Angelo had disappeared inside the house shortly after. My cousin Andrea said between sipping mimosas that she saw him slipping into a guestroom upstairs with the blonde reporter Wolfe used to date.

“The one with the pretty hair? Tall? Lanky? Tan?”

I didn’t need a reminder to the fact that Kristen was gorgeous.

“Right. Thanks.”

Instead of feeling anger at his behavior, all I felt was strange hostility. Even that wasn’t toward Angelo—it was toward my own fiancé, who had humiliated me in front of my parents when my father threw a jab at him.

Now we were in the car, staring outside our windows as we always did, watching Chicago whooshing by in its majestic, grayer-than-Wolfe’s-eyes glory. I fiddled with the edges of my white dress, unsure what to say or do. Again, Wolfe arrived at the silly conclusion that I’d slept with Angelo. And again, I felt that defending myself was encouraging a pattern where I always had to make excuses for talking to a friend.

Did he really think so little of me? We had a verbal contract, and since striking it, time had passed. Time in which I kissed him and caressed him and opened my thighs for him to stroke me there through my clothes. I stroked him, too. Did that mean nothing to him? Did he really think I could do that with any man at any time?

“I will not marry a whore,” Wolfe said with dry resolute, still staring out the window. In the rearview mirror, I could see Smithy, his driver, cringing behind the wheel and shaking his head. I closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry.

“Let me go, then.”

“Am I hearing an admission, Miss Rossi?”

“I will not defend myself in front of a man who does not deserve my pleas,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“Is he worth my wrath?”

“You don’t scare me, Senator Keaton,” I lied, ignoring the tears clogging my throat. I liked him. I did. I liked that he defended me in front of my father, and that he offered me the freedom to study and work and leave the house unattended. I liked that he was at war with my family but didn’t put me in the middle of it.