When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I was wearing a five-hundred-dollar white silk blouse and Chanel wide-legged pants that I usually meticulously kept clean, even going so far as to sit on napkins if I had to take a seat in public. I could feel Dante’s eyes on me as I nodded.

“Sure, Rora.”

She rewarded me with a smile and then launched into a monologue about her day at school and her best friend, Maria Antonia.

While she babbled happily, Dante appeared from the pantry with an apron and approached me. Instead of handing it over, he stood behind me, close enough I could feel his heat, and reached around my body to tie the fabric around my waist. Once secured, he lifted my hair with one hand to tie the other strings beneath it.

But he didn’t.

Instead, his hot breath fanned over the back of my neck, followed closely by the warm press of his nose skimming along the side of my throat.

“Mmm,” he hummed, the vibration tickling thin skin. “You smell intossicante.”

A shudder wrenched between my shoulders, impossible to hide from the predator at my back. When I spoke, I made sure my voice wasn’t as weak as my knees felt. “It’s just Chanel number 5.”

“The body’s natural chemistry reacts with a scent,” he murmured as he slowly slid the apron strings against my sensitized flesh, the rough fabric somehow deliciously sensual. “No one scent ever smells the same on different people. And this? It suits you. Elegant and sultry like a midnight assignation in a garden.”

“Can I smell?” Rora asked, interrupting the electric tension between Dante and me.

Silently, because my voice was somewhere at my toes, I offered her my wrist. She pressed her entire nose to it and sniffed deeply before smiling at me. Her happy, easy energy was contagious.

“Smells like warm flowers,” she decided. “Maybe I should wear some too?”

Dante chuckled, moving out from behind me having secured the apron. He tweaked her nose. “Little girls do not need to wear perfume.”

She frowned at him. “What do you know about it?”

I laughed.

God, but I laughed. It burst out of me indecorously, seizing my belly and warming my chest. When I recovered, eyes wet with mirth, Rora had gone back to shaping pasta in her little fingers, but Dante was watching me with something written in black ink in those long-lashed eyes.

“Bellissima,” he mouthed.

A blush worked itself under my skin, but I ducked my head to focus on the pasta, letting a curtain of dark curls fall between my cheek and his gaze. It was disconcerting how much interest Dante seemed to have in me. I wasn’t used to being…watched.

I could be an emotional terrorist, my broken pieces weaponized like shards of broken glass. I was used to being the bitch, the warrior, something strong and impenetrable, more a worthy adversary than a worthy friend.

But Dante looked at me as if I was some priceless, mysterious work of art, and he wanted to know the story behind my almost smile.

I wanted to be furious with him for forcing me into a situation where I could not only be called off the case that could make my career but one where I could lose that career entirely. And in a way, I still was. The wariness and the bitter tang of anger lingered on the back of my tongue. But emotions had a funny way of boiling together in the same cauldron of the gut, and right then, in his messy kitchen with an adorable little girl who adored him, it was impossible not to feel something completely contrary to rage.

“Ciao raggazzi,” a woman called from the entryway, drawing my notice.

A moment later, the beautiful and blond Italian woman I now knew to be Bambi walked into the living room in a form-fitting dress. Rora scrambled from the table, jumping awkwardly to the floor, falling to one knee, then taking off at a run to hug the woman.

Bambi smiled as she accepted the girl into her arms even though they were laden with grocery bags. “Bambina.”

The word made me grit my teeth. It was the nickname Sebastian and Cosima had called Giselle since they were young even though she was older than them both. It was perfectly emblematic of their relationship with her too. They coddled her, protected her, lavished her with affection and praise.

Dante’s hand was suddenly lightly pressed to the middle of my shoulder blades. He was looking at Bambi, but something about his touch told me he’d sensed my tension and was trying to offer relief.

Like an idiot, I was moved by the gesture.

“Bambi, this is Elena Lombardi,” he introduced as they came into the kitchen. I noticed he didn’t mention I was his lawyer, but I figured she already knew.

I offered a small smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Really, I couldn’t get past the question of their relationship. Was she his girlfriend?