When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

It wasn’t that I was embarrassed per se, but admitting I had reproductive issues, let alone anorgasmia, was vulnerable, and I didn’t want to have to explain it to anyone more than I had to. I didn’t even tell Mama because I hadn’t told her I was temporarily living with Dante.

So, that morning I fasted and dressed to catch a cab to Monica’s private clinic. A flock of anxious and excited birds flapped in my belly at the thought that I could be fixed in twenty-four hours.

I was almost out the door when Dante called out for me from the kitchen.

Everything in me wanted to avoid him and the embarrassment of being called out for my voyeurism the night before, but I knew we had to interact eventually, seeing as how I was his lawyer and his enforced roommate.

So, I sucked in a deep breath, told myself to stop acting like a shame-faced schoolgirl, and went into the living room.

“A late start for you today,” he noted from the island where he sat on a stool drinking espresso and reading Il Corriere, a popular Italian newspaper.

It amazed me that he could sit there looking so cool and unaffected when I’d seen him at his most vulnerable last night, naked and splashed like a Pollock painting with his own cum. But then, wasn’t that part of his appeal? Dante felt no shame, he did not hide, and he did not suffer fools. If I wanted to be embarrassed, I could, but that wouldn’t affect his perception of what he undoubtedly felt was a natural activity.

That I could admire him somehow, respect him even more than I had before the incident, was as outrageous as it was somehow right.

From the beginning, Dante had caught sight of my red hair and turned to me like a bull, set on destroying whatever barricades lay between us in his quest to get to me. It still chilled me to wonder what he might want to do when and if he finally succeeded, but that chill was only a cool breeze compared to the firestorm of lust that swept through me lately whenever we were in the same space.

I hesitated, smoothing my hand nervously down my cashmere turtleneck. “I have that appointment I told you about.”

His brow knotted, and I hated how handsome he was, how much I’d missed looking at his broad, beautiful face while I’d been avoiding him the last week. He was wearing a black turtleneck too, his thickly woven and snug over all those rippling muscles, heightening the fathomless black of his eyes and hair so that he looked nothing short of sinfully sinister sitting there.

I was thrown immediately back to watching him naked and aroused in his office. Those muscles bared to my eyes as they tensed and jumped in time with the sensations he pulled from his cock.

A shiver rippled through me.

Dante saw it and seemed to think about commenting on it before his frown descended again. Instead, he shocked me by offering, “Let me drive you.”

“No,” I almost snapped, moving back toward the entry room. That was the last thing I needed, this incredibly virile man knowing I couldn’t even come like a normal woman. “No, I’ll grab a cab. There’s no need to go out of your way.”

“It’s surgery, no? Shouldn’t someone pick you up when you’re through?”

“I asked a friend to bring me back,” I explained.

“He knows you’re staying here?”

“I trust him.” And I did. Beau would never do anything to harm me, and I could count the people I trusted on one hand, so that was saying something.

“You need me, you call me, si?” Dante demanded, still scowling. “I don’t like this. You should tell me what it is you are having done so I can be prepared to care for you.”

A hard bark of laughter erupted from me, my mortification from last night obliterated by the dark edge of my humor and prideful solitude. “I don’t need looking after, and I can hardly picture you as a nursemaid. Don’t worry about me, Dante. I’ll be fine. I always am. Now, I have to rush, but have a nice day.”

I glided out of the room before he could protest, catching his muffled, “Only she would wear heels to surgery,” then a shouted, “In boca al lupa!” before I got in the elevator.

Good luck. Literally translated as “into the wolf’s mouth.”

Exactly where I currently felt myself, clasped between Dante’s unshakeable teeth, unable and gradually more and more unwilling to get free.

It took me a moment to decide if I was grateful or irritated that he hadn’t pushed me about watching him masturbate, but I eventually settled on grateful. I had more important things to focus on, even if my mind slipped back to those scandalous images like a hard grip on wet soap. As the cab crawled through morning traffic toward my destination, my nerves began to corrode any other thought in my head.