When Heroes Fall (Anti-Heroes in Love 1)

I canted my chin into the air and challenged, “Don’t hold your breath.”

The hand on my hip moved up my side, his thumb dragging over the underside of my breast beneath my lace blouse as it traveled up to my throat. I swallowed hard against his palm as he cupped my neck and squeezed just firmly enough to feel my pulse kick against his skin.

“No, lottatrice,” he murmured as he angled his nose over the shell of my right ear. “I’ll hold yours when I finally fuck you. Eat it off your tongue when I kiss you as you beg me for more.”

There was a cool breeze moving over the balcony, but Dante was an inferno against me, my resistance evaporating with every second I remained caged within his heat.

“You’re everything fire, and I’m solid ice,” I protested because nothing about us made sense, and he needed to remember that.

If I couldn’t make things work with Daniel, a man seemingly perfect for me, nothing could ever amount to anything between Dante and I.

“Si,” he agreed gruffly. “That’s why I know I’m the one who will finally make you melt.”

“I’m already risking my career by just staying here.” I was throwing grenades blindly, hoping one of them hit the target.

He was wholly unperturbed, his eyes so focused on mine I could almost read what he was going to say in the black screens before he spoke. “So, make the risk worth something.”

“I’m not a gambler.”

“No, but I am, and I rarely lose.” He ran the tip of his nose down the side of my ear and feathered his lips against the sharp edge of my cheekbone. “Let me show you passion, Elena. Let me teach you how to love again.”

My heart stopped in my chest as if he’d reached through the cage of my ribs and gripped it tightly in one of those powerful hands. For one breath, I was paralyzed entirely by the fear of what he was hinting at.

Love.

There was no way I could love a man like him, a mafioso, a criminal like the kind who had played the villain in my life for so long.

It was impossible.

But when my heart started to beat again, it did so with a bone-rattling bang like an engine backfiring, and then it set to racing.

I’d promised myself I would never love again.

“The contents of my heart are confidential,” I told him archly as if to suggest that he might ever read about the private agonies of my heart was ludicrous.

In a way, it was, but not in the way I made it sound.

It was ludicrous because, for one moment, I thought if anyone could understand what was written there, it would be this man with the black eyes and shockingly kind heart.

“Not all love is romantic,” he pointed out rationally, staring into my fearful eyes. “I don’t think you’ve had enough of it to know that, but I’m offering the love of a friend and the love of my body. The love of a man who can see you are not hateful. You are not villainous. You are misunderstood. And Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m fucking undone by the beauty of you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I insisted. “You don’t know half of the bad things I’ve done.”

“And you don’t know mine,” he agreed. “But we are more than our flaws and our mistakes. Who told you that you were hard to love? Give me a chance to prove them wrong.”

“I don’t want to be loved,” I asserted, almost baring my teeth at him because I’d never felt so threatened in my entire life. Not when I’d hidden under the sink and watched mafiosos beat my father. Not when Christopher forced me to do unholy things with my body. Not when he showed up at Giselle’s art show and assaulted her, and I’d stepped in to fight him myself.

None of the boogeymen in my life held a candle to the power Dante seemed to yield over me compared to the length of time I’d known him.

One month of constant contact and I was in danger of throwing away everything I knew just for one single kiss.

“Let me love you anyway,” he suggested.

And then he was moving.

They say there is a thin line between love and hate. The moment Dante Salvatore twisted his hand in my hair and yanked me in for a savage kiss, I knew he had just pushed me over that invisible line into something infinitely more dangerous than hate.

But all I could do as thoughts swirled into one furious tornado of sensation in my head was curl my hands into his silky cotton shirt and hang on for dear life.

The kiss tasted like the smoke, but not because of my anger. It tasted like the ashes of my once solid self-control. Because I knew this wouldn’t be the last time we kissed.