He looked into his glass as he swirled the contents. “So that’s why you wanted us to get together, Hades. You think your lovely wife can do some damage control.” He set down his glass. “I’ll make a deal with you.” He leaned forward and looked at his brother. “Let me borrow her for the night and—”
“If you like your two front teeth where they are, shut your mouth.” Hades didn’t raise his voice because we were in public, but his message echoed off the walls anyway. “You don’t have to respect me. But respect my wife.”
Ash actually backed off, wiping that smile from his lips. “That’s fair.” He turned back to me. “I apologize…Mrs. Lombardi.”
I drank my wine.
We returned to painful silence, and Ash stared at me again.
This was a terrible match, and I was a horrible referee.
“Back to what you were saying.” Ash pulled his glass toward him. “Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m the manager of the Tuscan Rose in Florence. My father founded our line of hotels twenty years ago, and now they belong to me and Hades. It’s my life’s work, and I’m proud of everything we do.”
“Ambitious,” he said appreciatively. “That’s sexy in a woman.”
I ignored his comment. “Hades and I live with my mother at his estate in the city. We don’t really have a lot of hobbies right now because we’re still newlyweds, but I enjoy golfing… Maybe we’ll start in a few years.”
“You golf?” Ash asked, his eyebrow raised. He grabbed his scotch and took a drink, his eyes staying on me. His throat shifted as he swallowed. The glass hit the table again with a quiet thud once he was finished.
“Why is that so surprising?” I kept my fingers around the stem of my wineglass. Hades’s fingers still rested on my thigh, slightly touching me, slightly possessive. Copping an attitude wouldn’t fix the situation with Ash, but I couldn’t control my innate response to his sexist assumptions.
The corner of his mouth rose into a smile, practically a sneer.
“I don’t know too many women who golf, let alone pretty women. What’s your best score?”
“Whatever it is, it’s lower than yours.”
I could see Hades’s slight smile on his lips, amused by the defiance I showed his brother, the most formidable man in the room other than himself. My husband appreciated my fire, my sass. And that made me appreciate him as a man.
Ash was visibly amused by me, his smile still prevalent on his handsome face. He glanced around the restaurant as if there was someone else to see before turning back to me. A quiet chuckle came from his throat, a raspy sound that mirrored his brother’s chuckle. They were so identical that if I couldn’t see Ash’s face, I would’ve assumed that laugh belonged to my own husband. “Wow, you’ve got a mouth on you, don’t you?”
“Why do you think Hades married me?” I sipped my wine and stared at him over the rim of my glass.
Ash turned his gaze to his brother across the table, his fingers lazily touching the rim of his glass. For most of the night, he’d been focused on me, but now he directed his attention to Hades, the reason he was there in the first place. His eyes showed an intimacy that wasn’t there before, but they also showed his obvious distaste for his brother. A moment passed, and there seemed to be a sense of camaraderie between them. Maybe I just imagined it, or maybe it happened so quickly I wasn’t sure if it happened at all. “I’m not sure why he married you. I didn’t know you existed until a few days ago.”
Hades met Ash’s look, his fingers digging a little deeper into my thigh. The brothers faced off in a silent battle.
Ash turned his attention back to me. “But based on your looks, I can figure it out.”
The waitress returned to the table, carrying the entrees we’d ordered for the evening. After she set them down, her attention went back to Ash, probably because he was available, unlike Hades. “Looks like you need a refill.”
Ash raised his glass. “You know how to take care of a man.”
The waitress grabbed the glass, gave a slight smile, and walked away.
When Ash turned his attention back to us, the quiet discomfort returned.
Hades had brought me to this dinner for a reason, and it wasn’t to get chummy with his older brother. It was to build a relationship, to repair the damage. Their father’s death had caused an irreparable rift between the two, making the two brothers strangers.
How was I supposed to fix that?
Maybe I couldn’t. But maybe I could bring them closer together. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself? I don’t know anything about you.”
Ash rubbed the back of his head, his fingers gliding through his short hair. “Glad to know that my brother talks about me,” he said sarcastically. “When did he tell you I existed in the first place?”