A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

32. Nate

32

NATE

I have decided countless times that I will not go seek out Vanessa tonight. Not after she and the whole Morelli family were charmed half to death by Maxim Orlov—whose name literally translates into Greatest Eagle (I googled it) which makes me even angrier somehow.

He was comically decent, handsome, and broad like a linebacker, with all these noble ambitions to make the Russian mafia a better place. What the fuck is that? If Jenna wasn’t still touring Greece on her Eat-Pray-What-the-hell-ever adventure, I would call her and she would agree that the whole thing is surreal.

He was as good, if not better, than he was in his interview, and if Vanessa didn’t think that she should have Maxim’s beautiful, broad-shouldered babies before, she does now. Or she should.

Me interviewing and delivering him to her feet like a recruiter doesn’t make the thought of them together sting any less. In fact, it pisses me off more—the fact that I have no right to be mad and yet I’m pacing around my room, which is just her guest room, fuming.

We’ve been wrapped up in this secret fantasy since the gala, her body and mine, sweet kisses, talking until one of us falls asleep, too tired to keep our eyes open. Some nights she’s out doing mafia shit with Leo and Mary when I go to sleep, but in the middle of the night, she’ll crawl into my bed with damp hair to cuddle and pretend a little longer that this is something sustainable. I live for these nights.

I don’t know how to stop. Worse, I can’t imagine wanting to stop. Nearly a month of her hands, her mouth, her moans in my ear like an incantation to her thrall. But we can’t have that anymore. I cannot have that anymore.

We shouldn’t, not when she’s soon to be engaged to the one noble mob boss in the universe.

What we’ve had is enough. It has to be enough.

I decide that I will seek her out tonight, not for sex but to tell her this, that there will be no more just tonight in our future and that the sooner she marries that man, the sooner they can figure out who’s been targeting them, the sooner I can get out of her house and her life forevermore, amen and amen.

It’s only tomorrow from now on, just tonight is canceled.

I would love to stomp across the hall to her room, but I don’t want to disturb Mary, so I settle for shuffling along the plush carpet, and when I get to Vanessa’s door, it swings open before I can knock, putting Vanessa directly in front of me.

“Oh,” she says, and that tell-tale red flush is already climbing up her neck.

“Vanessa—” It’s on my tongue to tell her all that I’ve been thinking, the monologue I planned, but when I start to speak, what comes out of my mouth is: “I don’t want you to marry that guy.”

She appears as shocked to hear this as I am having said it.

“Come in,” she says, and closes the door behind me.

I take three long breaths to think through what I’m going to say next, but I’m operating on a previously unknown part of my brain now, the section in my mental command center that plants me right in front of Vanessa and picks her hands up in mine.

“Don’t marry him,” I say.

“You said he was perfect,” she says.

“He is,” I agree. “You could have a healthy, protected life with him. Even if you don’t love each other, I believe he won’t cheat on you or try to undermine your authority.”

Vanessa’s face is screwed up in some anguished confusion. “What are you saying then?”

“I can’t fucking lose you, I don’t want to,” I say. “I like you so bad. Too much.”

“You do?”

“God, yes.” I breathe out a heavy exhale and the weight I’ve felt since before dinner lessens. “Obviously I do.”

“But you said?—”

“I know what I said.”

Vanessa pulls her hands from mine and perches on the side of her bed. I follow and drop down next to her with a few inches between us to give her some semblance of space that I really don’t want to offer after that bombshell.

“You know what I am,” Vanessa says.

“I do. I think you’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Vanessa puts her face in her hands. Muffled, she speaks again: “How can you say things like that when we both know you think everything about me is abominable?”

I wanted to keep my hands off her, but it’s a short and futile battle as I grip her biceps and make her turn towards me.

“That’s just it. I don’t think that at all. I did at first, but you keep being wonderful, the best woman I’ve ever met, and every time I thought you were evil or deranged, you’ve proved to be just the opposite.”

“And my life? I’m not going to just get another job, Nate. This isn’t a temporary thing you can save me from, this is forever for me. For my kids.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I say, and I realize for the first time that I mean it. These thoughts have been living in my mind where I tried to pretend they weren’t real, nestled in beside my very real feelings for Vanessa. She pulls away from my grip and stalks to the other side of the room, once again putting distance between us that makes me feel like I’m floating alone on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

Vanessa worries her hands together and chews on the inside of her cheek. She halts her pacing and meets my desperate gaze.

“I need you to be very clear about what you’re saying,” Vanessa says, and her voice isn’t confident, but nearly shaking. Timid.

I just want to keep touching her, I want to hold her against me—showing my feelings would be easier than speaking them, but I know that wouldn’t be enough, so I take a big breath and try.

“Maxim is a better choice. He’s perfect for you,” I start. “But I want you to choose me instead.”

Vanessa’s lips part, her brown eyes betraying her shock at the admission.

“I know I’m not strong, I barely know how to fight, and I throw up when I see blood, but I can learn. I’m learning . Mary’s lessons—she’ll teach me how to defend myself better, I can keep working at the school, or I can do accounting for you, I can learn whatever you need, I’d learn for you.”

“And the bad stuff? What about when I have to bring a criminal into our home? Someone unsavory in the basement, where I will have to do horrible, unsavory things? What about when I come home with blood on my hands?”

I swallow down the dry lump in my throat, really wishing I’d thought to bring a water bottle. “I’ll help you clean them,” I say, my mind straying to the night of the gala, her own blood dripping into the kitchen sink. “You have your reasons, and they’re always good. You aren’t some monster killing for sport, I know that now.”

“This isn’t—” Vanessa takes a clarifying breath. “I can’t date you, Nate. It’s all or nothing with me. It’s marriage and a fleet of little babies who will have to see and hear and do very difficult things when they grow up. I can’t just date someone until they get tired of the bad business and shitty coworkers.”

“I know that,” I say, though she’s right to think that I haven’t thought as far down the road as our children having blood on their own hands. I only know what our private nights look like. I don’t know what being together for real, in the light of day, would look like in practice—in the reality of a marriage, a life together. It terrifies me. “And I still want you.”

“You’ll change your mind,” she says, and her eyes are welling with tears that I want to wipe away with my thumbs. “You can’t want this.”

I do step closer now, anxious to touch her and hold her and kiss all over her face, put hickeys on her neck so everyone knows she’s mine.

“I don’t understand it either,” I admit. “But I want you all the time. Forever. And I can’t keep pretending that interviewing these men doesn’t make my blood boil imagining any one of them touching you, standing by you, putting a baby in you. There’s not a man on this planet good enough for you, not me, not even the Russian, but I want to try.”

I don’t reach out to her, but we are close enough now that she has to look up at me beneath her big black lashes.

“Let me try,” I whisper.

“You would hate it here.” Her quiet voice breaks and a tear spills over. “This place is a graveyard.”

I cringe remembering how cruel I was when she brought me here, how she opened her home to protect me, and I spent the better part of a week telling her how wrong she was for it.

“I thought I would hate it. I really tried to, but there’s nothing rotten about this place, or your family, or you.”

She groans, more emphatic now. “But the night of the gala, you said ?—”

“I lied, Vanessa!” I press on even with the cracking of my voice. “I lied. You scared the shit out of me, and I was falling in love with you, and I thought you could never be with me, and I lied.”

Vanessa says nothing, her face searching mine like a crossword, tears still tracing lines to her chin.

I step closer still and she doesn’t flinch when I swipe my thumbs across her cheeks.

“I do, I do. I love you. Please ,” I whisper, but I don’t even know what I’m begging for. “Please.”

She must get the message though, because she grips the collar of my sweatshirt and pulls my mouth down to hers.

That does it.

We are mouths and hands and limbs—a cacophony of sensation. I press Vanessa against the wall, pouring a moan into her mouth while she grinds against me until she pulls back and mutters “bed” into my ear.

I press her down onto the mattress and help her wiggle off her shorts before I pull her top up and latch onto her tits as soon as they’re in view. She groans, tugging at my hair until I feel pricks of pain in my scalp that light me aflame.

I bite her tits, up her chest, on her neck where I do leave hickeys beneath her collarbone and a light one on the base of her throat, and she lets out the prettiest little moans grinding against my thigh while I do.

“Fuck me,” she breathes into my ear. “Now, no condom.”

The sound that comes out of me is inhuman, a man possessed. But I do as she says, making quick work of my clothes.

“Turn over,” I demand, and she listens. Her ass in the air, hands fisting her comforter, I am dumbstruck. I am paralyzed watching her wiggle beneath me until she lets out a moan, and I am spurred into action. She wants to be fucked, but I must lick her first, I am a starved man, parched, and I lap at her relentlessly as she squirms.

“Nate,” she moans, then more stern, “Now.”

I would toy with her longer if I had any control, but if she’ll have me, I’ll have forever to torment her, bring her to the edge and make her beg; today is not that day.

I kneel behind her on the bed, sheathing myself inside of her in two thrusts, making us both groan.

I want to cry, or come immediately, fill her up with it and watch as it drips out after. It’s caveman speak and probably not very feminist of me, but I want to fill her up and keep it there, I want to come across her chest, her back, her ass, and then I want her to ask for more. I’m dizzy thinking about it.

My hands grip her hips as I press into her again and again, the feeling of her hot cunt addicting around me and her moans making me delirious. I press harder, faster, until she’s moaning into her sheets, her face against the mattress while I hold up her hips and slam into her again and again.

She’s going to come, I think, and I see her hand snaking down to rub her clit to take her there.

“Yes, baby,” I say. “Make yourself come for me.”

She just moans louder, her pussy squeezing around me as I move faster. I keep muttering things, not holding back from showering her with praise and all the filthy thoughts that have been swimming through my head. I tell her she’s perfect, that she’s mine, that I don’t want her to even think about another man, not ever, that I want to hear her come and then I want to hear her come again.

And then she comes, moaning so loud I can only pray that Mary is still in the basement punishing a punching bag. The way Vanessa tightens around me sends me over the edge, all of me spilling into her as my thrusts get more erratic and entirely uncoordinated.

I try to catch my breath while she comes down, while I come down. We are both sweating, panting messes, and she’s potentially got bruises on her hips from where I was grabbing her.

I flip her on her back and enter her again, slower languid movements as my dick is growing flaccid. She watches me while I do, and I’m afraid to speak the words aloud but I want her to see them, in my eyes, in my touch. I lean to her ear and whisper them.

“I want to be the one. I love you,” I say, and then I say it ten more times, a chant against her ear. “Let me be the one. Please, please.”

When I pull away, she looks serious, assessing how serious I am, and whatever she finds makes her nod.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Yes.”