I Married the Mafia Heir to Bury My Secret novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Lies in Bed

On the wedding night Sandro sets his terms and stops kissing her when she shakes, and at 3 a.m. she finds him burning a photo from his safe.

"Sunday," Rocco said again. "Ten at night. Old men sleep early."

"What's in the fifth photo?"

"A hand." He smiled. "Yours, if I tell it that way."

I looked at his face, the one I used to wake up beside, and tried to find the man who cooked eggs for me on Sundays.

He wasn't there.

"If you hurt him," I said.

"You care about him." He said it gently. "That's useful, tesoro. I'll remember it."

I took my bouquet off the seat and got out.

The loading dock door was still propped open for me.

I walked up the service stairs holding my skirt in both fists, and no one on the staff looked at my face.

My husband was waiting at the top with my coat over his arm.

"You threw it from the back stairs?" Sandro asked.

"Bianca's too fast. I had to let the quiet girls have a chance."

He studied me for a moment.

Then he draped the coat over my shoulders and said, "Come. They'll toast until dawn if we let them."

The bridal suite was the whole east wing of the house.

There was a fire already lit, and a bed with a headboard of dark wood, and a bottle of champagne on ice.

Sandro shut the door and turned the key.

"I have two rules," he said.

I stood by the fire with the photos still under my garter and my heart going hard.

"Say them."

"In this bed, no lies. And I won't ask about the years before me."

"Those cancel each other."

"They do." He took off his jacket and laid it over a chair. "That's why I made them."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

He crossed the room and stopped one step away from me.

He had told me on our fourth dinner that he'd bought the Harbor Grand's security footage after his brother died.

The tapes were locked in his father's safe, and I had married him to get to them.

Now he lifted his hand and slid one pin from my hair, and then another, and the weight of it came loose onto my shoulders.

"There she is," he said, low.

I didn't plan to kiss him.

I put my hands flat on his shirt and the next breath I was kissing him, and he made a sound in his throat that I felt in my knees.

His mouth was warm and sure and tasted of the one glass of champagne he'd poured for himself.

He backed me against the bedpost and his hand went to the zipper at my spine.

It ran down slowly, a tooth at a time, and the cold of the room touched my back, and then his palm did.

I pulled his collar open and put my mouth on the line of his throat.

"Mara," he said.

The gown fell to the floor around my ankles.

I stood in a sequined puddle in white lace and the blue garter, and he looked at me for a long moment.

"God," he said. "Look at you."

His hands found my waist, then my hips, and slid down my thighs.

He reached the garter.

The photos were under it.

I caught his wrist so hard the bone shifted under my fingers.

He went still.

"Not that," I said. "Leave that."

He looked down at my hand, and then at my face.

"You're shaking," Sandro said.

"I'm not afraid of you."

"I know." He said it quietly. "That's what worries me."

He took his hand back, and the room got very quiet.

Then he picked my wedding dress off the floor and laid it over the chair, so carefully, with both hands.

"Not while something's got hold of you," he said. "I'll wait. I've got the rest of my life."

I stood there with my skin burning and my want unfinished, and I hated Rocco more than I ever had.

He put his own shirt around my shoulders.

It smelled of cedar and him.

We lay down side by side in the dark, and he held my hand until his breathing slowed.

I waited.

When I was sure he was asleep I slid the photos out from under the garter, wrapped them in a stocking, and pushed them to the bottom of my shoe.

Then I closed my eyes and opened them again.

The bed beside me was empty, and the sheet had gone cold.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:04.

I put on his shirt and went into the hall barefoot.

The study was at the end of it, behind a heavy door.

There was light under it, orange and moving.

I pushed the door open one inch.

My husband knelt at the fireplace in his trousers, with the safe standing open behind him.

He held a photograph by one corner.

He fed it to the flames, and watched it curl.

"Sandro?"

He didn't startle.

He turned his head, slowly, and the fire lit one side of his face.

"Old pictures of my brother," he said.

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