The contract lay between them like a loaded gun—black ink on cream vellum paper, her name already scrawled in his jagged script.
Eloise Winters. Fiancée.
Luciano leaned back in the leather chair as though he owned gravity itself. His shirt, which he must have changed into the moment he left her, hung open to the sternum, revealing tanned skin and the hard line of muscle beneath. His eyes—icy blue-gray were fixed on her—cold, depthless, hungry for something she couldn't name.
"Sign it," he said, voice a purr sharpened to a blade. "Or I hand you to the police. Arson. Thirty years. And I will cry—oh, so beautifully—about how my poor little traumatized heart was betrayed by the woman I sheltered, after she burned down my estate, and how she tried to run from the scene like a startled criminal." He placed a hand dramatically against his chest, feigning injury. "Trauma, cariño. They eat that up in court."
