Ugh… Alessandro knew She was going to be a problem.
Alessandro had known it the moment she lifted her chin at him in that garden, looking at him like he was an inconvenience she intended to deal with rather than the man who had just decided her fate in under sixty seconds, Fuck… she was so defiant but when she begged saying please, Gosh, it excited the hell out of him. He had known it and he had made the decision anyway, now he was sitting in his office at quarter past eight with a glass of whiskey and the full weight of that decision pressing down on him entirely.
He didn't bring people here. That was a rule, one of very few he kept without exception, this house was his and nobody came into it unless he decided they were useful or necessary and even then they didn't stay. They came, they left and the house went back to being his.
Elena Rossi was now upstairs in his guest room and he had moved her to the larger one this morning without thinking too hard about why, that alone was enough to tell him he needed to be careful.
He poured more whiskey into the glass as he cursed under his breath.
He had women. That was not a complicated thing to say, it was simply true, women who understood what they were to him and accepted it because what he offered in return was more than most men were capable of offering. He was not unkind to them. He was simply honest, which in his experience women found more difficult to forgive than unkindness, but that was their problem and not his.
None of them had ever made him feel like the air in the room had just vanished when they walked into it.
He hadn't been able to stop watching Elena at dinner.
That was the thing that was sitting badly with him, the thing the whiskey was supposed to fix and wasn't but instead making worse. She had come downstairs in jeans and a simple top with her hair down and no armor on, none of the expensive stuff she had been wearing the night he met her, and something about seeing her like that, face flushed and slightly furious in the way she had been furious all day, had done something to his concentration that he was not particularly interested in examining right now.
She had a way of moving that he kept noticing against his will. He had watched her reach across the table for her wine glass and had looked away deliberately because he couldn't help himself, he then looked back anyway because apparently he had no control over that particular impulse tonight.
And her scent, fuck…
He pressed two fingers to his mouth and stared at the wall. Oh jeez… he was about to lose himself.
He had noticed it first in the garden when his man had brought her to him, something sweet and faint filling the night air, and he had shrugged it away because there were more pressing things to deal with at that moment. But at dinner it had reached him across the table again and settled somewhere in his senses refusing to leave. he was sitting here an hour later still thinking about it which was not something that happened to him. That dang perfume… he liked it so bad.
Nothing like this ever happened to him.
He had built his entire life around control. Every decision calculated to perfection, every outcome mapped, every variable accounted for before he moved. He did not get distracted. He did not get pulled off course by things he hadn't planned for. He certainly did not sit alone in his office at night drinking whiskey and thinking about the curve of a woman's waist or the way she had looked at him across the dinner table like she was trying to figure out if she could stab him with her fork. Those big doe eyes… so gorgeous.
He hadn't intended to tell her about the risk, about the other people who had known about that night, about the fact that keeping her here was as much about keeping her alive as it was about anything else because the other people might have gotten to her and killed her without thinking twice if they knew she had seen him kill. He had intended to keep that to himself, to manage it quietly the way he managed everything, without explanation, he intended to make sure no one came to him regarding it and he'd know she's safe but at the same time, he still just wanted to keep her for himself at this point. But she had looked at him and asked what he actually wanted and the answer had come out before he had decided to give it.
He didn't do that either. He didn't give people things without thinking.
It was obvious that She was going to fight him on everything. He already knew that, had known it from the garden, she was not the kind of woman who accepted things quietly and waited to be told what came next. She pushed back, she argued, she pointed her fork at him across the dinner table like that was a completely reasonable thing to do to a man in his position and status, a powerful and wealthy man.
He found it unreasonably interesting and even sexy.
That was the problem. That was the whole problem sitting right there. He found her interesting and she was here, well she was going to be here for however long this took, he was going to have to sit across from her at dinner every night and watch her reach for her wine glass smelling that sweet scent from across the table and pretend that none of it was getting under his skin.
He was good at pretending. It was practically a professional skill at this point.
He finished the whiskey and set the glass down looking at the ceiling for a moment.
He had told her she was here because it was the safest place for her and that was true. It was completely true. It was also true that when he had stood in that garden and looked at her through the dark and made the decision to keep her rather than deal with her the way he dealt with other people, safety had not been the first thing on his mind. All that came to his mind was that he wanted to keep her in his house for no reason and see her everyday like a pretty little price.
He stood up and straightened his jacket deciding that what he needed was to go to bed, sleep and wake up tomorrow with his priorities in the correct order, which was the same order they had always been in before Elena Rossi had walked into the garden and witnessed what he had done.
He turned off the light and left.
He got halfway to the door and stopped when he heard rustling.
Somewhere above him, faint through the floors, he could hear movements. Her room was directly above his office. It was something he actually hadn't planned. He stood there and listened to the sound of her pacing, back and forth, back and forth, and thought about her up there unable to sleep in a house that wasn't hers, furious.
He pressed his hand flat against the wall.
He was in trouble, deep deep shit.
He had known it and he had made the decision anyway and he was going to have to live with that now, going to have to sit across from her every evening and keep his face neutral and his voice even and his hands to himself, going to have to be the same man he always was while she walked around his house in bare feet and pointed forks at him and also played his piano like she had every right to, he wished deep down she would sit at that piano and play everyday just so he could watch her fingers tap those keys gently.
He pushed himself off the wall and exhaled.
He was Alessandro DeLuca. He had built an empire out of nothing in a city that had not wanted to give it to him. He had done things that would make most men lose sleep for the rest of their lives and he had slept fine.
He could handle one woman! Yes! He could! Well that was what he kept making himself to believe!
He walked out of the office!
Above him, the pacing had stopped.
He stood in the hallway for a moment in the dark before going upstairs and walking past her door without stopping. Gosh, he wanted to stop there so bad and maybe grab her hair and kiss her, maybe take her from behind on the bed, couch or even the floor. He was going crazy right now but he walked quickly to his room and entered the bathroom quickly as he undressed leaving the trail of clothes on the floor.
"Oh my God… what the fuck have you done to me Elena?" He groaned with heavy breaths as he took matters into his own hands thinking about Elena with his eyes closed shut and hands resting flat on the wall imagining her with that little rose toy of hers.
After taking a long shower and pleasuring himself relentlessly to soothe the burning desires he felt, he moved to his bed and waited for sleep to swallow him whole before his body would decide to push him to her room and make her beg him to have her.