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Her scent surrounds me and I’m simultaneously comforted and aroused. I go to tuck my face into her neck but hesitate.

Massimo offers to carry me up the stairs but Giovanna just shakes her head and walks past him. She strides up the stairs like I weigh nothing and I want her to stride right past the kitchen and living area and carry me up to her room.

‘Hey hey hey,” Giovanna’s voice is gentle and concerned as she peers down at my tear-streaked face. “What’s happened?”

I cling to her, arms around her neck. Her hand cups the back of my head and now I throw caution to the wind and bury my face in the warm nook of her shoulder. The panic subsides a little as I inhale her scent.

“He’s humiliated me again,” I manage to get out, but the embarrassment makes it difficult to admit what happened. “He is fucking that model in our bed. His bed, I guess. But I’m supposed to sleep there.”

“What?!” She wasn’t expecting that, though really what else was it going to be about? “He’s pushed this too fuckin’ far,” she says to Matty and Massimo.

She gently deposits me on a sofa in the lounge and instructs them to sort out my feet. Then she marches down the hall towards Elio’s suite and I’m worried she might choose violence today as well.

Chapter Twenty

Giovanna

“OUT! Now!” The words roar out of me with more explosiveness than I intend as I slam into Elio’s room. His pale arse is bobbing in the air, one impossibly thin leg draped over his shoulder, as he pistons in and out of the simpering idiot he’s had hanging off him all day.

“What the fuck?” he roars right back at me, looking over his shoulder to where I stand in the doorway with my hands on my hips. He’s a fucking moron. A complete idiot. “You get out,” he adds.

“Girl,” I address the woman; she’s a stranger to me. “Clothes on and out of my house now, thanks.” She unfurls herself from Elio and sheepishly climbs off the bed.

“You can pull rank over a lot of things, Gio, but not over where I stick my dick,” Elio spits at me as he tugs on a pair of sweatpants.

I grit my teeth. “Your inability to exercise control over your dick is what is causing problems!”

Dressed haphazardly, the young woman tentatively clears her throat. “Yeah, so I’m going to go now?” Her voice goes high at the end of the sentence and it sounds like a question.

“Elio,” I bark. “Are you going to see your friend out?”

He looks like he’s on the brink of throwing something at me. His anger swells and surrounds him like a mist, but he does as he is told, leading the woman out of his suite and into the hallway.

Incredulous that I’m having to do this to my 36-year-old brother, I follow the pair of them to ensure she leaves the property.

“Aren’t you lucky you can go running to mummy? Pathetic!” Elio taunts Francesca as he stomps past her towards the back door.

Mummy?Haven’t been called that before. A girl I was seeing a few years back used to call me ‘daddy’ in bed. Weirdly, I didn’t mind that so much. It was kind of hot. I’m not sure ‘mummy’ has the same effect.

“Time to go!” Elio bellows at the stragglers from the party as he crosses the great open living space. “Now, thanks!” They scurry around collecting their belongings, hearing the fury in his voice. In a matter of minutes only Francesca, my brothers, Sammy, and I remain.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, you piece of shit?” Sammy rushes at him. Her fury would be more intimidating if she didn’t have to tip her head right back to look up at him. “I hope you catch 17 STDs from your hoebags and your dick falls off!”

Massimo scoops Sammy up and drops her in an armchair from where she continues to call Elio an eclectic and impressive list of names.

“Francesca!” Elio shouts, glaring at her from a few metres away. “You want to fight your own battles, princess? Or are you leaving it to mummy and the fuckin’ Kiwi chihuahua?”

I have never seen him like this. Sure he has always been an egotistical twat, but usually he is oblivious to or reckless with other people’s feelings, not downright cruel. Either the marriage or the new role he has in the family seems to have tipped him over the edge. Probably both.

Francesca stares wildly from the sofa looking like a disheveled fucking angel. She’s still wearing just the jumper I gave her over the top of her bathers. Her golden brown legs and feet are in the air as Matty plucks pieces of glass out of the soles of her feet with a pair of tweezers. Looking at her legs in the air gets me ridiculously wet and I quickly raise my gaze back to her face.

Her face is haunting. Those big doe eyes look so afraid and tired.

“I told you not to fall in love with me,” Elio shoots at her, exasperated.Arrogant son of a bitch.

Fury has her innocent eyes narrowing at him. Her chin tilts a little in the air and her shoulders go back. Where she had been a nervous little girl a few seconds ago, now she looks fierce.

She slaps one of her thighs, laughing. Almost deranged, she is cackling like it is the funniest thing she’s ever heard. “Love? You’ve got to be shitting me, right?” She sneers, “I don’t love you! I’m embarrassed by you! I don’t want to marry a man so pathetic he is ruled by his cock and incapable of treating me with respect.”