Page 146 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet

This was why love could make a man weak.

I had put her comfort before her safety, and now I was paying the price.

“My wife,” Frankie asserted from behind me.

Shocked but schooled enough to hide it, I turned in time to see him sling an arm around Elena’s waist and press a kiss to the very hickey I’d put on her neck only minutes before. Elena’s eyes were pinned to mine, but she let Frankie touch her.

Smart girl.

One slipup and we’d be dead on the hot asphalt beneath the plane.

“Thought you married a Sicilian girl,” Rocco muttered skeptically, staring hard at Elena’s dark red hair. “The girl barely looks Italian.”

“Te assicuro che sono Italian,” Elena promised in fluid Italian, her voice distinctly Neapolitan. “Frankie got rid of the old bitch and traded up for me.”

Rocco let out a hard, little laugh, his eyes glazed with desire as he moved closer to me in order to get closer to her. “Fiery thing, aren’t you?”

“Touch me and you’ll find out just how much,” she purred, leaning into Frankie provocatively even as she kept her eyes pinned on him.

The entire charade was ridiculous. I wanted to pick the Don up by his fat neck and break him over my knee like a feeble stick. A man like him didn’t deserve to even look at Elena. The difference was almost blasphemous, a sinner looking on a saint.

I wanted him to die for wanting her, and he hadn’t even tried to touch her yet.

He would.

I knew it as surely as I knew the sun would rise in the sky every morning. He was a man ruled by his impulses, and his gut cried out to take Elena’s strength and overpower it with his own. He didn’t understand a woman like her. He wanted to break her to prove his machismo, not understanding that a true man stood beside a woman like that and was made more powerful by her own strength at his back.

“I worried for a moment,” he said slyly, shooting me a beady-eyed look. “If you were married, you would be of no use to me.”

“Oh?” I didn’t give him the benefit of genuine curiosity. Instead, the word fell like dead weight to the ground between us. I checked my cuff links and adjusted the golden crest on my right sleeve that spoke of my first life in England.

He growled. “You wanna find a home in Napoli again, Salvatore, I got a home for you. But it’s in the bed of Mirabella Ianni. You remember her? The woman you were supposed to marry?”

I fought the crushing desire to shoot Rocco with the gun he’d dropped to his side. Of course, thefiglio di puttanadidn’t entirely trust that Elena was Frankie’s woman and not mine. Just in case, he’d thrown a grenade at us, hoping for maximum impact.

Elena didn’t say a thing, and I didn’t dare look over my shoulder to see her reaction, but I trusted that her impeccable poker face was in place.

My own was not.

A muscle in my jaw spasmed as I ground my teeth.

“I’m not here to marry some country girl, Rocco.” He flinched at my disrespectful use of his first name, but I was beyond caring. He flinched again when I took a step down the stairs so I could loom over him. His gun raised between us, the butt pressed right to my heart, but I didn’t shy away from it. I was a man who only feared one thing, which I was learning was infinitely more dangerous than a man who feared nothing.

I would not lose Elena.

Not for anything.

Not for my bloody kingdom and stacks of crisp bills.

Not for my honor or my family, my Italian ideals.

She was it.

Mine.

Forever.

And if Rocco wanted to test that, I’d show him what happened to people who tried to come between our love and wedge us apart.