Page 23 of Forbidden Pregnancy (The Buffalo Italian Mob Family #2)

Chapter Nineteen

Michael

Present Day (...after rescuing Myra)

I can tell that Myra won’t listen to my command to drop the subject about her kidnapping.

What matters is that we have a new safe house and this time, nobody will find me.

I don’t have much time to investigate who or what exactly breached my security system, but this time it will be much more difficult and I’ll shoot first, ask questions later.

My father put Renzo up to this. My father wants Myra dead and if I tell her that, she’ll find a way to leave just like she did the first time she caught a whiff of the truth about my life.

I can’t have that. After all those years, after all this trouble I’ve gone to bring this woman back into my life – I can’t let her go again.

It’s not something I would admit freely, mostly to protect her, but I love this woman with so much intensity that I am completely horrified by the acts I would commit to keep her safe.

She drives me insane in every sense of the word, and Myra might be poking a beast incapable of controlling himself around her.

“I’m not going to drop it, Michael.”

“Why should I tell you? I’m keeping you safe.”

I don’t look over at her directly – for safety, and not because I fear this black woman an entire head shorter than me – but I can feel her gaze piercing angrily through the side of my neck.

She disagrees with everything about my lifestyle and in some ways, everything about who I am.

She wants me to be the man I am in the bedroom with her, but I can’t be that softer, gentler version of myself in the outside world.

It’s just not safe.

“I don’t feel safe, Michael,” Myra responds with a tight, angry voice.

If I have to tie her to the bed to make her feel safe and loved, to let her know how hard I’ll go to protect her, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Or something like that. My mind turns over brutal ideas to keep Myra’s body bound to mine. I can’t let her leave – ever.

“Would knowing who kidnapped you make you feel safer? It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

“Are you and the baby hurt?” I ask her.

“That’s not what we’re discussing right now,” Myra replies forcefully.

She’s only become more stubborn and impossible over the past twelve years.

And more beautiful. Unfortunately, the years of separation have turned me into a desperate man, willing to do desperate things to keep Myra in the position I want her in.

“We’re not discussing anything. You signed a contract.”

“This isn’t about the contract, Michael.”

It’s about us…

“You find the truth, all you’re going to do is run away, again. I won’t let that happen.”

“You’re the only one of us crazy enough to jump out of a moving car,” Myra says. “I’m the one trying to be an adult and have an adult conversation.”

“Is that why you disappeared twelve years ago? I tell you that I love you and then I never hear from you again.”

She’s cold. Icy. But for the first time, she’s quiet.

“That’s not what happened,” Myra says, her voice trembling with either sadness or outrage. I feel too smug that I finally got through to her to properly place her emotions. I’m right. She’s the one who left twelve years ago. She can blame it on my piggish ways, but it has nothing to do with that.

“It’s exactly what happened,” I tell her. “And now that you’ve crawled your way back into my life, I have decided this is fate. Our fate. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”

Myra snorts indignantly. “I did not crawl back into your life. Cosima, in some misguided attempt to ensure her eldest brother doesn’t die completely alone drugged me and that’s why I’m here. I was perfectly content never seeing you again.”

“You’re detached from your emotions,” I grumble, loathing that Myra could even make these words come out of my mouth.

I don’t talk about feelings. She’s the only woman on the planet who makes me feel like I’m sensitive and soft instead of a brutal killer who heartlessly moves through the world obeying his father’s command.

“I am smart,” she says. “I know you’re smart too, Michael. Which is why you know this isn’t reasonable and why you’re cooking up some demonic plan to keep me in your custody. It’s not going to work.”

Her saying that pisses me off even more.

How the fuck can she sit there pregnant with my child and not want to fight for us?

How can she give up so easily and just assume that nothing will work for the two of us?

I have a new plan. I have a backup safe house.

We need to lay low until she has the baby and then we can figure it all out.

Naturally, she’s going to interpret my silence to mean that I’m utterly predictable and she knows what’s coming next, but nothing could be further from the truth.

“I’m taking you to a different safe house with a pit stop along the way, and then we will discuss your future. But you’re not leaving me.”

She gives me an annoyed expression as if to suggest I have too many “secret locations” to lay low.

I’ve been on the lam quite a few times during my adult life.

You pick up a few survival tactics along the way.

Plus, most of the places belong to our extended family and aren’t mine personally.

Myra will be safe. I can do that for both of us.

“Why not? Just let me have this baby and I’ll be out of your life. It’s time for the two of us to stop pretending you’re not a dangerous man.”

I don’t know if it’s from spending all those years as a private teacher, but Myra has this superhuman capacity to make me feel like a goddamn failure.

The most infuriating part of this woman’s ability to get under my skin is the way it just makes me want to chase her approval down.

There’s been nothing as challenging or as mentally stimulating to me like the football games I played in college until I met my match with Myra.

“What about our emotions? I love you, Myra. You know I love you.”

She purses her lips. This woman infuriates me, but I know her refusal to let the words come out of her mouth doesn’t mean she feels any less.

I was with Myra that first day we made love outside against the guest house wall.

It was the type of young and passionate encounter that I’m unlikely to have again at forty-years old.

Even with all the weight-lifting, my back isn’t what it used to be and my desire for hard, rough sex has been replaced with this powerful need to have the same woman in my arms when I wake up in the morning.

There’s nothing appealing to me at this age about playing the field again.

It doesn’t matter that I’m better looking and more mature than I ever used to be – I would much rather dedicate all of that growth to a family. To just one woman.

To Myra.

Her inability to admit that she loves me just adds yet another hurdle.

My father sending men after us doesn’t help either, but that hurdle will disappear with time.

If she trusts me, I may even find a faster way for us to get out of this.

But I can’t have Myra disappearing on me.

I can’t picture a life without her and I don’t want to try.

“Emotions have nothing to do with why I spent fourteen hours in captivity.”

She smells the bullshit before it even comes out of my mouth. “Maybe it was random.”

“You know what happened.”

“What difference would it make if I told you? You made up your mind that you want to disappear from my life.”

“It’s not random.”

I don’t know what she means by that and right now, I just want to drag Myra inside and tie her to the bed. She realizes we’ve stopped.

“Where are we?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Pennsylvania? As in Pittsburgh Steelers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Pittsburgh?”

“The legendary city of Pittsburgh.”

“Okay, that’s a stretch,” Myra says. “Why are we here and why are we… not hidden away somewhere? It looks like I could get kidnapped by a stranger here.”

“This is my Aunt Viviana’s house. She’s up in the Adirondacks this week, so we can stay here a couple days until my next property opens up.”

The real safe house.

“Right. So Pittsburgh and lies are safer than honesty in our home city. Got it.”

There she goes again, getting under my skin in a way that honestly makes me want to tie her to the bed – with a ball gag.

“You and the baby must be hungry.”

“I’m not asking questions out of hunger,” Myra snaps. “I’m asking questions because you are currently kidnapping me, Michael. This is the third time, I might add.”

Third ? That really doesn’t seem right at all, but Myra’s tone almost makes me too scared to speak up and stand up for myself. It’s better to allow her to be wrong.

“Get out of the car. We can talk in the house.”

This motivates her to listen, but I suspect she’s too tired to protest and hopeful that the house has some place where she can safely fall asleep.

After getting tossed around the back of an SUV for a few hours, I doubt driving brings Myra any peace.

Nothing will happen to her tonight and once we’re both completely off the grid, I’ll work on establishing her sense of safety again.

I lead Myra into my aunt’s house, hoping the mid-nineties suburban Italian-American home decor comforts her the way it comforts me. Reminds me of a simpler time, before I had as many responsibilities as I do now for my family’s organization.

Even then, during that simpler time, I still had to look after Cosima, and I still had room in my heart for Myra. She’s visibly exhausted when we get inside, but never too exhausted to fight with me.

“I don’t belong in your family,” she says. “Cosima doesn’t get that, but we both understand that all too well, Michael.”

“You’ll feel better once I get some rest.”

“That won’t change a damn thing. I’m black and you’re Italian. From a traditional family. I doubt your family will ever accept us.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Really? So that’s not who came after me?”

She turns to face me and we’re cramped in Aunt Viviana’s main hallway – the one lined with our childhood photographs and photographs from her younger days back in the Tuscan countryside.

We used to race down these halls as kids on our way to play hide and seek during the rare occasions Aunt Viviana hosted Thanksgiving dinner for the Corsini family.

Those hallways feel a lot more narrow now. And if I want a family like the one I grew up with, I’m almost too late to start. Judging by the look on Myra’s face, I won’t get that family at all. She wants nothing to do with me and my people.

Why would she?

“I’m not wrong,” Myra says, making it even more difficult and frustrating for me to find my footing around my feelings and the words to make this right.

“It’s all a misunderstanding,” I grumble, frustrated with the situation around us more than I could ever feel frustrated with Myra.

“And if it weren’t for Cosima, I would have had a chance to solve this earlier.

But I didn’t. That doesn’t mean you’re unsafe and it doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon you. ”

Her dark brown eyes flicker with warmth. Finally, there’s some sign that deep down, despite all the trouble I’ve put her through, I’m not wrong about Myra and she loves me just as much as I love her.