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Chapter seven

Never Take a Green At Their Word

Cillian

I t’s like she’d lived her life in a cult and been fed lies. Now she was in the real world—in my world—and trying to apply her old schema on current events.

I expected her to have had a lover. Most women did by our age. A first, a second, a third… a great love affair, as well as several meaningless ones. I didn’t expect to be the first. I just knew that I would be the last.

It made sense to grab onto someone when marriage wasn’t your choice. The liberty to give herself to a man she loved… to take a bit of power back? I couldn’t blame her for that.

But she hadn’t.

And that made me… elated. Relieved? Honored.

“I’d never take a Green at their word,” she whispered. Desperate to still see me as a cloaked, evil villain.

“Then don’t, love,” I said against her skin. “But I am not a liar.”

She would learn that soon enough.

“You’ve always been allowed to do what you want. To the victor go the spoils, right? The Greens were the victors. I’m the spoil?” She was somewhat right about that. That was a natural consequence of being on the losing side. “Just because you can have mistresses and—”

“I don’t have mistresses.”

I almost heard her roll her eyes.

I grabbed her chin to force her to look at me.

“I have never had a mistress,” I said with all conviction. “I might not be as pure as you, love. But I have never had a mistress, a girlfriend, or a lover.”

“Please…” she tried to pull her face away and I chuckled.

“Who knew my wife would be so jealous?” What an unexpected pleasure to see a flaw within the frigid ice queen.

“I have never lied to you. I will not lie now. I have done things with women, sure.” She tried to pull from me, and I held her tighter.

There was no escaping from this reality, from this conversation, or from this marriage.

“But I have never stuck my cock inside another woman’s cunt. Is that clear?”

I had never admitted my own status before. The assumption that I had mistresses had flown from overblown statements of quick fondles in coat rooms, and gropes in the backseats of town cars. Women who wanted to hitch their wagons on a rising star.

But to seal the deal? To do more always felt wrong when I knew I was promised to another. It was wrong for me, for them... for the bride I despised. The one who was shackled to this fate.

Her brows knit together. Her face scrunched in confusion. “But… why?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Why is the sky blue?”

Because it never felt right.

“Because sunlight reaches the Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered by gases and particles,” she whispered. “Blue light is scattered more than other colors at a broader angle because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. It’s called Rayleigh scattering.”

I smiled to myself, as I tucked my nose into her hair.

“I’ve been in school as long as possible to delay our marriage,” she admitted. “I learned a thing or two.”

“That you did,” I chuckled.

I knew she was reluctant to marry. My parents delayed our initial marriage date until she and I finished university. Then afterwards, she went for a masters, requesting an additional delay. She would have gone for a PhD had my father not put his foot down and said we had waited long enough.

“Will you still be finishing your doctorate, then?” I asked, casually twirling a finger in her chestnut-colored hair.

She flinched, looking up at me. “I didn’t think that was a choice.”

“Of course, it’s a choice.” I shrugged. “When things calm down, you should tell me if you want to.”

“Only in New York, I imagine,” she whispered, forlornly.

“For now,” I admitted. “But if things calm down, if you’re willing to wait, then you could go anywhere you wish.”

Her face was stuck in a mask of confusion. Like I was throwing too many curve balls at her at once.

“But,” I said, dramatically. She almost looked comforted with that single word—the one that could contradict all that came before it. “You must be honest with me.”

Her face closed again. Expressionless. Cold.

I liked this version of her the least. This was the one she presented to me all those years. To my parents. To the world. The one that had no feelings, and an impenetrable surface. Like a frozen lake with all the activity hidden beneath the still surface.

“We don’t have to be enemies, Gia,” I whispered, almost desperate to reach her. “We can be allies. We can be friends. We can work together in this world if you let us.”

She turned away again, and I grabbed her chin to turn her back to me.

I liked doing this—controlling where her gaze landed and ensuring that it stayed on me. Was I a narcissist? Maybe.

“We were thrown into this together, love,” I whispered against her lips. They parted, her tongue darting out to wet that plump bottom lip. “We had no choice. We can choose to make this marriage work.”

“Would you let me choose to divorce you?”

“No.” The word came out stronger than I meant it.

The disappointment in her eyes had me back pedaling.

“At least not yet. I have no interest in the Mafia-Irish war resuming. That’s bad for business.

That’s bad for us. But if we ever get to a real situation of peace…

if you were truly unhappy… then we’d talk about it. ”

Over my dead body.

We’d talk about it. The answer would still be no, but she didn’t need to know that.

She looked at me and smiled, sadly, as if she could read my every thought. As though she knew each and every deception in it but appreciated my attempt.

She lay silent for a moment, and my eyes couldn’t help grazing down the long lines of her lithe body.

Sensual, curved, and perfectly formed. I was developing an unhealthy obsession with the way her hip rounded, as she lay on her side.

The beauty of the slight bend in her knee, and how I wanted them parted on either side of me as I drove myself in her again.

I needed to ask her about Marco. About the man in the footage. The man who followed her like a limping, love-sick dog.

But he wasn’t her lover. She had never had one. In some way, we were fated to only be each other’s. And there was comfort in that. One that heated my blood with a possession I never knew.

My cock throbbed with lingering desire, reignited.

Surely, we could discuss the important things tomorrow.

Or better yet, after Christmas.

I caressed her skin, and she gasped, her eyes fluttering closed with a reciprocated lust.

I deserved a little honeymoon. We deserved it.

“Let us be allies, you and I.” I gently pushed her onto her back and kissed the pretty valley between her breasts.

“We can’t be,” she whispered.

“Why not?” I’d be disappointed. Hell, I might even feel hurt if her words had any teeth.

She liked my kisses, and my touch. She liked my voice, and my words, the same as I liked hers.

What more does one need in an arranged marriage?

“Because vendetta is an Italian word,” she whispered.

“That has nothing to do with us,” I told her. “The past is the past.”

“And the future can only have one victor.”

I kissed her nipple, chuckling, as my breath traced over the delicate skin. “Rubbish.”

I sucked the hardened nipple into my mouth, tasting it like it was the most delicious morsel. I spent the darkened hours of night between my wife’s thighs, kissing, tasting, fucking. No words, just gasps and whimpers, intertwining until we couldn’t move.

We slept the morning of Christmas Eve, fingers and legs locked together.

Vendetta might be an Italian word. But we were in New York City. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we were born here. The past belonged in another land, and the future was whatever I decided it would be.