Page 1 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

Nella

Forget red flags, this guy was a walking emergency distress flare.

He was perfect.

Scruffy blond hair like a rehomed retriever, Instagram-filter skin, wanted to come upstairs instead of ravaging her in the bar’s seedy alleyway. Gold ring on his left hand.

He was the perfect alchemical balance of lust and self-destruction she was after tonight. So she followed him into the penthouse suite she shared with her siblings and shut the door behind them.

‘Whoa,’ he breathed.

The playlist she’d had on before she left started up again.

She didn’t know how to turn the automatic function of her brother’s sound system off.

And she sure as hell wasn’t going to do something ridiculous like text him.

So she was stuck in the purgatorial horror of Gen Z’s idea of ‘music’, where guitars and coherent lyrics were endangered species.

She swerved around his frozen form, anticipating his sudden halt like it was a choreographed ballet routine. She was yet to bring a guest to this apartment who didn’t make that annoying sound. Like he thought she’d been lying when she said who she was.

No matter what promises of nudity and whipped cream had been made back in the bar, it was the same every time. They evaporated as soon as her guest was confronted with the floor-to-ceiling glass cabinet of famous Barbarani wine, which stood where any normal person might have put a wall.

Probably for the best – all the whipped cream was expired anyway.

‘I can’t believe I’m here.’ He twirled like Alice in Wonderland rolling out of the rabbit hole.

She shoved past him and tossed her denim jacket across the amber couch (not her choice of colour), then made her inevitable pilgrimage to the kitchen, clinking two glasses onto the marble kitchen benchtop.

As her invited interloper proceeded to sniff out his new surroundings, she shoved his glass under the ice dispenser with more force than needed, rogue ice shards grazing her hand.

He was gazing starstruck at the framed copy of her grandfather’s wine recipe (secret ingredients blacked out, of course) like it was a sheer La Perla brassiere.

She sniffed; he hadn’t paid nearly this much attention to her in the restaurant.

He was good with his fingers (when it came to fingering the statues Nella’s brother Tomaso had decided were artistic and expensive enough to put on display).

Tom rarely came here, but Nella liked it well enough – everything was out in the open.

No hidden bedrooms, no secret passageways.

No lies. No betrayal heaving in the shadows waiting to smother her.

No murder plots.

And the penthouse had fulfilled its purpose these past six months. No matter how many stray bullets and cannons were fired back at the family mansion in Bindi Bindi Cove, she was spared from them here in her war bunker.

Evidence of the apartment’s longest-ever inhabitation was catalogued through the lounge room as her date stepped over discarded pink Ugg boots and G-strings like they were normal debris on a leisurely bushwalk.

His eyes lasered across the wall-length paintings – the type of art working-class people scoffed at and said, ‘My three-year-old could paint that’ – but he tactfully ignored the rubble of takeaway containers and coffee mugs as he crossed his arms and took in the view of the sparkling river and Kings Park.

When he got to the wine cabinet, he scratched his shaggy cool-dad surfer hair and took a shuddery breath.

‘You cold?’ She squeezed a lime into his glass and added an extra shot of gin to her own.

It was 3.36 a.m. The sickly green numbers on the microwave made her regret every decision she’d ever made that had brought her to this moment: standing in this kitchen instead of being curled up in bed with her laptop watching America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on Netflix.

‘No, it’s just ... hard to believe I’m here.’

Congratulations, sir, you’re now officially breaching Challenge 21 ( Don’t drink and swim ), which was a reference to the fatal action of bringing up Barbarani Wine in any sort of romantic situation.

If he made any sudden movements, it would crumble beneath him.

Under normal circumstances she would have kicked him out.

But normal circumstances were about four cocktails ago.

Nella raised her brows. ‘In front of my grandfather’s famous wine, you mean?’

He turned to look at her, for the first time since he’d walked in. ‘No. In the home of the most beautiful woman at the bar.’

Urgh. He should have stuck to worshipping at the shrine of her infamous family. Then they could have had immensely satisfying hate-sex.

‘It’s not my home,’ she said. ‘I just come here sometimes.’

That was his opportunity to boast that he could make that happen more than once tonight. But he didn’t take it. Instead, his gaze dropped to a pizza box balancing on the life-size statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the wolf that raised them. ‘How long have you been here this time?’

‘Six months.’ She passed him the glass and took a deep sip from her own.

He gave the liquid a lavish swirl. Of course! She was the daughter of the late wine mogul Giovanni Barbarani. An agile wrist swirl was bound to get her wet in an instant! ‘Gin?’ he asked accusingly.

‘Mmm.’

‘Couldn’t we have some of the wine?’

‘That stuff’s like a hundred years old,’ Nella said. ‘And my brother set up a Fort Knox security system that’ll take half an hour to crack.’

‘Oh, okay. I just thought ...’

She closed her eyes. ‘Look, did you come up here for my wine or for my boobs?’

‘I—’

‘I don’t want to talk about my family.’

He shifted uncomfortably. ‘Is that because of the poll?’

‘What poll?’ She’d muted all her social accounts. She hadn’t checked the news in weeks. She used her phone for Apple Pay and Spotify. When it was charged.

‘The “Who’s Hotter?” poll between you and Ariana La Marca.’ He gulped his gin.

Ariana La Marca. Her nemesis. Well, the daughter of the Barbaranis’ greatest rival wine-making family.

Nella didn’t really know her well enough to bestow her the prestigious title of nemesis.

The feud between their grandfathers had been passed down the family line like an extra chromosome and now Nella and her siblings were biologically programmed to hate the La Marcas too.

It was the only thing she’d ever been able to do that made her father proud.

‘Well?’ Nella pushed a hip painfully into the benchtop. ‘Did I win this poll?’

‘It’s not, uh, finalised ...’

She frowned. ‘How much?’

‘What?’

Had she drunkenly slipped into Italian? ‘How much is she beating me by?’

‘Doesn’t matter what a poll made by a thirteen-year-old gamer in Hong Kong says, you’re the knockout.’ His eyes drifted towards the cabinet again. ‘Can you tell me what’s in it?’ he asked, moving closer.

Nella turned and shoved her empty glass under the ice dispenser. ‘Wine.’

‘The wine your grandfather made?’

‘Silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row.’

‘Just one ingredient?’

‘Grapes.’

‘C’mon.’ His eyes sparkled; potentially the promise of the expired dairy products was forcing its way back through the deluge of newer memories from this evening.

‘How about we share a glass? We can make it a game. I’ll tell you what I reckon’s in it, and if I get it wrong, I have to take off an item of clothing. If I get it right ...’

‘I get to jump out the window?’ Nella did her best Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader smile.

His own smile froze.

‘Fine.’ She unhooked the keys from above the bread boards and tossed them to him, but she was drunk, so they sailed past his shoulder and hit the glass cabinet. ‘Take the wine. It’s the green key.’

‘Antonella ...’ He set his glass down on one of Tom’s coasters, which Nella had been using as an ashtray, and walked over until he was right in front of her.

‘I’m so sorry. I should never have mentioned .

.. You said you didn’t want to talk about them .

.. and after what happened ...’ He stared at her like he was a puppy she’d shouted at for jumping on the couch.

Hell, no. Make it stop ...

She crushed his mouth with hers. The force made him stumble back onto Romulus’s big toe and the pizza box crashed to the floor.

An old piece of pepperoni squelched under Nella’s foot as she burrowed in his pants for the hardness she suspected had been there since she’d said the word ‘boobs’.

If she was going to bed satisfied tonight, she’d need to do quick damage control to shut him up about what happened .

He tasted like beer and spiced rum with a hint of meringue from the dessert they’d shared. His idea. Nella hated sharing dessert.

She pushed him onto the couch, unzipping his jeans as he mumbled something incoherent about the bedroom, but her body siphoned that request from his lips as she leant into that satisfying pressure she’d felt behind his belt, now straining through the blue cotton of his underwear.

Had his wife bought them for him? This was too easy – he hadn’t even taken his ring off. She liked that he was upfront about being an absolute shithole of a human.

She pulled at his shirt buttons and he made no complaint when a few of them ripped, fumbling with the straps of her dress.

She sat back and peeled the whole thing over her head with an impatient growl he might have mistaken for primordial arousal and reached for him again.

He grabbed her neck and started pushing her down, but she strained against the order and brought her mouth to his jaw instead.

He had a boring face. Symmetrical. Blue eyes, equal distance from his straight nose, blond hair – a propaganda poster for 1950s true-blue Aussie masculinity. But the pressure between her legs, and the angry, almost violent way he was teasing her nipples was making up for it.

‘Birth control?’ he asked in between kisses.

She thought about lying like she usually did.

Challenge 11 ( Slip, Slop, Slap ) was about protection, but when she’d come up with it at eleven years old, she wasn’t really thinking about condoms. Now it had become a bit of a game – lie about birth control, see what his reaction is.

Does he risk it (idiot), does he leave (dickhead), does he have a condom in his wallet (serial cheater or actually under the age of eighteen), or does he . .. stay?

‘Implant,’ she said truthfully.

‘Cool.’ He reached for his wallet anyway, ripping open a silver packet with his teeth (serial cheater). ‘Just to be safe.’

She heard the truth. I’m not going to have you ruin my marriage by having the nerve to get knocked up!

She sat back on his thighs, resisting the impatient sigh burning in her sinuses like a sneeze while he slid on the condom. The furrow of his ordinary eyebrows and every other lacklustre detail of his plain face as he hyper-focused on his own penis were sobering her up.

He started to say something, but as soon as her lips touched latex he stopped. Mission accomplished. But she didn’t miss the cloud of regret in his eyes that he’d come up with the fabulous idea of protection before this moment.

Nella was doing a half-arsed job of it, but despite the amount of alcohol he’d consumed, she was bringing him shockingly close to the edge.

She moved away, but he pleaded for more.

Honestly, she wasn’t sure if she could be bothered.

Everything about him was making a quickie seem like the best-case scenario.

But shit, she wasn’t giving it away for free.

He seemed to register her frustration. He unclasped her bra in a more practised fashion than the way he’d handled the dress and fondled her in a way that reminded her of her annual breast check.

She brought his hand further down, past her navel and to the spot that was burning about as hot as a birthday candle, but still, she wanted something.

Feeling about as turned on as a broken toaster plugged into a faulty outlet, her mouth was back on latex when the sound of a key rattled in her apartment door.