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

Jett

Jett tried four keys before realising the door was already unlocked. The claws of fear that had been scraping his throat for six months finally tore through: Antonella Barbarani had a death wish.

He shoved the (futile) heavy security door open with his shoulder, trying not to remember the last time he’d charged through a door to save her, refusing instructions to wait in the car where he belonged.

That door had been locked, though. There was a good chance Nella wasn’t even home and as a fuck you to the rest of her family she had left the shared Perth apartment open for any crazy Goldilocks to waltz in and feast on the Barbarani wine.

Or burn it to the ground.

Heart pounding more than he would ever admit to anyone, he prepared his rebuttal like a Year Eight debate team champion for the off-chance she was here and safe and about to throw a statue at him for ‘breaking in’.

(Unlocked. The door was unlocked. That’s your line of defence.)

Jett had learnt the hard way, fifteen years ago, that keeping up with Nella in a conversation required more than his incomplete high school transcript.

After ten years as a lawyer, her tongue was decidedly lethal, but it had already been knife-sharp the day he’d met her.

He’d been twenty-four but she’d made him feel about twelve as he took her in, tanned arm resting against the railing of the Barbarani mansion’s third floor balcony, lollipop in her mouth and winged eyeliner framing her hazel eyes. She was eighteen.

Since that day, he’d tried hard to hate her. But when that failed, he’d gone for mild indifference. Fifteen years on, friendship was the tenuous island he’d settled on.

Jett’s heightened senses noted the stale smell of the apartment – old cheese mixed with some sort of Chinese takeaway sauce.

But despite that, it was impossible not to notice the rose musk and vanilla scent that had faded from the passenger seat of his car over the past six months.

Which he would ignore. Easily. He tried to focus instead on the sound of SZA warbling faintly in the background, but a muffled groan (not from SZA) made him freeze.

Danger. Compute. React . He was a programmed robot. A driverless car.

He spun, ready to rip an attacker off Nella or beat the shit out of an armed burglar trying to break into the wine behind the bulletproof-glass cabinet.

Program glitch.

Abort.

An almost-naked Nella was straddling what looked like the Aldi version of a long-haired Chris Hemsworth. They were on the couch Jett had heard her refer to multiple times as ‘cat-vomit yellow’, and this time it wasn’t a lollipop in her mouth.

‘What the fuck, man?’ Aldi-Chris saw him first and pushed Nella off, covering his manhood with one hand, raking his twisted jocks up with the other.

Jett tried not to look directly at his cock but tried not to look directly at Nella either.

He settled for staring at a faded brown stain on the white carpet beside an overturned takeaway coffee cup, and urged his brain to try to work out if it looked more like Tomaso’s nose or a hunch-backed seahorse, instead of focusing on what was happening in his periphery.

A bra clicked, a belt buckle snapped.

The stain was definitely more seahorse than nose. He’d seen Nella topless before (from the back), because she used to lie facedown by the outdoor pool with her bikini off so she didn’t get tan lines from the straps. But this was ... not that.

‘You said you were single!’ Aldi-Chris’s accusation ripped Jett’s gaze to him.

Nella was standing now, still in just her underwear. She squinted at the guy with vulture eyes. She wouldn’t look at Jett. ‘I am. He’s my family’s driver.’

‘He doesn’t knock?’

‘He has a key,’ Jett said.

‘Bro.’ Aldi-Chris shook his head. ‘You always knock.’

Jett didn’t give him the satisfaction of a laugh or the I got you, bro look that this guy was clearly expecting, just because they were men of roughly the same age and therefore should apparently have identical worldviews.

Aldi-Chris was still topless, and decidedly less Aldi-like in the incredibly flattering shadows cast by the skylight.

As he stepped into the harsher tones of the kitchen fluorescents, Jett caught the look on his face that was slippery and squirmy and all too familiar.

People were predictable when it came to their reactions to Jett’s face.

They either stared too much or deliberately looked away, suddenly fascinated by a brick wall or a parking meter.

It was painfully obvious they thought this was the socially acceptable, polite option.

Aldi-Chris was no exception. Jett could feel his skater-boy blue eyes tracking across the deep, jagged scar that ran from the right side of his jaw up the middle, through his eyebrow and then over to his left temple, as though he was tracing it with a cold finger.

Nella, who, on that same day fifteen years ago on the Barbarani balcony, had blinked at him and said, without even taking her lollipop out of her mouth, What happened to your face?

, now grabbed Aldi-Chris by the arm. She had to physically pull him away to get him to stop staring.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she asked, turning back to Jett.

He glared at her. ‘Put some clothes on.’ He kicked over a leather jacket that was Aldi-Chris’s size before grabbing a silvery dress that was about the length of a tea towel. It felt like cool, river water in his hands as he tossed it to her.

Okay, at her.

‘What happened the last time you tried to tell me what to do?’ Nella threw the dress back, but it puddled in the space halfway between them, over the brown stain Jett had been staring at.

The memory kicked him in the shin. Giovanni’s funeral.

Nella, high as a space shuttle, trying to wrestle the microphone from her brother, her sharp lawyer tongue frothing to unleash thirty-three years of repressed feelings about a dead man in front of everyone who’d ever known him.

Jett, arms around her waist, pulling her back into the sea of black and mascara-stained faces.

She’d hit him, bitten him, kicked him, sobbed into his chest and, once they were far enough away from the mausoleum, he’d let her go and she’d .

.. well. Everything she’d wanted to scream at Giovanni’s casket, she screamed at Jett.

She’d told him she never wanted to see his face again.

That was the last time he’d seen her.

‘Believe me, Nella.’ Jett scraped the fleshy remnants of a lime into the bin drawer and started to stack the dishwasher with bowls crusted with mac ’n’ cheese and brownish milk that smelled like Coco Pops. ‘I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here.’

‘That,’ she said, handing Aldi-Chris his wallet, ‘is impossible.’

‘Uh, should I go?’ the guy asked, his offensively jacked chest now completely covered by his shirt.

‘Yes,’ Nella and Jett said in unison, still glaring at each other.

‘Right, well, it was an ... interesting night, Antonella.’ Aldi-Chris ran a hand through his hair. ‘Maybe I can come back another time ... for some wine?’ With the last word came a smirk Jett didn’t understand.

‘Maybe.’

‘Never got your name, mate.’ Aldi-Chris held out a hand to Jett, his gaze resolutely fixed on Jett’s nose. See, man? Look how cool I am with you! Staring straight at your ugly-ass scar! Now, let me shake your hand with the fingers I was just using to pleasure your boss and we’ll be cool, yeah?

‘Jett. Like the plane,’ he said, his grip tight.

Aldi-Chris squeezed harder. ‘Victor.’

Nella blanched. Jett would bet his car she’d forgotten the guy’s name.

‘Of what exactly?’ Jett asked.

‘Huh?’ Aldi-Chris dropped his hand and went to plant a kiss on Nella’s temple. Nella, still glaring at Jett, pulled Aldi-Chris towards her and stuck her tongue down his throat, pawing at his still-unbuttoned shirt.

Jett moved on to stacking the cutlery in the grey plastic holder.

When Nella eventually set him free, Aldi-Chris stumbled to the door, eyes starry and lips bee-stung. It was a good minute after he’d shut the door behind him before Nella spoke.

‘You ruined everything.’

Jett had turned on the dishwasher and was now working his way around the crime scene that was the living room. ‘I thought someone had broken in,’ he said. ‘The door was open.’

‘Piss off – I heard the keys.’

‘Yet, you didn’t stop. I could have been a—’ He stopped himself in time.

‘I was this close to an orgasm.’ Her fingers were almost touching. ‘You twat-blocked me.’

Don’t respond. Don’t negotiate with Barbaranis.

‘Really?’ Jett picked up a corn-crusted Mexican takeaway box.

‘ That’s what you look like when you’re about to come?

It looked more like he’d dropped the key to his hybrid Prius and was trying to find it in your underwear.

’ He shoved the box into the purple bin bag lined with an optimistic lavender scent.

Kitchen drawers slammed as he continued to wade through the takeaway debris. He didn’t want to look. She was probably finding the sharpest carving knife they had.

‘Go on then.’ Her voice was heavy.

He turned and almost dropped the bin bag. She was brandishing a long, bubble-gum pink vibrator like it was a medieval sword.

‘Show me how it’s done. Or I’ll just do it myself.’

He swallowed, crinkling an empty packet of Tim Tams until it was a tiny ball in his fist. ‘You keep your vibrator in the kitchen?’

‘It’s a utensil. Utensils go in the kitchen.’

‘Not exactly sanitary.’ Stupid argument. This entire apartment should be quarantined.

‘Well?’

Jett sighed. Everything he needed to tell her kicked against his chest like he’d buried someone alive in the coffin of his ribcage. ‘Get dressed, Nella.’

She swallowed, her eyes raking from his fist, still squeezing the Tim Tam packet, to his face, where he knew she would always find disappointment, just like everyone else.

She had known him long enough to not flinch at his scar.

But whenever she held his gaze like that, his inner gambler raised its drunken head.

Sometimes he thought he’d go all in – give all the money in the world, his car, his home, his left kidney – to hear the echoes of her thoughts when she looked at him.

Even if it was only to reassure himself that she was just as spoiled and bratty and shallow as everyone thought.

To know she had the same reaction to his scar as the rest of the world.

Her gaze hadn’t left him. ‘No? Fine. I’ll do it myself then.’

It was a challenge. He let the packet drop into the bag. The sound of it uncrinkling woke something inside her and she snarled, pushing past him (the vibrator whacked his stomach) towards the enormous bathroom door.

Which she slammed behind her.