Page 28 of Sin City Obsession (De Salvo Empire #1)

Chapter fourteen

Choices

Rocco couldn’t bring himself to crawl out of bed when he woke.

There were so many things they needed to talk about, really, and for as sore as he felt in the moment, he knew damn well he’d get distracted if they tried talking naked.

He hadn’t had such poor self-control in years.

But he wanted to hold her. He wanted to stay near her, and to watch the way the silk bedsheet shifted oh-so-subtly with her every soft, steady breath.

Alessa was gorgeous in sleep, of course. Her hair was still a mess from the way she’d undulated beneath him the night before, and most of the marks he’d left across her neck and shoulders had faded in the hours since they’d collapsed. Most.

Rocco felt a possessive grin lift his lips as his wandering eye spotted at least two remaining.

One where he’d bit down on the outer curve of her unblemished shoulder, and one where he’d sucked a quality hickey over her pulse point.

Good. Both spots were temporary, but at least she would be wearing his mark somewhere for the majority of the day.

And he’d certainly enjoy rebranding her later.

His gaze continued to travel over her, his eyes drinking in her barely tanned complexion and her perfectly shaped nose. There wasn’t a damn thing about her he didn’t find attractive.

The grin faltered, dropping into a frown as his eye snagged on the phones on the bedside table Alessa had brought in from the bathroom in the middle of the night. He supposed there was one thing, but it wasn’t physical.

She still thought she was beholden to another man.

Two weeks. He had two weeks to show her otherwise. Two weeks to prove to her that she belonged with him, to him, and only him.

He didn’t give a fuck about histories. He would never tell her she couldn’t go back to New Jersey for a casual visit, considering everyone she knew lived there, but her future was Las Vegas.

Her future was him . He knew it. He just had to get her to see it.

And disappointing though it was, he was smart enough to realize that would require more than simply getting her hooked on his dick .

Actually… That wasn’t the worst angle.

Moving carefully, Rocco replaced the arm she’d been lying on with a pillow, placed a soft kiss to her forehead, and slipped from the bed.

He found a pair of sweatpants in his walk-in closet to step into, then padded quietly from the room and down the stairs.

He didn’t bother taking either phone—hers was likely dead, but his was plugged in and usable.

If she woke up, the presence of his phone would assure her he wasn’t far.

As he’d expected, her things were waiting in the foyer.

He still had mixed feelings about having let someone else pack her stuff, but since she was likely to insist on moving out of the free suite now that her job was done anyway, this was easier than arguing over where she stayed next.

It also made his new goal much more achievable.

He lucked out, finding a smaller toiletry container—not really a bag—packed inside the large bag-like case she’d probably used as a carry-on on the plane.

And inside that, as he’d known he would, he found pills in foil packs, enough for two months’ worth.

She couldn’t possibly have thought she’d take that long.

Maybe she just always kept them in this thing?

It didn’t matter, regardless.

Rocco extracted the packs and resecured the toiletry kit back into the larger bag.

Then he carried the foil packs over to the lower-level bathroom, shut the door behind him, and methodically began popping each pill into the toilet.

She’d barely started on the first pack, he noted, and of course the second was untouched.

Until he got to it. It only took a minute for the nearly two months’ worth of contraception to be dissolving in the toilet water, and while he flushed that, he dropped the empty foils into the garbage.

On top of those he deposited some random things he surely didn’t need and didn’t know why he kept in the bathroom vanity.

Including a pack of condoms he would definitely not be using anytime soon.

He felt a small twinge reminiscent of guilt as he exited the bathroom, but shoved it aside.

Even if she was angry at first, Alessa would forgive him. She would understand and forgive him.

He was set to ascend as the head of the family by summer’s end and he was under more pressure than ever to think about the future.

As things stood, he was the last Cavallo in the States.

He had a distant cousin, female, about a decade younger, flitting about in Europe.

She thought she’d disowned the family when she’d hit eighteen and they were content letting her believe that.

But if Rocco didn’t provide an heir, sooner or later there would be a lot of in-fighting.

Rocco’s problem was that he didn’t just want to provide an heir. He wanted everything, the whole damn package. And he wanted it with Alessa. She was the perfect fucking queen to his king.

His thoughts—and his footsteps—derailed when his perfect queen let out a heartbreaking wail that ripped through the silence of the penthouse.

In the next instant, he was moving faster than he’d moved in years.

He sprinted through the space between himself and the stairs, practically leapt up the stairs themselves, and had to catch himself with a hand on the wall as his bare feet skidded across the floor when he rounded into the bedroom.

There couldn’t possibly have been an intruder, not unless the person had been lying in wait for hours while they slept, waiting for them to be separate. But the fear was there regardless.

The relief he should have felt at seeing her unharmed, alone, and sitting upright in the bed barely flickered.

It couldn’t, not beneath the simultaneous recognition of the way she shook and the way she was bent in on herself.

She wasn’t sitting upright, in fact. She had sat up and then bent forward, curling almost into a ball. And she was crying.

“Alessa,” Rocco called, gentling his voice as much as he could manage while he tried to get himself back under control.

He moved swiftly across the bed, more or less reclaiming his abandoned spot.

“Alessa, beautiful, what happened?” He reached out and laid his fingers softly over her exposed shoulder blade.

She stiffened for a second, then sniffled audibly before slowly straightening. She kept the sheet pulled tight to her chest. “S-sorry,” she whispered.

The answer slammed into him.

“I didn’t have any nightmares. Or wake up screaming, or sobbing.”

This was what she’d meant. This was what she endured, every day, for whatever reason it was she hadn’t been able to articulate in that diner.

Rocco pulled her into his arms, hauling her completely into his lap and tucking her head beneath his chin.

He reached down and lifted the sheet she’d dropped in her surprise back up, letting it enshroud her from the opposite side.

But he kept one arm tight around her directly, skin on skin, and didn’t let her shy away from him.

“Shh,” he murmured into her hair as he bent his head.

“I’m here, beautiful. You’re not alone.”

Alessa gasped, the sound wet and painful. She twisted, her hands clawing over his shoulders as she burrowed her face into the groove of his neck, and a shuddering sob wracked her frame.

He wished like hell he knew what was breaking her inside, but this was obviously not the time to push for explanations.

So he held her tighter and let her cry out whatever it was she’d seen in her dreams, whether it was memory or imagined phobia.

And he prayed it was something he could kill for her.

“Rocco, no. This is too much.” She meant what she said as strongly as she hoped he’d argue, but that was a truth Alessa wasn’t wholly comfortable acknowledging even to herself.

The last thing she’d expected when they’d come downstairs after her nightmare-fueled sob fest was to find her stuff— all of her stuff, near as she could tell—carefully stacked in the foyer. It didn’t take a genius, or even a cup of coffee, to figure out what he was thinking.

“How?”

Alessa opened her mouth, but too many half-formed responses swarmed her brain.

She lowered herself onto the eat-in island seat Rocco had previously pulled out for her.

“It’s two weeks,” she said, as if thinking aloud.

“I understand I can’t monopolize the suite for that length of time, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to—”

“Let me stop you right there.” Rocco set a steaming mug of delicious-smelling coffee beside her, simultaneously stepping up to crowd her space.

He flattened a palm on the island top, grabbed hold of the low back of the chair she sat in, and leaned forward until their noses nearly touched.

“You need to listen better. There’s no obligation involved, beautiful. ”

Alessa blinked hard and pressed her lips together for a long second. “Excuse me?”

He smiled and angled his head to brush a kiss over her cheek. The movement was soft, but too indulgent and too drawn-out to be mistaken as anything other than intentional. Then his eyes were locked with hers again. “ Mine ,” he said, a roughened edge slipping into his voice.

The breath caught in her chest. He couldn’t possibly mean that the way it sounded—the way he’d said it the night before.

Her mind flashed instantly back to how he’d found her in bed barely an hour prior, sobbing and shaking and pathetic.

Shameful. He’d held her, he’d comforted her, and she’d collapsed against him like some weeping flower.

She appreciated the response he’d offered in the moment, but she was no fool.

Men like him had no lasting interest in women like her who were only being held together on the outside by cheap stick-glue.