Page 19 of Taken By the Enforcer
When I reach his suite—four-poster bed dressed in white silk, balcony overlooking endless sea—I know the truth.
I am no longer running.
I am caught.
And Donatello Romano intends to make sure I never want to escape again.
“How long will you be gone?”
The question slips out before I can swallow it. It hangs in the sun-washed bedroom between the open balcony doors and the suitcase he hasn’t zipped. Salt air spills through gauzy curtains, carrying the faint thrum of the Mediterranean Sea below the cliffs and the citrus note of lemons from the grove.
Two months on this island have taught me the rhythm of Donatello’s life. He comes. He goes.
Business draws him away overnight, sometimes until dawn, always back before the sun has the nerve to setwithout him. I stay. Staff tends to me like a queen who never asked for a crown—fresh fruit on silver trays, meals tailored to cravings I don’t admit out loud, appointments I never book appearing on a discreet schedule. The obstetrician checks me every week; the nurse visits daily with a calm smile and a blood-pressure cuff. Morning swims smooth the weight from my hips while the baby rolls like a sleepy dolphin in my rounded belly. The pool glitters. The Med welcomes me with cool hands. Afterward, the spa/fitness pavilion claims the hours between lunch and dusk with prenatal massage that loosens the ache beneath my shoulder blades and low-impact yoga and Pilates. All done and taught by trained professionals.
Aside from the kidnapping, Donatello has been good to me. That is a dangerous truth to admit, even in the privacy of my head. No sex. Not once. At night he pulls me into him, and we sleep locked together, his hand splayed across the round of my belly as if he can cradle the baby through skin and bone. Sometimes the length of him hardens along my backside; sometimes the restraint in his body feels like the loudest thing in the room. He never moves beyond holding me. Even though he always could, he doesn’t. The absence breeds want like heat breeds storms.
I haven’t spoken to Mamma. The burner phone lies crushed on a road somewhere. Papà’s anger is a door I refuse to open even in memory. Silence is mercy—distance, survival.
Donatello pauses with his watch in his hand. Dark eyes flick to my face, reading more than I say. “A few days.”
A few days.It hits harder than it should. This will be the first time he’s gone longer than a night.
Surprise blooms into something lonelier than I expect, an ache that starts low and widens until I have to press my palm there to catch it.
“I’ll manage,” I say, because pride is a habit that learned to walk before love knew how to crawl.
“You will,” he agrees, not as a question. He sets the watch on his wrist, then steps in to brush a thumb beneath my eye as if he can smooth the sleeplessness away. “Nora will stay close. The doctor is on call. Security is the same. Swim only when the flags are green. Eat more in the morning. Rest after dinner.” His mouth softens at the corners. “And text me when you want me. I’ll answer.”
“Bossing me from the sky now?” It comes out lighter than I feel.
“Yes.” The word is simple. Then he adds, “And because I want to kiss you before I go.”
He doesn’t wait for permission. Naturally. Lips find mine, warm and steady, a promise pressed into a goodbye.
The kiss is not hunger. It’s claim and comfort and a thousand things I’m not ready to name. My fingers curl in his shirt, anyway. The baby rolls and stills, as if listening.
When he draws back, I breathe him in once more. “Let me walk you.”
The silk kimono waits draped over the chair—cream with a scatter of painted cranes. I slide my arms through, tie the belt over a belly that has outgrown denial. Seven months and every step reminds me I’m carrying a world inside my body. He watches me knot the sash, something like pride moving beneath the iron in his gaze.
He takes my hand as we leave the suite. Marble cools the soles of my feet. The villa sighs around us—lanterns dimmed for morning, a maid’s cart ghosting past a corridor, the scent of espresso whispering from the kitchen. On the terrace, bougainvillea throws fuchsia shadows across the stone. The path to the helipad slices through citrus trees heavy with fruit. He turns there, at the angle where I always stop, and he always assesses distance with a soldier’s eye.
I place a hand on his arm, suddenly not wanting him to leave.
“Be careful,” I whisper.
“Always. I’ll be back before you count too many sunsets,” he says, and the line should make me roll my eyes. It doesn’t. It lands and settles like a pebble tossed into a still pool, ripples spreading.
My hand lifts without thinking. I wave. He hesitates, then does the thing that undoes me. A small, private smile meant only for me. One last look, and he’s walking—dark suit cutting through green, shoulders squared for leaving. Rotor blades begin their slow thunder. Windtears the scent of him from the air and flings my hair across my face. I hold the kimono closed and stand there until the helicopter shrinks to a black insect and then to nothing at all.
The villa is too quiet when I come back inside. Silence folds around me like a heavy robe. Loneliness pricks and sparks into restlessness fast.
A shower first. Maybe heat can rinse want from skin.
Steam fogs the mirrors. Water thunders against travertine, a bright white noise that drowns thought. I brace one hand on the wall and let the other map the territory that used to be only mine—the curve of belly, the slope of hip, the place where my pulse beats faster under my own touch. A sigh slips out before I can catch it. Closing my eyes makes it worse. He is everywhere when I shut out the world. The weight of his palm on my stomach at midnight, the rasp of his morning stubble against the nape of my neck, the inaudible murmur ofbella miawhen he thinks I’m asleep.
Fingers slide lower. Heat flares. I chase relief the way drowning lungs chase air—greedy, grateful, unpretty. The rhythm builds quickly in the shower’s rush, tightens, crests. Pleasure spills through me in soft, shaking waves, water carrying the sound from my mouth away before it can embarrass me.