Page 140 of Vows of a Mobster

“Come on, princess. Let’s find a dessert before dinner.,” Marissa ushered her back to our private area outside, in the back of the restaurant.

I caught Declan’s lingering gaze after Marissa and had to suppress my smile, despite this fucked up, tense situation. Yes, he was smitten.

“Yes, leukemia,” I finally answered the old woman’s question, meeting her gaze. I tilted my head to all of them. “Enjoy your dinner.”

I pushed my hand into Mateo’s and turned my eyes to him. “Ready?”

Forty-Nine

Mateo

Declan fucking O'Connor. I couldn’t stand his eyes on Brianna, I didn’t want him anywhere near her. I knew all about his tastes, and from the first day he saw her, I saw that gleaming interest in his eyes. He wanted her.

“Mateo,” Brianna’s voice pulled me back. Her hand squeezed mine, and her arm nudged me. “Are you okay?”

She was shaken up, found herself in the middle of twenty men that pulled out guns on each other and she was asking me if I was okay. Fuck, it was wrong of me to do this to her and her daughter, but I refused to let her go. She was the reason I had survived all these years, weathering the storms, when the odds were against me… I had been waiting for her.

Her shaking hands as she lifted Emma into her arms, the fear in her eyes when she saw her little daughter in the middle of an almost warzone. I was trying to protect them.

Liar. You are trying to keep her. Protecting her is just an excuse. You can protect her without marrying her.

I didn’t give a shit. Yes, I was a hypocrite. She was mine.

“Yes,” I answered her. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” she muttered and then caught my look. “Okay, maybe a bit. Declan is a bit of a jackass.”

I grinned at that description. I completely agreed. “Total jackass. But he wants you.”

“No, he doesn’t,” she replied without an ounce of doubt. “He is just taunting you.”

I scoffed. “Trust me, amore. That man wants you. Whether just for a taste or to watch you, he wants you.”

Her eyebrows wrinkled. “Watch me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I ended the conversation. “Because I’ll kill him if he gets within a foot of you.”

Her hands wrapped around my waist. “That sounds good to me. Just don’t let him taunt you. I fully intend to have mind blowing orgasms with you for the next fifty years.”

Antonio stifled a choke behind us and Brianna’s face turned bright red as she noticed him. Sometimes her observance, or lack of it, scared the shit out of me.

“Fuck, Antonio,” she muttered. “What are you doing back there?”

He cleared his throat. “Watching your back.”

She brought her palm to her cheek, embarrassment written all over her face. “Please tell me you heard nothing.”

There was amusement in his eyes, but he kept his face expressionless. “I heard nothing.”

She didn’t believe him but said nothing. The next moment, a bustle of life surrounded us. It was a small dinner for the most important people in my family on the night before the wedding. Of course, Brianna didn’t think it was small. I caught her muttering a few times under her breath,It’s too crowded.

It was intriguing. Now that I knew she grew up in the spotlight, as a stepdaughter of a senator, it was peculiar that she didn’t like crowds, nor being in the middle of it. She frequently attended state events and dinners. I went through Antonio’s file, everything he found. Her pictures were in the papers often, either as a promising next ballerina star or as a daughter of a prominent and distinguished senator.

I knew she was an amazing dancer, from the moment I saw her performing at the Boston Opera House. But even that didn’t prepare me for some of her performances she had done throughout her life. I watched several videos offered by the Ballet schools, using her past stage performances as tutorials to younger generations. She was a goddess on stage, in any role she played. It took my breath away, watching her dance. In one of the videos, she had a dual role of Odette and Odile, her technique and emotions in perfect harmony. The headlines called it a masterpiece; the young ballerina brought the perfect balance between good and evil onto the stage and delivered. It was a firsthand confirmation that all the praises about her were true. She moved gracefully and effortlessly, as if she floated, dancing; a euphoria on her face that made you watch mesmerized. So young but there was such weight on her shoulders.

The political coverage of her was not always gentle. The opposing political parties didn’t stop at attacking only her stepfather, they often made her a target too. The pictures snapped of young Brianna on the political scene, alongside her stepfather and mother, showed an entirely different young woman. The first picture of her in the newspaper was when she was five, at her mother’s wedding to the senator. Strangely, her little frame hid behind her stepfather, gripping his pant leg. Kind of like she gripped my sleeve when she was nervous. It told me her mother was never there for her, even as a small child.

There weren’t any pictures of her for a while. The speculation was that the senator kept her out of the spotlight to allow her to have privacy. But then slowly, her pictures became more and more frequent. She rarely smiled, looking reserved and disinterested, her eyes distant. And again, she was mostly by her stepdad’s side. The only photo that I saw of her laughing, true happiness on her face, was captured during some sailing trip alongside her stepfather. They called her a very accomplished sailor.