Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

Bianca

There was no reason to suspect that my life would change that hot, southern night with the arrival of yet another man on my mother’s doorstep.

It started the same as any other Friday night in the Belcante household. My mother, Aida, was in her bathroom with her hair up in fat pink rollers doing her face in the reflection of the old-school Hollywood-style vanity we’d been able to salvage from our old house. Frank Sinatra crooned loudly from the rickety record player perched on the edge of her pink bathtub. I knew all the words to all his songs by heart, and I was sick of them.

As sick of her favorite love songs as I was sick of her countless rotation of lovers.

It had been exactly one month since she kicked the last one to the curb, but she was already dating a new man.

Even at forty-five years old, my mother was unusually striking. The combination of her deeply tanned olive-toned skin, a gift from her Italian father, with her pale cloud of curled blonde hair, and dark blue eyes was instantly arresting. And then there was her body. Curved like Venus in Botticelli’s famous painting, Aida Belcante had been dressing to highlight her lush form since she was just a girl and middle age had only perfected her style.

I sat beside the record player on the rim of the bathtub and watched her apply powder to her cheeks with a fluffy brush, wondering how many hours in her life she must have spent beautifying herself for men, but I was too lazy to do the math.

“Brandon had an episode today,” I reminded her lightly, because if she sensed a “tone” to my words, she became irrationally angry with me for back-talking. Every good Italian girl knows back-talking is the familial equivalent of blasphemy. “He’s really weak. I think he’d love it if you wanted to stay home tonight and watch Marvel movies with him.”

Mom laughed, light and feminine, as curated as the notes in the Chanel perfume she sparingly spritzed to each wrist and pulse point on her neck. It was the last of the bottle my father had given her, and she’d already watered it down as much as she dared.

“Bianca, cara mia, this is why he is so very lucky to have you in his life,” she praised dramatically, doing a half-twirl to face me, her pink-painted lips puckered as she blew me a kiss. “You are such a saint.”

It was a Friday night, I was seventeen years old, and I was spending yet another evening at home with my seven-year-old brother. It didn’t depress me as much as it might have if I hadn’t spent my whole life caring for Brandon as if he were my own kid. In a life that hadn’t given me much, God or something like it had seen fit to give me the best brother in the entire world.

So, I wasn’t angry with my mom for saddling me with babysitting duty again.

I was angry with her for not giving a single shit that Brandon had another seizure, the second in as many weeks. They were happening with increasing frequency, and we desperately needed to get him to a specialist, but we didn’t have the money for one.

“If you stayed home some nights, I could get better hours at the diner,” I suggested. “We could afford some new dresses, maybe another bottle of Chanel.”

And a visit to a specialist,I didn’t say aloud.

Aida paused, as I knew she would. Nothing intrigued her more than money and beautiful things.

Not for the first time or even the thousandth, I wondered what my father had ever seen in her beyond her pretty face and form. He’d been terribly flawed himself, but at least he’d been a man of substance.

“Don’t worry yourself, cara, you’ll get wrinkles. Besides, I have everything under control. This man I’ve been seeing, he’s very wealthy.”

I rolled my eyes as she turned back to the mirror and began to carefully unroll her hair from the curlers, fat sections of honeyed blonde falling around her full breasts.

She was always trying to fix our problems by hooking up with some man who would inevitably spoil her, love her for a time, and then leave her heartbroken and destitute once more.

It was a series of bandages over a gaping wound.

I didn’t have much time to study between working at the diner and taking care of Brando, but I had straight As and I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity so that I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a scholarship to a university somewhere.

No man was going to fix our problems in the end.

I was.

“Just because he’s wealthy doesn’t mean he’ll share that wealth with us,” I pointed out mildly as I picked at the chipped navy-blue nail polish on my thumb.

Aida laughed again; the tone indulgent as if she was just placating her silly daughter.

Between the two of us, I was not the silly one, but again, I knew it was pointless to argue with her. She’d been living her life in the exact same pattern since before she met my father. It was fruitless to expect change now.

“He’s from New York City,” she continued in her fluttery, breathy way. “He owns multiple Fortune 500 companies, and he comes here often for business.”

I frowned. We lived in a town the same size and relevance as a wet spot on a map of Texas. There was no reason for someone to visit unless they were involved with the oil and gas industry or they were passing through.

I knew it was unlikely this man could be doing business in the area because the city was dominated by a single company.

And that company was owned by the Constantine empire.

And Aida, despite her flightiness, would never date another Constantine even if they were wealthy and available.

Not after the last Constantine ruined her life.

There was a knock at the door.

Three hard, staccato raps against the wood that sounded to me like a death toll ringing.

“Cara, answer that for me, would you?” Aida purred as she fluffed her hair, then discarded her silk robe, revealing an old, but meticulously cared-for La Perla corset and stocking set in the deepest red. “Invite him in.”

She didn’t have to tell me that she liked to keep her men waiting a little longer to build the anticipation before she revealed herself in all her made-up glory. This was a song and dance we’d been preforming since Dad died five years ago.

Still, I gritted my teeth as I turned on my heel to do her bidding, muttering under my breath. I was distracted by my irritation, the hot spike of it in my blood like lactic acid making my hands shake as I opened the front door off the kitchen to let in another in a long line of my mother’s lovers.

So, I wasn’t prepared for the sight that awaited me.

The sight of a man cloaked in shadow because our front porch light had been out for months, and no one cared enough to change the bulb. He wore the darkness like a mantle over his broad shoulders, a king of some underworld place. There were diamonds at his cuffs, a glittering silver watch with gems embedded in the face at his tanned wrist, and a single, exquisite red rose in one tattooed hand. The expression on his fierce, roughly hewn features was regal, cold, and haughty. He looked down his hawkish nose at me as if he was deigning to grace me, a mere mortal, with his presence, but he wasn’t happy about it.

I swallowed thickly, struck dumb by the sight of a man for the first time in my life.

It wasn’t his beauty that did it, even though there was no doubt his strong features beneath the olive-toned skin, his height and considerable bulk, his thick, artfully mussed black hair were all beautiful enough to make a painter weep. Aida had dated beautiful men before and they’d never impacted me so powerfully.

It was that look in his pale green eyes.

A look that said, I dare you to sin.

A look that welcomed your darkest desires.

A look that hooked through my gut and pulled me just a little step closer so I might smell his scent—smoky and warm—so that I might trace the exact path of the scar puckering the skin from his left ear to the corner of his mouth.

“Have you ever heard of personal space?”

I blinked, momentarily mute and dumb, the sight of him dominating every other one of my senses. So it took me a second to realize he was insulting me in a voice dripping with poisonous disdain.

I blinked again as my mouth dropped into a shocked “O.” “Excuse me?”

One inky brow rose, thick and slashing so that he had a perpetual expression of aggravated contempt. When he spoke, it was slow and overly enunciated as if he were addressing an imbecile.

“Per-son-al sp-ace.” One tattooed hand, the one with the shiny watch, gestured dismissively between our bodies, his knuckles brushing my chest. There was a tightening to his flat mouth that made me wonder if it was as accidental as it seemed.

My nipples beaded beneath my hoodie, but the fabric was too thick to betray me.

Anger sparked through my blood like a delayed fuse, heat racing out from my heart to set my entire body on fire. I didn’t move back. In fact, I took one daring step closer and fisted my hands on my hips. My head was forced back at an awkward angle to maintain eye contact with the tall beast of a man, but I didn’t care.

This jackass was not going out with my mother.

I bared my teeth at him. “If this is how you normally greet your girlfriend’s family, it’s no wonder you were still single when you met my mother and it’s even less of a wonder why you’ll be single again after tonight.”

A slow grin, somehow more vicious for its calculated movement, claimed his handsome face and made it acutely beautiful. “You are operating under the assumption that Aida cares enough about your opinion to end our relationship because you’re embarrassed I caught you making a pass at me.”

My mouth flapped open, then closed. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. Never in my entire life had I faced such a rude, horrible man.

“Making a pass at you?” I almost stomped my foot in outrage and just managed to resist the urge. “You show up at our doorstep and speak like this to a teenager? What kind of man needs to put down a little girl in order to make himself feel big, hmm?”

“At least you acknowledge you are a little girl,” he said with faux pride. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t give a single fuck what you think of me. I’m dating your mother. Not you.” His pale gaze, a green so light they glowed almost unnaturally, seemed to burrow into me. Past my dark blue eyes straight into my brain, reading my thoughts like an X-ray machine read bones. “Though, it’s obvious you wish things were different.”

Outrage crackled in my chest, my lungs steaming with it, my ribs creaking as they threatened to cave in on the fiery rage in my heart.

I was a fairly good-looking girl though I knew I was no Aida Belcante. Still, enough of her boyfriends had hit on me when she wasn’t looking. They cupped my ass while I reached for a cereal bowl, complimented me lecherously at the pool, watched me walk to my room when I came out of the shower. They were all the same, eager for some woman to make them feel like a king. So, his comment rankled me more than it should have.

I’d dealt with innumerable men in my mother’s life, but never someone like him.

A demon in a suit more expensive than three months’ rent.

I gathered myself, rising to my full five-foot-three height as I pinned him with a look I wished ardently had the power to kill him.

“I wouldn’t date a jackass like you if you were the last goddamn man on the planet.”

He stared down at me, utterly unmoved, his perfect, stupid face a study in symmetry. “I don’t date little girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with me and I don’t have the patience to teach bumbling virgins. Now, be useful and go get your mother for me.”

“You know I’ll tell my mother you treated me this way,” I warned through my teeth.

His blink was a slow-motion condemnation of my character. “Yes. I expect little girls to tattle.”

“Oh, you’re here,” my mother called in her breathy tone from somewhere behind me. “Bianca, don’t make the poor man stay out in the cold.”

I hesitated, staring into those fathomless eyes as cold and pale as the Arctic tundra and I wondered what kind of monster my mother was asking me to invite into our home.

“Bianca!” she reprimanded.

I was seventeen, nine months away from freedom, but years ahead of my peers in maturity because I’d stopped being a kid the moment my little brother was diagnosed with epilepsy four years ago. I had been Brando’s primary caregiver since he was born because Aida wasn’t exactly maternal and we didn’t have the money for a nanny the way we did when I was young, yet the law said because she was older, because she had spent a few hours pushing us out of her vagina, she deserved to make life choices for the two lives she barely noticed most days.

Which was why I’d started referring to her as “Aida” instead of “Mom” in my head when I hit puberty and realized I had to take responsibility for Brando and me.

She brought men into our lives without any thought to us.

Men who hit on me. Men who ridiculed Brando for peeing his pants after some of his seizures. Men who treated Aida like pretty garbage, something to own and use without any need for niceties.

It was irritating and deeply unfair.

But I was used to it.

So, I didn’t argue with her even though I wanted to slam the door in the cold, arrogant face of the man at our door because I had that feeling. The kind you get in the base of your belly when you know something is wrong, the kind that raises the hairs on the back of your neck when a storm is an electric beat in the air minutes before it descends.

I shot one more glare at her latest conquest and stepped aside to let him into our home.

Into our lives.

The grin he shot me was a brief, brilliant flash of white teeth between firm lips. It was…triumphant. Mean. The smile of a marauder invited warmly into the village he intended to pillage.

A shiver bit vicious teeth into the base of my back and rattled my spine.

“Aida,” he said, shifting his focus from me to my mother, his entire face suffused with new warmth. “You look beautiful, but I do not know why I am surprised. You always take my breath away.”

I turned to watch him approach her, kissing her suavely on both cheeks, one tattooed hand light on her hip. The inked hands were such a contrast to his otherwise civilized veneer that I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, trying to discern the black ink patterns. The only image clear to me was the outline of an exquisite rose planted in the center of his left hand, the same hand that held a rose for my mother.

Aida blushed like a preteen girl at his praise. “You’re a dangerous man. If you aren’t careful, I’ll develop a complex.”

I snorted before I could curb my reaction, drawing their attention to me.

Aida frowned at me, then quickly affixed a smile to her face, addressing her boyfriend. “You brought me a rose?”

He lifted the single stem between them, twirling it between two fingers so that the lamplight caught the velvet petals and made them shine like blood.

“A perfect rose for a perfect woman.”

I covered my gag with a cough.

My mother didn’t buy it.

“Bianca, be a good girl and come take the rose from Tiernan. Put it in some water for me while I grab my coat,” she directed me as she moved away to gather her things.

I fought against the urge to roll my eyes and nearly lost the battle. Bitterness coated the back of my tongue as I trudged forward to take the rose.

From Tiernan.

Tiernan.

When I looked up the strange name later, I learned it meant lord.

Of course, it did.

He stared down his nose at me as imperiously as I extended my hand to take the flower. For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t give it to me.

“Don’t get any ideas, little girl,” he said quietly, his voice a rough rasp of sound that my mother couldn’t hear over her delighted humming farther down the hallway. “This is the only time you’ll ever receive a present from me. You’ll need to look elsewhere to satisfy your daddy issues.”

I gasped so sharply the air pierced my throat like a knife. “You arrogant, conceited ass.”

He dipped low, his scent wafting over me in a cloud of dark, almost smoky fragrance. It conjured images of burning forests and ash falling from the sky like silver rain.

“You think I am arrogant because you know I am better than you and it hurts your pride. I am wealthier, more attractive, more powerful than you could ever dream of being. You think I am conceited because I refuse to hide behind false modesty.” He swooped even lower, a predatory bird descending for the kill. When he spoke, his breath was hot against my ear. “Don’t worry, little thing, I only devolve the more you get to know me. It’s too bad you won’t have that opportunity.”

I gaped at him as he pulled away, then jerked as he took my limply offered hand in his grasp and forcibly curled my fingers around the stem of the rose. Pain burst across my flesh. A hiss streamed through my clenched teeth.

He hadn’t dethorned the rose.

I stared at our joined hands, his deeply tanned skin bisected with deep black lines of script written in Latin. My own hand, small, almost totally consumed by the breadth of his grasp. Slowly, scarlet blood seeped between our fingers and rolled down my wrist.

My gaze snapped up to his.

He was smiling.

A thin, mocking expression more like a knife wound than a grin.

“Why are you like this?” I asked softly before I could help myself.

I was too shocked, too deeply impacted by the absurd contrast between his scarred beauty and his blatant cruelty to maintain my composure.

His white teeth winked at me as his mean smile widened briefly, then collapsed. “Because, Bianca Laney Belcante, no one is going to stop me.”