Page 3 of I Would Beg For You
“What?” I blink, tearing my attention from his resting form.
“Give you the impression I didn’t want to see you again.” He pauses, the moment loaded with tension. “I’d have thought you’d come back for the summers, settling back in your bedroom, wearing those tiny shorts and crop tops I could totally see from my bedroom window next door.”
A wave of mortification rushes in hotly. I did do that, especially the next day after he’d snuck in a lithe, model-like bimbo into his bedroom and I caught glimpses of what he was doing to her body before he would turn around, look across the window, then close the curtains.
I always pictured a little half-smile when he caught me staring from across, and it wasn’t my imagination because I’d seen it plenty. He had a girl in almost every day, and these changed every week, it seemed back then. And with each girl I would see him bring into his room, my imagination ran wild with despair, and my heart took untold beatings.
“I was away at college and not whiling my summers away like some people.” He always came back home for breaks—spring,summer, Christmas. “If you need to know, I interned all over to gain experience in policy and governing offices to get the experience needed to work for my father.”
His face tenses when I mention my dad. And yes, there it is—that small muscle ticking away in his left cheek. Definitely more prominent now his face has grown leaner with age. Guess this is still a trigger for him, me mentioning my father. It’s the same the other way round, too, I know.
“Anyway, I worked for the Board of the County Commissioners last summer. This and everything else will look great on my resume,” I continue, happy to have shut him up and wiped that sardonic smile off his face.
“You really think ‘I worked for my daddy and his political frenemies’ is going to get you hired?” Valentino throws this out with a deep laugh.
Experience is experience, and it’s who you know that moves people across the checkerboard in the governing world. All these contacts will come in handy when I set out on my own path in the policy-making world.
Something makes me look at the man across from me, a sudden chill in the air.
Indeed, his face is stone-cold sober, eyes like glittering rocks.
“You’re never making it out from under your father’s thumb. You know that. He is grooming you to be his life-long puppet.”
More than the words themselves, the venom they’re coated in sinks into me and makes my stomach roil.
Who does he think he is?
“Last I checked, you work for your father, too.”
“My father is dead. I work for no one but myself.”
I’m sorry. The words are there on the tip of my tongue, but they don’t make it out. Iamsorry. Valentino, his brothers, his sister Francesca—they lost a rock when their father passed. Forthem, he was their dad. Never mind what he did outside the home.
Thinking of that hardens my heart.
“Ah, yes. The family business. You all have graduated to what, now? Racketeering? Smuggling? Murder for hire? Good, honest work it is, right?”
His eyes narrow, a dark glint appearing in them. Yes, I am pushing him. Everyone knows what Marcello Andretti was about. It’s a hush-hush M-word, and the world’s best-kept secret it was not. Said world rejoiced when he was killed.
Still, he was Valentino’s father, and family is everything to the Andrettis. I might not see eye-to-eye with my dad all the time, but I would be devastated if anything happened to him. That’s family.
“There’s no such thing as an honest politician, Naomi. So, since you studied to be one, I guess you’re not exactly into good, honest work, either.”
The bastard. He thinks he could throw this at me? My dad married my mom for money, yes, but his dealings have always been the opposite of shady. He got into politics to do good.
“At least I haven’t killed anyone,” I snap back.
Nor gotten anyone killed.
“Yet,” he states, one side of his lips curling up in that half-smile again.
I narrow my eyes on him. He’s definitely the person who will make me cross that line—I can already picture myself throttling him. Not just for what he just said, but for stealing my heart and making me burn for him all this time.
Valentino Andretti is an— “Asshole.”
He chuckles. “You have it in you. You’re an ambitious little thing, after all.”
This. Sexy as all get out he may be, but what did I ever see in him? Did I not look beyond the outward appearance, into the nothingness that exists inside this man?
