Sleep stayed away as the hours passed, even though I felt utterly drained and beyond exhausted. I had my hands laced behind my head, staring at the ceiling, listening to the logs burn. I kept the fire going all night but let it burn low. The firelight glow fit my somber mood. Especially when the wind kicked up after two in the morning.
The wound in my shoulder throbbed, made worse because I went easy on the painkillers. The wind howled and rattled the windows like a demon trying to get inside. And I couldn’t sleep because my thoughts were all on Sofia. I closed my eyes and I saw her face. I swore I could hear her voice in my mind.
You have it so bad for her, you stupid bastard…
Yeah. Maybe I did. That didn’t mean ending things with her hadn’t been the right decision.
Sofia was in the master bedroom, in that big bed alone. Thinking about her in my arms again was trouble I didn’t need. It either left me feeling this empty, yearning ache to hold her again, to look into her eyes, to see her smile, or it led to me remembering how beautiful she’d looked naked. How she’d tasted. How soft her lips had been, how smooth her skin, like warm satin under my hands. Those kinds of thoughts left me aching somewhere far lower than my chest with a raging hard-on that only she could cure.
Too bad I’d doubled down on driving her away. What good was playing the noble hero if it left you alone?
No, I’d made the right choice. This had to happen. I kept justifying it to myself. Sofia was a fucking med school student. She wanted to be a doctor. The world needed more doctors. It needed more people like her and far fewer people like me. That wasn’t me having emo self-esteem issues. It was me being goddamn honest.
Sofia deserved better than a guy like me, and it killed me to admit it. She deserved a man who wouldn’t drag her into danger. Some guy who would grow old with her and give her a swanky life—or at least a life where she didn’t have to feel afraid.
Yeah, I already hated that lucky bastard.
I wanted her to be mine.
Selfish. Impossible. Even if she could tolerate my bullshit, I’d eventually have to explain to my mom whose daughter she was. My mom had gone through enough. She didn’t need her second-born son falling in love with the daughter of the man who’d killed one of her children. It sounded like a goddamn soap opera.
I got off the couch, paced the room, and put another log on the fire. I sat on the stone hearth, enjoying the warmth against my skin. The wind kept howling, and the house creaked and groaned. Exhaustion made me feel sluggish but restless. I felt the need to do something, but I didn’t know what, and I was too tired to pull it off even if I did.
Sofia. It kept coming back to her.
I wanted her. I wanted her to be mine. It wasn’t just that she was as beautiful as hell. Plenty of women were gorgeous. I found her stunning and had since the first time I’d laid eyes on her…with my gun in her face.
The fact that she was here with me after all she’d endured was incomprehensible to me. I teased her by calling her “Princess,” but she was anything but a spoiled royal. She was strong, brave, and smart. Smarter than I was—I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
She’d been nothing but polite to my mother and to my brothers. Even to Ryan, who couldn’t help acting like a douchebag sometimes.
Sofia could keep a secret and did so gracefully. When I’d strolled through the door bleeding, she hadn’t hesitated and rushed to patch me up. Helping people was important to her. Yeah, her family might be rich, and she lived in a penthouse on her daddy’s dime and used his money to pay for school, but she wanted to become a doctor, she wanted to heal people, and she didn’t shy away from getting her hands bloody.
The problem was that Sofia got her hands bloody fixing wounds while I got my hands bloody making them. She proved that people were complex creatures with flaws and strengths. I had no right to judge her. But better than that, she hadn’t judged me. Or if she had, it hadn’t kept her away from me.
And as much as I might hate to admit it, the only reason for someone like Sofia to tolerate me, much less accept me, was because of her father. Don Giovanni Accardo, head of a crime syndicate. She didn’t call me out on what I did because she wasn’t a hypocrite.
Didn’t that make her perfect for me, no matter what bad blood remained between her family and mine? Fuck her father. This was about Sofia. I needed to stop playing games and be honest with myself.
Was I willing to put my brother’s murder behind me in order to have the woman I knew I could come to love? That’s if I didn’t already love her, because it sure fucking felt that way. Could I let Cal’s death go and be Sofia’s man, protect her, love her, and make her mine?
Yeah, I could.
Cal was dead. If Giovanni Accardo were right here in front of me and I had my pistol, I’d put a bullet in his head. And another for what he’d done to my mother, killing her firstborn.
But what if I manned up and fucking lefteverythingbehind to get what I wanted, what I needed? Was Sofia worth more than what I had now? What about my family? Did I lose a woman who was wonderful and perfect for me, or did I leave my family behind and go with Sofia? Because we would never be able to stay on the East Coast after all that had happened. There was too much stolen money and too much blood.
Would Sofia be willing to give up everything and come with me?
I left the fireplace with that question haunting me and walked to the front window. I peeked outside at the darkness. The trees were bending and shaking in the wind, victims of the storm.
It was an ugly night. A good night to be inside. Hell, a good night to have a woman in your arms. But my woman was sleeping alone with the door shut.
I needed to change that.
I crossed the cabin for the hallway before checking myself. Waking her from sleep, pouring out my heart, and asking her to change her life forever for me was not a good idea right now. I was too exhausted, physically and mentally, to make sense, and too much was riding on saying the perfect words. I couldn’t risk it. Not yet. Not after hurting her so badly.
Slowly, I walked back to the couch, my burst of resolve draining away as fast as it had rushed into me. The more I thought about it, the crazier the two of us together seemed to be. Which only made me want it more. But what did you do when something important was on the line?
