Page 123 of Ruthless Daddy
Pietro Scordato.
He set the pen down.
He looked at me across the paper.
The collar was at my throat.
The ring was on my hand.
The room was very warm.
He stood.
He held out his hand.
I took it.
He led me through a second door at the back of the small room and into a bedroom that was somehow both larger and quieter than the room we had left.
Low ceiling. Dark wood. A single lamp at a low setting. A bed against the far wall that was wider than any bed I had ever slept in, with linen the color of old paper and a heavy duvet folded back at the foot. A small fireplace with a real fire in it that someone had laid earlier in the evening and lit at some hour that made the wood already glowing by the time we walked in. No window. The walls were thick. The door, when he closed it behind us, made the kind of sound a door made when it had been built to keep sound on the inside of itself.
We were alone.
We were finally, completely alone.
He set the leather folder on a small table by the door. The new contract was inside it now, the ink still drying, the two signatures fresh under the lamp. He closed the folder. He turned the lock.
He came to me.
He stopped in front of me. He put both his hands on either side of my face, the way he had on a morning eight months ago in his kitchen, and he tilted my chin up, and he leaned down, and he kissed my forehead.
The same kiss. Exactly the same kiss. The same place on my skin, the same pressure of his mouth, the same slow lift away.
The first time he had done it, the night I had signedAngelaalone on a piece of paper in his guest room, he had stepped back from me afterward and said, very softly,not yet. We do this right.
But tonight, he did not step back.
He stayed.
He kept his hands on my face and his forehead against mine and he said, very quietly, in the same voice he had used that other night, the same exact register:
“Now, baby.”
I closed my eyes.
“Now.”
I felt it land—the small private flip, the same gesture turned inside out, the man who had walked away replaced by the man who would not.
His mouth came down to mine.
He kissed me the way he had been kissing me for eight months—slow, attentive, the lower lip first, the patient mapping of a man who had decided that this particular act was not something he was going to rush, ever, in his life. The collar at my throat moved a fraction when I tilted my head up. He felt it. His thumb came down and traced the gold along the front of my neck—once, slowly, end to end—and the touch went through me down to the floor.
“Look at you,” he said. Against my mouth.
“Pietro.”
“My girl.”
