“Don.” My second-in-command opens my office door and hesitates. “I found the girl—”
I jolt as I see Taggie behind him, wearing an oversized T-shirt and a pair of baggy leggings with seemingly nothing else. Her curly hair is tousled and a bit fluffy, like a blonde halo.
It’s barely seven in the morning. I thought she’d sleep for hours more.
Her gaze zeroes in on me as though we’re connected, and I have to suppress a jolt as I remember standing over her in the darkness last night, fisting my cock until I came with a low groan of hollow satisfaction.
Just being near her was a turn-on, and it is now too.
“Come in, bambola.” I can’t stop looking at my girl as she creeps forwards.
Most people’s eyes are drawn straight to the row of windows behind me that look out onto the River Thames and parkland on the other side. Taggie just looks at me.
“Thank you for bringing her to me, Gavino. That will be all.”
Gavino nods, his brow furrowed with worry, but retreats silently.
“He calls you Dom?” She seems almost upset.
For a beat, I stare at her in a clash of confusion and lust. It must show on my face, since she mutters, “I thought you said no one called you that.”
I smile at the misunderstanding. “No, he calls me the Don.”
Gesturing at the chair in front of my desk, I retreat back to a safe distance where she can’t see my erection pressing towards her, and nervously, she slides into the leather seat.
“Half my men are Italian, including Gavino. They came with my mother from Sardinia. The others are from London, like Edward who you met yesterday, and are my father’s legacy. And they all call me Don, because…” I swallow. It’s still a bit painful even after all this time. “Because that was what they called my father. He insisted on it as a mark of respect for my mother’s heritage. We speak Italian for business a lot, and amongst the family, when…” I peter out, suddenly aware I’ve said more than I needed to. I can’t help it. I want her to know everything, and have her feel at home in Richmond. It’s a fucking stupid impulse. “I didn’t mean to give you a whole history lesson.”
Her eyes brighten. “It’s okay.”
A girl as lovely and innocent as Taggie isn’t meant for a blood-soaked kingpin like me.
What would she say when I reveal that I’ve been stalking her since I first saw her? There will be the inevitable question of why I found her originally, and the answer to that is simple and unforgivable.
I intended to kill her.
And the moment I saw Taggie, everything changed. It’s not that I didn’t believe in love. My parents loved each other, and my family cared about each other.
I just didn’t think it was something that would happen to me.
I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be fucking Romeo and Juliet’ed like a cliché from a 1990s movie. My only love sprung from my only hate.
She’s Thaxted’s daughter, but I can’t murder her. I’d burn the world down before allowing anything to so much as bruise her.
“I just wanted to say thank you before I left.” Taggie interrupts my thoughts with nervous words that pour out over each other too fast.
Something dark seeps into me. “You’re welcome. But you need to stay long enough for the clothes I ordered to arrive. Charming though that look is…” I indicate the T-shirt that hangs almost to her knees. “Shoes, at least?”
“Oh.” She wriggles uncomfortably. “I couldn’t put you out like that.”
“Nonsense. Sit. Some breakfast?” I quickly message Edward, requesting tea and hot buttered toast, and make a little show of asking what she wants and how she prefers her tea, as though I didn’t already know she likes it white as her innocent soul, and just as sweet. Two teaspoonfuls of sugar.
“Did you sleep alright?” I say casually, and my heart jumps as a wary expression I can’t identify flashes across her face.
“Yeah. No nightmares,” she replies.
“Good.” I ask her about her grandmother’s reaction, and it doesn’t take much prompting for her to tell me all about her granny. I gobble up every detail she unwittingly tells me about herself, from the fact that her grandmother thinks she reads too many books, and was sceptical about Taggie’s psychology course at university, but Taggie won her round.
The tea and toast arrives and she cautiously takes a bite, then another as she finds it’s exactly the bread she likes, slathered in butter.
“It’s just you and your Grandmother?” A gentle probe. I’d listen to details of Taggie’s life all day, but I need to be certain of the situation. How much danger is she really in?
“Yeah.” She nods easily.
“And your mother?”
“We think she died when I was a baby. She disappeared, and apparently that wasn’t like her.”
“I’m sorry.” I make a note to follow up and see if I can discover what happened.
“It’s always been me and Granny, so it’s been okay. I miss that I don’t have a father more, to be honest.” There’s longing in her blue eyes as they meet mine. “I would try to find him, if I could.”
I nod, in what I hope is a sympathetic way. She wants a father, would a Daddy do? I could manage that, but I’m not telling her she’s the daughter of Thaxted.
“You don’t know who he is?”
“No.” The sadness around her eyes deepens. “Unknown on the birth certificate.”
“Must be tough not to know your family.” As painful as it is to have lost mine, I can’t imagine the lonely gap not ever having them would leave.
She shrugs. “Granny says he was a waste of space.”
That we can agree on. And thankfully, Taggie doesn’t seem to know about Thaxted and his strategy of collecting his children at age twenty-one. That makes protecting her a little easier.
“The young men who attempted to assault you last night. Did you recognise them?” I check.
She shakes her head. “I’d never seen them before.” Her gaze flicks up to mine, and I wonder for a second if she’s going to add, “unlike you”. But she doesn’t. “I met them in the club, and one of them invited me to go to another bar with him.”
Jealous fury flares in me.
He made a move on my girl. Little shit deserved to die for what he did to Taggie, but I might have murdered him for thinking he could even look at something so beautiful.
“Who were they…?” she asks tentatively.
“They’re sons of Thaxted.”
She shrugs and gives me a blank look.
“He’s the kingpin of Thaxted in Essex. Part of the Essex cartel.”
That makes her draw in a breath, and I know by the flash of fear in her eyes that she understands my meaning.
London mafia bosses are feared and loved in equal measure. The Essex cartel? They’re just hated.
“So,” she pauses. “Why is he your enemy?”
She’s remarkably direct for a slight little thing. I do her the honour of responding in the same way.
“Because two years ago he killed my whole family in cold blood,” I say simply, but there’s nothing simple about it.
The Richmond mafia was a happy, corrupt family that argued and loved and cared for each other.
We weren’t unreasonable. We made huge amounts of money, my father was the sort of mafia don who knew every person who worked for him by name, and the shouting matches were as passionate as the Italian heritage on my mother’s side would have you believe.
The funeral brought the whole of Richmond to a standstill for two days as people came to pay their respects.
“This was retaliation?” She peeks at me from under her long lashes, her curls over her cheeks as though she’s trying to hide her thoughts, but I read them anyway.
“Yes,” I reply. “But I can see that you think perhaps after two years I don’t really care?”
“No!” she squawks, and it’s obviously a “yes”.
“There’s a rumour that I collaborated with Thaxted to have my family killed so I could inherit.”
I encouraged the whispers, and evidently, they reached Taggie. They work in my favour, inflating my already brutal nature to legendary coldness and danger.
And it has the bonus of working for deceiving Thaxted, too. My spy in the heart of Thaxted’s family tells me that he believes I’m indifferent to the fact he murdered what he thinks was my competition in acquiring power.
Taggie makes a small sound like “err” from the back of her throat and won’t meet my eyes.
“It’s not true. I was the eldest son, and would have inherited anyway.”
She bites her lip and toys uncertainly with the hem of her T-shirt. She doesn’t believe me, and I can feel her slipping through my fingers as she judges me as unfeeling.
“I love my family.”
“Of course you do,” she replies quickly. “Did.”
“Do. And I can prove it.” I shouldn’t say this. I haven’t told anyone my plan.
That gets her attention. She gazes over at me, her navy eyes full of curiosity.
“Come here.”
Shyly, she rises and creeps around and at the sight of her gorgeous body hidden by my baggy T-shirt, I remember why I decided she should remain on the other side of my desk. She’s temptation incarnate, and my cock throbs with need.
But she’s here now. I adjust myself as I lean forwards, moving her attention to my computer. Obediently, she looks, and draws in a shocked breath.
The background on the monitor is a family picture.
“It was taken three Christmases ago. That’s Lorenzo, and Giovanni.” I point them out. “That’s my mother, and my father. My youngest sister, Isabella. My elder sister, Serena.”
“You all look so happy,” she says after a second, sounding wistful.
“We were.”
She twitches towards me, as though to come to comfort me. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“What happened?”
“I think now it was because of a deal my father wouldn’t agree to.” A trafficking deal. One of the few things we all agreed on. I wave my hand, because it’s best not to get into the disgusting details. “I suspect we pricked his pride, and he didn’t forget. It all seemed fine, and everything went on as usual. Then one of Thaxted’s sons became close with my little sister, and she fell in love. He proposed.”
I shrug, as though this part of the story doesn’t hurt more than any other. I’d brought the wrath of my whole family by insisting this was a bad idea. Isabella had been furious with me.
“My family went to Thaxted in force, to consider the proposal. He poisoned them all at the engagement dinner. I wasn’t there.”
“Why not?” she asks, then bites her lip as though she regrets the question.
“I disagreed with the marriage and refused to attend. Instead, I was at a meeting of the then newly-formed London Mafia Syndicate.”
Her eyes are full of sympathy I’m not sure I deserve with hands as covered in blood as mine are.
“With the help of the London Mafia Syndicate, I took over, and rebuilt. Richmond is stronger now than ever.”
She eyes me. “But you keep that photo on your computer where only you’ll see it? You could have a portrait on the wall and everyone would know—”
“It suits my purpose to have Thaxted and others believe that I don’t care that he murdered my family.”
“Why?” she asks, brow furrowed. “And why wait so long to kill all of Thaxted’s sons?”
Cute that she thinks he only has three sons, and I haven’t killed the others yet. Thaxted has only one child alive at this point, out of the many he had. Admittedly, he thinks he has two.
My spy—Harrison—is pretending to be Thaxted’s son. Like a cuckoo laying its eggs in the nest of another bird, Thaxted is pouring his resources into Harrison, unaware that I murdered his real son. And Thaxted has become attached to my spy, which will make it all the sweeter when Harrison betrays him.
“Oh. You killed the others already.” Her eyes widen.
“Such a clever girl.” I smile slightly at the way she has put the pieces of the puzzle together.
She pulls herself up a bit straighter at my praise. “If it were me, I’d want revenge.”
“I do.” I pause, because my throat feels rusty with disuse on this subject. “I keep the photo there because it helps me remember why I breathe every day. My mother was deeply superstitious. I wasn’t there, but I have reports that corroborate what I know in my gut. Before she died, she cursed Thaxted.”
She nods, as though this is a totally sane thing to do.
“And that curse? It’s me.”
