Closer, The Guarding Her Series, Book Four, page 5
“Thank you again.”
“My pleasure and, seriously, less is more.”
She nods as she puts her wallet back in her black Coach purse. “I hear you. I love your makeup. It’s so subtle it almost doesn’t look like you’re wearing any.”
“That’s my specialty. I respect any woman who wants to wear every color of the rainbow on her face, and there have been times when I’m heavy-handed with my looks as well, but for the most part, I love a natural look.”
“I’ll have to come back and have you teach me how to do an everyday palette.”
“I’d love to. Have a great time at your party.”
“I will, thank you.”
As she walks away, I catch eyes with Gio, who’s leaning on the wall across from my counter.
“Did you tell him?” Gwen asks. She knew me and Gio before I moved, and we kept in touch over the years, so I was so happy when I came back and she was still here. She also knows everything. Everything.
“No.”
“Are you going to?” She bites her bright red lip.
I look over my shoulder to find him still watching me. “Yes. Eventually.”
“Listen, I know he’s your… whatever, but I just have to say it because it’s gotten better over the years. He’s ridiculously hot.”
I sanitize my brushes and smile at her. I don’t need to look at him to remember what his ass looks like in his dark wash jeans, or how his muscles bulge in the tight white V-neck T-shirt, his dark skin making a mesmerizing contrast. “I know, right?”
“He’s really just going to stand there all day?”
“I guess.” I shrug. “He insisted, and it’s pointless to argue, so I didn’t.” Because Gio is one stubborn man who inherited said stubbornness from a full-blooded Italian father.
She grabs a stack of disposable lipstick applicators to restock the display. “He’s so into you, Whitney. God, he’s watching you like a lion. Is it a lion that stalks its prey?”
“I don’t know.” I laugh. “Sharks circle, don’t they?”
“Not sure. Maybe he’d know. Gio!” She hollers for him, despite me glaring at her, and Mr. Tall, Dark, and Sexy saunters over.
“What’s up?”
She leans on the counter. “Whitney and I were just talking. Which animal is it that stalks its prey?”
His brows shoot up. “Come again?”
“You know… they stare at them, follow their every move, and when they least suspect it, they pounce before they… eat them.” Gwen is ridiculous. I owe her for the opportunity to work here again but am about to smack her upside the head.
“Oh my God,” I mumble.
He licks his lips, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Not sure about stalking prey because that means death. I’m more familiar with animals seducing their mate—… you know, marking their territory kind of shit.”
“Oh yeah?” she asks, trying not to laugh.
“Yeah. See, in the wild, the males do all sorts of shit. They usually start by pissing all over what they deem theirs. But that’s just to warn the others. To catch their mate, they make sure they look good, like how a peacock with the largest… feathers draws the most attention from the females.” I don’t even need to look around the mall to know that he’s by far the most attractive male in the building.
“They show their strength, too. The baddest ones will pound on their chest to make sure everyone knows he’s the most powerful.” I picture him after a fight, banging his chest to show everyone around that he’s the motherfucking man. His heavy arm draped across my shoulders while all the ring bunnies batted their eyelashes at him, practically begging for him to notice them. And yes, I was totally petty and smirked at them, because he never went there with them, and I knew he wouldn’t.
“Some of them will serenade their conquests.” He smirks, and I roll my eyes, remembering him singing karaoke. He’d always get on the stage, and with a surprisingly good voice—like everything Gio did, he was always the best—he’d stare at me as he rolled his hips and sang “Wicked Games.” The lyrics always messed with my head, and as I play them over right now, I feel my pulse speed up because he was giving me signals back then. I just never picked up on them.
“There are a few who will even try to buy affection with gifts.” My hand goes for my neck, fingering the heart-shaped pink diamond pendant he gave me for my twenty-first birthday. I have worn it every single day since then.
His eyes don’t leave mine when he says, “And if all that doesn’t work, they even try to seduce them by dancing…” He sinks his teeth into his bottom lip. “Giving them a preview of how it would be when they finally submit.”
Even though the mall is crowded, everyone stops talking for about two seconds, and I could hear a pin drop. My pulse races and Gio winks at me.
“Yeah, I think that about covers it.” Gwen clears her throat. “So, um, I’m just gonna take my break now.”
She practically runs away, and I swallow loudly. “You seem to be well rehearsed in mating rituals,” I whisper.
“I thought so, but if that were the case, my mate wouldn’t have run away.”
He tilts his head, waiting for my rebuttal.
“Maybe if you would have stopped giving mixed signals and grew the balls to take what you claimed was yours, she wouldn’t have had a reason to leave.”
“Pretty sure the size of my balls wasn’t the problem,” he growls.
I cross my arms, and he narrows his eyes at me while we stand off. Tension passes between us like an electrical current, and my body warms from between my thighs all the way up to my cheeks. His jaw muscles twitch, and when he swallows, my eyes follow the movement and stop on his muscular chest, right where the scattering of dark hair peeks out at the V of his shirt.
“Excuse me, do you have this in peacock blue?” a customer asks about a nail polish, drawing me out of my trance.
Gio smirks, and I answer her while looking at him. “We’re all out, but I just got a new shipment of pussy-cat pink in.”
Chapter 6
Gio
We’ve been unpacking her boxes and arranging furniture all week. The couch arrived today, and aside from the boxes in the spare bedroom, everything is all unpacked. The week has been pretty uneventful for the most part. A lot of talking. Sexual tension. But also the best sleep I’ve gotten in years since she’s in my arms.
I push her couch in the middle of the room and stand back. “There?”
She walks the length of it, then back. “No, I liked it better at an angle.”
“Are you sure? Because the four times it was already at an angle, you said you didn’t like it at an angle.”
“Yes, I’m sure. I promise it’s the last time.”
I grumble as I push it back to an angle between the living room and kitchen. “There.”
She assesses the location for the seven hundredth time and bites her lip. “Umm…”
“Whitney,” I warn.
“Okay, fine.” She tosses her hands in the air, exasperated. Like she was the one who was sweating from moving this heavy ass couch that has a pull-out bed in it. “It looks good there. I don’t know why you’re getting mad anyway. It’s not like you couldn’t use the exercise.”
My brows crawl up into my forehead. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve been staying with me all week.” She’s right; I have been. And it’s been torture. Watching her get ready, smelling her fresh out of the shower, sleeping next to her and not touching her like I want… like I always wanted. “And you haven’t been to the gym once.”
I glide my tongue along my teeth. “Do I look like I haven’t been to the gym in a week?”
“Look? No. You’re still an Adonis. But the way you were huffing from just moving a little couch around…” She shrugs and shoulders past me to grab a bottle of water, and I wait for it. When she takes a drink, a shower of liquid drips down her shirt, and she shrieks as I howl with laughter. “You jerk! You poked holes in it!”
She grabs the dish towel and wipes her shirt, then hits me in the ass with it. I yank it from her hands and start winding it up. “No,” she pleads, frantically searching for an exit. “No, no, no, no.”
“Yes.” The gleam in my eyes tells her I’m being playful because she can’t stop smiling. And I love that we can mess around like this again. She’s the only one I was ever this at ease with. Not even my sisters or cousins got this side of me.
“No!” She screams as she rushes past me into the living room. “Don’t you dare.”
“You started it.” I strategically walk closer to her, making sure she doesn’t know which way I’m going to go.
“Come on. That shit hurts.”
I lurch at her and whip the cloth. It snaps, and the very tip gets her bare thigh. “Ow, shit. You got me.” She rubs her skin and darts to the opposite side of the room.
“I know.”
“You were going for my bare legs. At least I got you over your clothes on your butt. You have enough padding on that thing to soften the blow.”
I toss my head back as I laugh, totally remembering why I used to spend so much time with her. She always made me smile and made sure to keep my ego in check. She takes the opportunity to try to dart past me to go down the hallway. But she’s too slow. I put a shoulder in her stomach and lift her in the air. “Ahh!” She laughs.
Then I smack her butt, and she yelps. “Seems you too have some extra padding over the years.”
“Did you just call me fat? Put me down.” She struggles to get out of my grip.
“I did not and not yet.”
“Gio, come on. My stomach hurts.”
Immediately, I drop her to her feet. “Shit sorry, are you okay?”
She hunches over and nods. “Yeah. Just give me a second… to distract you.” Then she grabs the towel off the floor and jumps over the couch.
“You’re such a brat.”
“You love me.”
“I kn—”
The ringing of her phone interrupts us, and she rushes over to the kitchen table to grab it. She’s been really jumpy whenever she gets a call, and I’m assuming it’s because she’s waiting to hear back about that asshole. “Hello? Yes, hi.” She sits down and puts the phone on speaker.
“Detective Barker calling with information about your case.” I listen to the detective and watch as Whitney’s face relaxes. No matter what she says, I know that the years she was with that prick made her scared, more scared than she was when we first met. And she should never have to feel fear.
“He pled guilty and is getting charged to the fullest extent, one year and a thousand dollar fine.”
She sighs of relief. “Okay.”
“If you have any questions, please feel free to call me.”
She holds her head high even though her voice is strained. “I will. Thank you for everything.” Her fingers are shaking when she hangs up, and I reach over the small kitchen table and take them in mine.
“This is good, cara.”
“I know.” She sniffles. “I think I’m just relieved. I expected him to get off with a warning.”
“Hmm.” I shrug.
She angles her head to the side. “What did you do?”
“What?”
“It was his first offense. He didn’t even touch me, so he shouldn’t have gotten the maximum sentence. What did you do?”
She’ll never know that I paid him a visit one night while she was asleep and convinced him that he would much rather be behind bars than on the street where I would be the one punishing him. “Let’s go celebrate.”
“Gio…”
“I’ll take you to Antonetti’s.”
Just as I knew it would, her face drains of color. “No, I’m not… I can’t.”
“Why?”
“That’s your uncle’s restaurant.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So they’re gonna hate me.”
I’m genuinely confused. “Why would they hate you?”
“I left.”
“Okay.”
“Your entire family treated me like I was one of them, and I left all of them, too. I just…” She hangs her head and sighs.
“Hey, look at me.”
After she raises them up, her guarded eyes focus on me.
“Nobody else knows what happened between us that night. They don’t know what we felt, what we were thinking, how blurry the lines got, or how that affected us. Nobody hates you. If anything, they were and still are mad at me because they figure I did something to piss you off enough to up and leave… and despite them telling me to, I didn’t suck up my pride and go after you like I should have.”
“I didn’t just up and leave, though. I had a promotion waiting for me. It wasn’t like—”
“No but I was supposed to convince you to stay, not make you want to leave. Because the way things were with us was part of why you left.”
She presses her lips together before releasing them and moistening them with her tongue. The wheels in her head turn so fast I can practically see them spinning in her eyes. “He’s in jail.”
“Perry?”
“Yeah. So you don’t have to stay anymore.”
She’s not gonna do this. “Don’t be like that.”
“I’m not, Gio. Honestly. It’s been a really stressful week, and I’m so glad, God, so glad that you’re back, and you made me feel safe, but I think you should go.” She pushes up from the table and walks to the door. “Thank you for everything.”
“Marching orders?”
“No. Just…” She squeezes her fingers on the bridge of her nose. “I want to sit on my new couch with a blanket and a bucket of ice cream and watch stupid romance movies and cry about Perry and you and feel sorry for myself, okay? You’ve given me so much this past week, but right now, I just need you to please, give me just a little bit of space while I consider everything that’s happened. Please.”
I don’t like it, but I understand. “Okay. I can do that. I don’t feel right leaving when I know all you’re gonna do is cry, but if that’s what you need, I’ll give you the night.”
“I’ll call you, okay? Give me a day or two, and I’ll call you.”
Stopping at the door, I put my hand over hers on the knob, then lean down and gently kiss her lips. I swipe my tongue along the seam of hers and pull back. “I don’t like leaving you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
I kiss the tip of her nose and step back. “Call me if you need anything. Even if it’s the middle of the night and you wake up afraid or just want to talk or anything. I’m always here for you. I always was, and I want you to know, cara, that I always will be.”
Whitney
Sleep wouldn’t come to me last night after Gio left, so I got up at four thirty to take a shower and then counted down the hours because I’ve been waiting for this day for a week now.
As I drive across town, I keep glancing behind me to make sure Gio isn’t following me. I wouldn’t put it past him not to have even left last night, but so far, there’s no sign of him.
I wasn’t lying last night when I said I wanted some time alone. Everything was happening so fast, and I needed to prioritize them or try to at least make sense of what was going on. I didn’t really figure anything out, but I kind of came to peace with them… accepted them.
After I park my car, I grab my cross strap off the passenger seat. Anxious anticipation courses through me as I walk to the grassy area where everyone is meeting. I put my hand over my eyes to shield the sun, and smile when I see him.
The love of my life.
“Mama!” Mateo yells for me and waves as he runs to me. I crouch down and hold my arms out as he throws himself on me.
“Hi, baby. God, look at you.” I hold his little face in my hands and kiss his cheeks and his nose and his forehead. He laughs, trying to push me away. I look into his brown eyes and ruffle the mop of black hair on the top of his head. “You got so big.”
“It’s only been a week, Mama, and I want to stay longer. Can I stay? My friend Sutton is staying for the space camp, but I have to go home.”
I wish he could have stayed, but the bottom line is, this camp cost me a lot of money. I have had it planned for months, but I organized it so it would be the same time I left Perry and filed the restraining order and started my new-slash-old job.
My plan was to get set up in our new house and make sure it was safe for Mateo. So I sent him away because I was afraid of Perry doing something when he got served. I needed to make sure it was safe to bring Mateo home. Unpacking with Gio there was hard. I had to make sure not to have him help me with any of Mateo’s boxes and lied that the second bedroom was just crap.
I should have just told him.
But everything with Perry happened, and one day rolled into the next, and before I knew it, it had been a week. And when he finds out that I kept his son from him for seven years, he is going to hate me. Hate. I know it.
I’ve known since the moment I pushed Mateo out of me that I was making a mistake. I wanted to tell him right away, but I was so young. Young and scared of Gio’s anger at me. Then it really was a case of one day led to the next. I was finally ready to tell him when Mateo was a couple of years old, but that was when I saw the news. Gossip sights were rarely accurate, and in this case, I wish that were the case. But it wasn’t.
When he said he got kicked out of the league for fighting with Viper, he wasn’t lying… but he also wasn’t telling the whole truth. On top of putting Viper in the hospital, Gio incidentally ended up dislocating his shoulder at the same time. And a week later, Gio got arrested for public indecency and resisting arrest.
And I refused to bring my child into whatever hell he was currently living in at the time. He was no good to himself, so how could he be good for a baby? Or for me. How could we build a life together when his was clearly so messed up?
I told myself that I’d keep track of him, and when he got better, I would tell him. But a month went by, then two, and then I met Perry when Mateo was almost four years old. Gwen would give me updates, but she said every time she saw Gio, which was always out at the bar, he was with a different girl. So I didn’t think with him being an immature man whore that it was the right time.
