She Took My Wedding, So I Married the Don Chapter 08

I didn’t sleep. So I went to the garage at two a.m. and pulled the tarp off the Alfa.

Luca found me there an hour later, sitting cross-legged under a work light with the burned car’s undercarriage open.

He didn’t tell me to stop. He sat down on the concrete beside me, bare forearms on his knees, and watched.

“Talk me through it,” he said.

So I did. The frame. The fuel line. The blast pattern, which told me exactly where the device had been mounted-under

the driver’s seat, wired to the ignition.

“Whoever built this was a professional,” I said. “Clean welds. Custom bracket.” I held up a small, scorched piece of

steel. “There’s a stamp on it. Half melted.”

Luca took it. Turned it under the light.

A partial letter. A C. And the curve of something that might once have been a rose.

His hand closed around it so hard his knuckles went white.

“Seven years,” he said. “Seven years I couldn’t touch this car. You found it in one night.”

“Luca-”

He turned and kissed me.

Not like the courthouse. This was desperate. Grateful. His hands in my hair, my back against the cold side of the Alfa,

his body caging mine. I grabbed his shirt and kissed him back with everything I had, and he groaned into my mouth like

I was killing him.

Then he tore himself away, breathing hard, forehead pressed to mine.

“I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t lose another one.”

“You’re not losing me.”

“You don’t know that.”

He walked out. I sat alone with a burned car and a racing heart and the absolute certainty that “business” had died

somewhere around the second kiss.

Thursday, Gia dragged me to a boutique downtown. “You are not wearing jeans to that wedding.”

I tried on a red silk dress. Backless. Lethal. Gia screamed. The saleswoman nodded solemnly. “That’s a revenge

dress.”

I was changing back when the fitting room curtain yanked open.

Ethan.

Unshaven. Red-eyed. Smelling like last night’s whiskey.

“Sloane. Please. Just listen.”

“Get out.”

“I made a mistake.” He grabbed my hands. “I don’t love her. I never did. She came after me, Sloane, she wouldn’t stop-

and now there’s a baby and I don’t even know if-” His voice broke. “I don’t think it’s mine.”

I stared at him.

“She was seeing someone else,” he said. “At college. Someone she was scared of. I think she needed a father for the

baby, fast. And I was stupid enough to be it.”

“That’s not my problem anymore.”

“I still love you.” He leaned in, trying to kiss me.

He never got close.

A huge hand closed on the back of his collar and lifted him off his feet.

Luca. Calm. Silent. Holding my ex-fiancé in the air like a wet kitten.

“Touch my wife again,” he said softly, “and they’ll need dental records.”

He dropped him. Ethan crumpled against the mirror, gasping.

But as Luca turned me toward the door, Ethan choked out one more thing.

“Ask her, Sloane. Ask your sister who she was really with the week before Christmas.” He laughed, broken. “Ask her why she screams in her sleep about roses.”