She Took My Wedding, So I Married the Don Chapter 03

It hadn’t been one drunken mistake.

It had been months. Ethan had held my hand at my grandfather’s memorial in September while texting my sister. He’d proposed to me in October while counting the days until she came home.

I sat down on the floor of my old room, because my legs stopped working.

Then I folded the note, put it in my pocket with the pearls, and carried my life out the front door in three duffel bags.

A black SUV was parked across the street.

Leaning against it, arms crossed, was a man built like a refrigerator with a buzz cut and a toothpick between his teeth.

“Rocco,” he introduced himself. “Boss said you might do something reckless today.”

“He had me followed?”

“He had you protected.” Rocco took the bags from my hands like they weighed nothing. “Different word.”

Luca was waiting at the garage.

“You had no right,” I said.

“No,” he agreed calmly. “I didn’t.”

He didn’t apologize. He didn’t argue. He just looked at me with those unreadable black eyes until my anger had nowhere to go.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he said. “My family eats together. You’ll come.”

“Why?”

“My grandmother wants to meet the woman who brought my father’s car back from the dead.”

The Moretti estate sat behind iron gates and a mile of old oaks. I expected guns and cold stares.

I got Nonna.

She was four-foot-eleven, smelled like garlic and rosewater, and grabbed my face in both hands. “Bella. Too skinny. Sit. Eat.”

Luca’s younger sister, Gia, hugged me like we’d been friends for years. “The mechanic! Finally. He talks about you.”

“He doesn’t talk,” I said.

“Exactly,” Gia grinned. “So when he does, we notice.”

After lunch, Luca walked me to the estate garage—a cathedral of steel and polished concrete. Gleaming cars in neat rows.

And in the back corner, under a gray tarp, a burned-out shell.

A 1971 Alfa Romeo. Melted paint. Twisted frame. The kind of damage you only see when something explodes.

“Don’t,” Gia said quietly behind me, when I reached for the tarp. “Nobody touches that one.”

Luca’s face had gone to stone. He turned and walked out without a word.

“Seven years ago,” Gia whispered. “That car was meant for him. His fiancée drove it instead.”

My stomach dropped.

I stayed in that garage for two hours. I couldn’t help it—I checked the Shelby’s spare parts, cleaned a carburetor someone had botched. When Luca came back, he stopped in the doorway and laughed.

Actually laughed. Low and rough, like he hadn’t used the sound in years.

“What?”

He wet his thumb, cupped my jaw in his enormous hand, and slowly wiped a streak of grease off my cheek. His touch was so gentle it made my throat ache.

His eyes met mine. Deep. Dark. Dangerous.

My heart did something it had never once done for Ethan.

“You had grease,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” I whispered—and my voice came out low and husky, like a stranger’s.

His pupils blew wide.

At dinner, the long table was full. No empty chairs.

Before I could look for one, Luca’s arm hooked around my waist and he pulled me down onto his lap.

The entire table went silent.

Forks froze. Gia’s jaw dropped. Nonna smiled slowly, like a cat who’d been waiting seven years for this exact moment.

“She’s with me,” Luca said.

Just that.

My face burned. My pulse roared. And then my phone buzzed against his thigh.

Mom.

I almost didn’t answer.

“You thief,” she hissed. “You think we wouldn’t notice? Forty thousand dollars. Your grandmother’s pearls. The police are on their way to that filthy garage right now.”