“This just for the two of you, boss?”
“Yeah, we’re hungry.” I hang up the phone. I want to make sure I have what she likes. Sue me.
I stand and stretch, call for someone to come and change our bedding, and walk to the bathroom. It’s unlocked.Good girl.If she’d locked me out, we’d have a problem.
She’s still singing when I enter. I just fucked the woman, but damn if seeing her naked silhouette doesn’t make me hard all over again.
“You need a shower?” she asks, sticking her head around the frosted glass door to the shower.
I shrug. “I’m naked, and housekeeping is changing our bed, so I thought I could while away my time in here.”
“Oooh,” she says, cringing. “Did we make a mess? Ugh, that’s gross.”
I shrug. “It’s not bad.”
“You don’t have to, like,showanyone like in the Dark Ages, do you?”
I feel my lips turn upward again. “Nah, we’re good.”
She ducks her head back inside and lifts a razor, giving me a little show with her foot up on the side of the tub. It’s a cute little foot, delicate with a pale pink polish on her toes. I want to kiss the top of each one of them.
“Good,” she says, her voice echoing. “Becausehello,that is so gross.”
I’m not used to people not being timid around me. Cristiano and my mother are the only ones that aren’t. I wonder briefly if I’ve made the right impression on her, but then I remember she’s a Rossi. Those men are known for being hard-asses, and she practically confessed to her father’s heavy hand and abuse already.
There are perks to marrying a mob girl.
“Do you travel a lot?” Her voice sounds like it’s in a tunnel.
“All the time. I travel more often than I’m home.”
“Ahh, that’s too bad.”
“Why?”
Her response demands that she put her leg down, stick her head out, and give me anare you seriouslook before she resumes shaving. “Hello, that house isamazing. The balcony, the pool,the beach?Are you even serious? It’s like something people dream of. I really hope we get to spendsometime there.”
“We will.” As soon as I make sure my mother’s nowhere in sight. I could handle her, and will, but I don’t want Marialena to have to deal with her.
“Don’t worry about your mother!” she says, as if reading my mind. “I will win her over, you’ll see.”
She shouldn’t even entertain that thought. It’s dangerous as fuck.
“I’m notworriedabout my mother,” I mutter. And no, she won’t win anyone over. “I just hate sharing the living space with her.”
“Then why do you?” The water shuts off. “I don’t know exactly how your family functions, but in mine, Romeo doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”
“It was written into the fucking agreement,” I mutter. I’m grateful for the distraction when I hear a knock at the door. “And that’s our food.”
I don’t want to discourage her, but the only way Marialena will “win my mother over” is if Marialena has my babies, partakes in my mother’s scathing harassment of anyone and everyone around her, matches her quip for quip on the bitch scale, and eats nothing but sprouts and boiled chicken like her. She has a certain type she’ll associate with, a certain type she’ll tolerate, and anyone less is beneath her.
In short, if she ever became the type that could win my mother over, I wouldn’t like her anymore.
I leave the bathroom and pull on a pair of boxers so I can open the door and take our food. The large table on wheels is covered with a white tablecloth, a flameless candle at its center. Half a dozen silver domes cover hot dishes of food.
“Thank you.”
I scan the hall on instinct, to make sure nothing and no one is out of place. It’s so customary for me by now, I can’t even exit my car or the bathroom without having to do a quick assessment. But now it isn’t just me I’m having to watch out for. Knowing Marialena’s in the room behind me, knowing that she’s my wife and will eventually carry our babies… I wish I had my gun on me and I wasn’t standing here in my boxers.