Fractured Freedom: A Brother’s Best Friend Second Chance Romance (Tarnished Empire)

Delilah

The next morning, I woke up to Dante gone from his bed. He’d left me the updated list, though. His handwriting was basically a scribble, and I squinted as I read the new bullet points:

Lilah’s Eat Pray Love List

Seven to Lilah’s Heaven

1. Leave home (done)

2. Do something crazy (you went to jail, Lamb)

3. Explore food here and EAT (you like gelato, quesitos, mofongo, and mojitos … too much)

4. Explore places here and PRAY (you read at the beach, saw the fort, the streets, the stores, any other places?)

5. Explore men and LOVE

*explored voyeurism

*explored water play

*What else, Lamb?

6. Find peace (I can search with you forever)

7. Find heaven (you with me)

Love sneaks up and snatches a heart from its owner so fast they don’t seem to know it’s gone for days, weeks, sometimes months. I think Dante had my heart all along. Even when I tried to protect it from the disaster that could happen between us, I never really had a chance.

The wolf gets what he wants, and I was just the lamb, too overpowered by who he was to do anything else.

He came back to the room not much later with all my favorite foods, dressed in sweats and a T-shirt like he didn’t have anywhere else to be.

“A new list?” I held it up, a small smile on my face.

“Sure. You needed some help.” He shrugged, completely unfazed. The man didn’t embarrass easily, didn’t think he overstepped, and definitely didn’t question himself.

I loved it all.

“I have a whole phone full of ideas to help me. I even bought a book to read on it.”

“Should we read it together?” He handed a quesito over to me, and a smirk teased my lips at the way he catered to me.

“No, Dante. I have to go to work, and I have to do these things on my own.” I sighed around the food as I took a bite. The flakiness of the pastry rivaled some of the best things in the world.

“Without sharing the experience, the joy is lost,” he murmured.

“Who told you that?”

“Just a switch up of the Into the Wild story.”

“What was that story?”

“He went searching for meaning in the wild and found that ‘happiness is only real when shared.’”

Dante sat next to me and took a big bite out of his own quesito while we mulled over the quote. I wiped my mouth as I stared at his, hypnotized by how his lips wrapped around each piece of food.

“Maybe I’m being selfish with my happiness, and you should come along for some.”

“Maybe.” He nodded, but he didn’t push me.

“Well, I want to see bioluminescent water. Have you heard of it? The water lights up this magnificent blue.”

“Blue?”

“Yes, but you have to ferry out to a small island. Oh, and there’s a sculpture that my book said I have to visit before I’m done here.”

He grabbed the list from where it was lying on the bed and started to scribble notes. Then he pocketed it.

“You’re keeping the list you made me?”

“I made the list for us.”

My heart fluttered at just that one word, and I bit my lip, glancing away from him and trying my best not to feel more than I already did for my childhood crush.

“When do you plan to be done here, Lamb?”

“With my food?”

“No.” He chuckled. “With your trip. With Puerto Rico.”

I hesitated with my answer, knowing exactly when my contract with the hospital ended but not at all sure if I would be ready to go home by then. “My contract was for three months.”

“That wasn’t my question.” He popped the rest of the pastry into his mouth and wiped his hands on his sweats before rising to stand right over me. Then he placed both hands on either side of my hips on the bed. “When do you plan to settle down, Lilah? When does my lamb turn into a sheep?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think I ever want to be a sheep.”

He hummed and dragged his nose across my neck. “You ever want to settle? To be happy with the good girl you are?”

I bit my lip as he nipped at my collarbone. “I don’t know. I feel different here. Happy.” I took a deep breath. “I’m scared to go back to feeling … not that. And I’m scared my happiness might be tied to you.”

“Why are you so scared you need me, Lamb?” He cupped my cheeks. “Why not share your happiness with me?”

“I don’t want my happiness to depend on you.” I took a shaky breath, and his lips descended on mine. He coaxed me to open up to him. Then he took my love, happiness, and desire for him. I knew he tasted it all—I felt the smile on his lips like he had me.

And he did.

He had all of me, and my heart beat fast with the idea that he could continue to massage and nurture and cater to all my needs.

Except, if happiness only existed when it was shared, what happened when the person you shared it with had to go? What happened if you couldn’t give them what they wanted? Or if you couldn’t make what you wanted together?

Would our families accept this? Would I be able to accept this between us, knowing that we’d lost the one thing a family was supposed to make? For some reason, my body didn’t carry a child of ours well. He could have that with someone else. He could have a totally uncomplicated relationship with a stranger, one outside of our families, one where my brothers wouldn’t grill him, where my mother wouldn’t insist on grandkids, where my sister wasn’t his colleague.

I pulled away. “I need to get ready for work.”

His jade eyes squinted at me, trying to cut through the wall he could probably see me building. His jaw worked before he pushed away and nodded. “I need to work too.”

“What exactly do you work on?” I sat forward in the bed and winced from the ravaging of the night before.

“You’re sore,” he murmured, immediately back in my face, staring me down, running his gaze slowly over me. He sat next to me on the bed, his big hands searching my hips and stomach and all parts of my skin for marks. When he came across a reddened mark, I saw the way his jaw worked. “I’m proud and appalled at the same time, Lamb.”

The realization of love must have made everything shine brighter and everything become clearer for me. “It’s not appalling.” I chewed on my cheek before I let go of the words I was holding in. “I’m happy, Dante. Happy in a way that makes me scared it’s all just a dream—that I’ll blink, and all this will be gone.”

“Lilah, I’ve always been here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You weren’t always here.” I chuckled at him as I watched him lean over to his nightstand and open a drawer. He grabbed a small vial of oil before he closed it back up, but not before I saw the pink color of my vibrator. “Also, I need that back.”

“If you were fucking your vibrator to my name, I must have been there in your mind. Always. Right?” He motioned for me to turn my back to him on the bed.

I scoffed but did as he wanted because my body was already yearning for his hands to migrate back to it, to smooth out any of my kinks. I was getting used to us bound together by touch, and I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be able to extricate myself from him when the time came.

I could smell when he opened the glass container and dropped a few beads of a minty scent on his fingers. He smoothed it over a particularly sore spot on my hip.

“Maybe it wasn’t always to your name.” I bit my lip as his hands started working around the sore area and up my back, massaging, kneading, and pinpointing my body in the way only he knew how. My muscles shifted under the pressure of his strong fingers, and I moaned when he turned me to face him and laid me down on the bed.

“I should be getting dressed for work, Dante,” I groaned when he dripped a bit of oil onto my stomach and smoothed it over my skin.

“This should help. I was too rough with you.”

“If you were too rough, I would have used the safe word.”

“You don’t know what’s too much for you, Lamb.”

“Or maybe I know exactly what’s enough.” I winked at him and scooted up and off the bed quickly. “Now, work. I have to get ready.”

I made my statement clear and giggled when he tried to grab me. “You ever play hookie and not go to work? Should we add that to your new list?”

“You can’t keep changing the list.”

“Of course we can. That’s life. Change, adjust, find what you love. Plus, I know this island better than you. You need help navigating it.”

“Is voyeurism part of the island?” I popped a hip and lifted a brow.

Dante’s laugh boomed through the room, so big and bright that it infected me—and the whole atmosphere—with joy.

My heart swelled with it too. I clung to it and hurried to get ready for work.

The night should have gone off without a hitch. We had three great nurses working our floor, and the rest of the team was great.

A gunshot wound victim rolled in screaming, but we’d seen a ton of them before. We operated quick, but blood was everywhere. Our doc was yelling for more when the man’s hand shot out to grip mine. The red of it smeared all over my rubber gloves, and I tried to yank it back since I needed to be able to handle tools for the physician operating on him.

He didn’t let me go. His grip was tight, and as I caught his gaze to tell him he had to settle down, he stared at me with dark eyes.

“You’re Izzy’s sister. You’re that girl with the boyfriend who got her out.”

I shook my head immediately.

“You look just like her. I knew she was bad news. And you. You’re worse. Your boyfriend did this. I saw him. I saw him!”

My eyes widened. I yelled, “Necesitamos intubar ahora.” His oxygen saturation was dropping, and I needed him to shut up.

One of the nurses nodded and agreed with me, but Allan froze and stared like he’d seen a ghost. He stood staring so long that the head physician screamed at him.

More blood poured from the victim. His oxygen kept dropping.

We couldn’t get it to stop.

His life ran away from him just like my joy fled from me at his words.

For the rest of the night, I tried to remember the joy Dante and I shared. I tried to relish it. Then, as the cases got worse and my mind kept concocting ideas of what he was doing out there, I fought to hold on to it.

A mother lost her baby at eight months that same night. She held my hand as she cried and cried, then she stared up at me and said, “I wish I’d never even tried.”

I watched the joy flee from me. Fear and sadness and loathing crept in. So many hours at the therapist’s office, so many check marks on a list, so many smiles and bouts of laughter hadn’t stopped the darkness from inking over it.

It never would.

Depression wasn’t an emotion to stop, my therapist had always said. I couldn’t ace my way through it or navigate around it or avoid it. Sometimes, I had to accept the piece of me I didn’t want, and as I left the hospital that night, the thing I feared most was whether or not Dante could accept that part of me too.

So instead of processing it with him, I tried to go without him.

He had to work too, I figured. Maybe he wouldn’t be home.

Only about ten minutes into me getting a massage from the spa downstairs, I got a text.

Dante: Where are you?

Me: I’ll be back in the room soon.

Dante: Don’t make me ask you again.

Me: I’m getting a massage.

Dante: I give you massages. What the hell are you going to get one for?

Me: I had a gift card from a patient, and the reviews on the website were good.

Also, I was practically addicted to his massages but needed to be self-sufficient sometimes. The man had done practically everything for me in the past week, other than accompanying me to work and putting on the nursing uniform to do my job. I figured I’d give him a break.

Dante: Mine are better. Mine are the only ones you should ever be getting.

Me: Oh, please. This guy has strong hands too. It’s only a twenty-minute one. I’ll be back soon.

Dante: A guy?

Me: Yes.

Dante: Where are you?

Me: I’ll be back soon.

Dante: Where. Are. You?

I rolled my eyes and let the young man finish what he’d been doing. I’d received a gift card from coworkers as a welcome gift at the hospital. I’d paid for a way to relax, where I could digest my thoughts. It was a smart thing to do, I thought.

My mind whispered that I was avoiding what I was terrified of, though.

As the young man turned on the lights in the room, there was a knock at the door. “One minute,” he called out. “We’re just finishing up in here.”

The door swung open, and there stood my overprotective superhero, breathing hard and looking ready to cause havoc. “You’re done now.”

The young man’s eyes widened. “Mr. Armanelli, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“Ms. Hardy is not to have any massages here unless they’re approved through me.”

“Of course.” He nodded once and didn’t even glance my way before rushing out.

Dante prowled toward me, his green eyes as bright as I imagined the aurora borealis to be against the dark sky. Both bright and dark, his pupils dilated like he was about to devour me. “Why were another man’s hands on you?”

I grabbed the sheet from my butt and pulled it to myself as I sat up. “Are you kidding me right now? You can’t barge into another person’s massage.”

“Another person? You’re not some other person, Lilah. You’re mine. Even if you’re avoiding the hell out of me right now.”

“I’m not—” My eyes darted everywhere around the room because I couldn’t look at him and straight-up lie.

“Lie down,” he commanded.

“What?” I whispered.

“Lie down, Lamb. Now.” There was no room for objections. “Back on the table and lose the sheet.”

“Dante, we can go to your room.”

“We’re staying here. This hotel seems to not understand how close we are, even after I made that clear to Leonardo. He should have spread the news to the spa staff also.”

“They were very accommodating and—”

“Lie down.” His voice was sharp and cut through the calm ambience of the room. I jumped and did as I was told this time.

I stared up at him as he walked toward me. I bit my lip at how good he looked in his work attire. His loafers, slacks, and white-collared shirt tucked into his leather belt appeared so businesslike, I wouldn’t ever have guessed that underneath were stitched-up wounds, tattoos, and a man who delivered all forms of torture to men who deserved it. The only giveaway were those loafers, so clean and shiny with that brown leather, but one drop of red stained them.

One drop.

Was it the man’s from the hospital?

“Where were you tonight?”

He quirked his head at me. “At work.”

I raked my teeth over my lips and asked, “When you go to do the work that had you bleeding out in your shower, do you always feel this way after?”

“What way?”

“You’re not you,” I mumbled as I rearranged the sheet over my body and smoothed it so everything was covered as I stared up at him.

“Who am I then?” He leaned over me and set his hands against the massage table, on either side of my hips.

“A man who looks like he’s just done something crazy. A man whose job winds him up and shoots adrenaline through him when all I know of him is a man who can soothe a wild-eyed horse.”

“Well, you grew up down the street from my mom’s farm. So that’s the man you know me as.”

“Is there someone else I should know you as, though? Because you have blood on your shoe, Dante.”

I didn’t tell him about the man at work, didn’t tell him someone had accused him of murder. I wanted the easy excuse. I wanted him to give me an irrefutable explanation and for that to be the end of it.

My mind wanted to ignore it while my body was occupied with him right in front of me. The spiral around that dark, dark drain was starting to swirl, and I was going to cling to anything outside of it, even if it meant avoiding the real problems between us.

“I’m going to keep you safe, Lilah. You and your family and my family. That’s it. Everyone else and what they think of me doesn’t matter. Tonight, I protected my family, and the blood on my shoe is proof of that. Now, I’m here protecting you from another man’s hands.”

The knots in my stomach unraveled. I found the excuse and ignored that valedictorian brain of mine. “That’s what has you all wound up? The hotel staff seems to know you make the rules.”

“Well, they will very soon,” he growled as he glared at the door like they might appear.

“What? You intend to have them hear me moan your name?”

“Is that what you want, Lilah?” he asked. His gaze flew back to mine, and he moved his hand to hover over the sheet on my stomach. We both watched it, and I swear I felt the heat of it spreading through my body, up to my breasts that tingled and down to my core that clenched with need immediately. I licked my lips as his hand moved up and then down, parallel to my body but never touching it.

I may have been struggling internally with what our future held, but the present always led to my body overpowering my thoughts.

He curled his fingers into a tight fist, and my body tensed with it, my soul somehow connected to his movements, wanting only what he showed—tension, heat, or both, I wasn’t sure.

He growled before he said, “You’re fighting me and building up walls I want to tear down.”

“You’ve never used force to get to me before, Dante,” I murmured, mesmerized by how we connected, how my body felt his energy, how he must have felt mine too.

His fingers danced over my collarbone before settling on my neck. “Some force, torture, or punishment could be classified as something else.” He breathed in deep and glanced at the smoke curling up from the candle that was still lit on the table across from us. “Remember your safe word, Lilah.”

Why my cunt instantly got wet when he said those words, I wasn’t sure, but I nodded before he squeezed my windpipe, and then I gasped as his other hand went to the sheet to rip it from my breasts. It all happened at the same time his lips flew to mine and tore them apart with ferocious lust.

A moan escaped from deep down inside me as his hands worked my breasts, kneading and squeezing them to the rhythm of his tongue.

“That’s the sound I want everyone to hear,” he said, his voice a whisper on my lips as he rubbed his nose back and forth over mine. “I’ve perfected the job I do, Delilah. You know that right? Do you think I do it just because it’s the job I was given in the military, because it’s my family name?”

His hand left my breasts to skim down to my center folds, and he didn’t waste time testing if I was ready for him. I stuttered out a response, not even sure I could string together a sentence with his fingers so close to the bundle of nerves I knew he could work into oblivion. “I guess that’s what I thought. Of course. I mean, most people do that. I fell into nursing. It’s fine—”

“Don’t downplay that job. You love nursing.”

“Of course, but I heal people.”

He rolled his thumb over my clit, and I hissed. “And I do what, Lilah?”

Biting my lip, I didn’t answer. His question was meant to goad me, to push me to say what we hadn’t discussed properly.

He tsked when I didn’t answer, and suddenly his hands were gone from my neck and pussy. He turned around while I fumbled with my protest.

“What are you doing? Are we not …? I mean, should I—”

Right when I started to sit up and saw him fiddling with his phone, he commanded, “Stay where you are.”

The music in the spa’s room changed to a darker instrumental. “Is this … from Bridgerton?”

“It’s the music I play when I work. Keeps me and my victims focused.”

“Focused on what?” I whispered.

“On whatever I want. What I want them to tell me. They say if you play music, your mind can only process a certain number of things. You surrender to the ones you need to focus on. Ready to surrender to what I want you to?”

The music built, but I felt a million and ten things just looking at him there in those slacks. Like I wanted him but couldn’t have him and needed him all the same. I took a shaky breath, “We should go back to the room.”

“You should tell me what it is I do.” He moved back to hover over me and placed both his hands on my shoulders. Then he slid them up to hold my cheeks in his hands. We stared at one another, his green eyes pulling me in, losing me in that deep forest of his.

“You do the opposite of me, Dante. You hurt while I heal. I enjoy healing, but how can you possibly enjoy coming home wound up like this or enjoy …” My words drifted off because it wasn’t that I was scared of what he did exactly.

I was scared that we couldn’t fit together.

That I would lose him.

He may hurt others, but he always, always healed me.