Tempted By The Mafia Boss

PROLOGUE

Gabe

Sometimes I wonder if I would have been able to forget her if we didn’t share the same birthday…

I wonder if that would help.

I press my head against my pillow and gaze up at the swirly patterns on the plaster of the ceiling.

Honestly…I’m not sure anything can help me.

Today reminds me that it’s been ten years since I last saw my girl.

My girl… my goddess… Charlotte Revello.

It hurts just to think her name. It hurts to recall what she looked like.

Charlotte Revello with her long velvet hair, delicate features, autumn colored eyes and porcelain skin. She looked just like a living doll.

She was a goddess, her body flawless, made for loving. Her beauty inside and out was always intoxicating. A balm on my soul.

Only she could tame the beast in me. The ruthlessness and rawness that was already encoded in my DNA.

Ten years.

Tomorrow is the day. The ten year marker.

Ten years ago I allowed another man to take her to pay her families debt.

Fighting for her would have started a blood war.

Everybody I knew would have been killed.

My parents, my brothers, family, friends. I was threatened their lives.

It’s a reason I should accept, but I can’t.

I still can’t.

Grief claws away inside me. Grief still clenches my chest and knots my spine. Grief courses through my body. It haunts me and keeps me frozen in time with guilt.

Ten fucking years have passed and I’m still a mess.

My heart is still screwed like it was when she was taken away and I knew… I knew I was never going to see her again.

My girl, who was my everything… gone.

The last time we were together we were in this very room.

We were happy.

Right here in this room at The Dark Odyssey where I made her mine and claimed her for myself. The club is about living your wildest fantasies everyday if you want to. I’m a hypocrite because I’ve been stuck in the replay of the last time I saw her.

I’m not sure if she knew I wanted her here because she was my living fantasy.

I started this club with my two brothers and my two cousins. The wild bunch.

While others label it to be the doorway to all kinds of debauchery and temptation-and, they’re probably right- we believe we sell people their wildest fantasies and dreams.

She was mine.

I try to forget her. I do. I try so damn hard to move on but I can’t.

I’m an idiot because I fell into love’s trap and allowed it to take me. When I told her I loved her I meant it.

I haven’t said those words since to anyone.

Haven’t felt for anyone that way since. Maybe it’s because I’m always with whores and sluts.

Women who help you to momentarily forget.

Like the two I’m in my bed with now.

I’m lying here, and they’re all over me.

It’s the same two women from last night. There’s always a woman in my bed.

Every night a different one, sometimes two. It’s fucked up shit I was going to cast aside to have the one woman I wanted to be with forever.

Forever…

Charlotte was supposed to be my forever girl. Nothing mattered when I was with her. Ten years have passed and I can’t forget.

She’d be so ashamed of me now.

It’s our birthday.

I’m thirty eight and she’s twenty eight. It should be special yet I’m in my suite at the club, drunk out of my mind with two women in my bed who aren’t her.

No one is her.

No one…

Cora and her friend Brittany weren’t Charlotte last night and they sure as shit aren’t her tonight.

Both have their hands all over me and I allow it, like I’m on autopilot doing what I always do.

Beautiful women like them should satisfy me. They’re both beautiful with the kind of bodies made for sin and I’ve been sinning with them all night since I left my birthday party.

The acrid smell of too much wine loiters over us, and the mess of the room with clothes and sheets everywhere is confirmation of the wild night I’ve had with them.

I should feel like some kind of king with them but I feel nothing. Nothing at all.

Just the hollow that I was left with when I lost Charlotte.

It’s the kind that a ruthless bastard feels when he’s told he can do nothing and he knows he can’t do shit.

I’m not the kind of man to sit down or back down and do nothing when trouble comes knocking on the door. Worse if it comes for someone I love.

I belong to the Giordano family. Our name precedes us and we’re not known for pussyfooting around shit or being told what to do. So I can’t help but feel a certain type of way when I’m made to do nothing, no matter how much time passes.

I was made to do nothing.

Forced to do nothing. Like binding my fucking hands behind my back with chains.

Cora runs her hand over my cock and I feel the tug of tension in my balls. Her wild dark curls drift over my stomach and her bright blue eyes tells me she wants more.

I’m supposed to do something, anything… even leave.Contentt bel0ngs to N0ve/lDrâ/ma.O(r)g!

Leave and walk away from the siren’s claws on me, luring me to forget the shit. Leave and find myself. Leave and stop trying to replace problem for problem. leave and stop trying to replace my goddess with whores and sluts.

I’m just too drunk to move.

God knows how much I had to drink tonight.

Fucking hell. I’m right to leave it to God, because only he knows how hard I tried to forget Charlotte. Especially today and every birthday for the last ten years.

This day is always worse.

It’s a renewed reminder that I can’t forget her. I’m cursed with the memory of her, and why she’s not with me.

A gust of wind blows open the large French doors that lead out to the terrace and I gaze out to the night. Stars fill the sky like diamonds splashed over black marble. I remember her saying something like that.

She loved poetry and made me love it too. She used to read me poems.

In my head jingles a familiar a verse of something my heart remembers. Like an old song playing in the back of my mind.

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick…

In Memoriam… Tennyson. I remember. That was her favorite.

I’ve always been a badass mobster, but I was for damn sure going to remember my girl’s favorite poem, especially on her birthday.

I wished I could have seen her one last time. I never realized that last time we were together was going to be the last time I saw her.

I can’t forget her.

It’s my last thought and then nothingness.