“Get over here!” he screams at me.
“If I see you anywhere near my fiancée, I’ll cut your fucking balls off and shove them up your ass.”
For a moment Rafael just stands there, quietly burning as the things he thought he had slipped from his grasp without him even realizing. I watch him suffer with a cruel sort of satisfaction pounding against my ribs. He won’t win. Not this time. First he lost me. Now his pride is gone, too.
“You’re a dead man.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Johnny shouts. He motions with his head, and two men grab Rafael’s arms, dragging him out of the restaurant.
Rafael snaps the moment they touch his arms. His voice raises to the ceiling as he screams at the top of his lungs. People glance around in their seats. Flecks of spittle fly from his mouth.
“YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD! I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU BETTER—”
I disappear from Tony’s side and run through the restaurant, ignoring everyone’s sympathetic looks as I disappear into the bathroom. My chest swells and I check every stall first, confirming that I’m alone. Then I let myself curl into a ball.
Only this once.
My back slides against the wall and I try to cover my mouth to stifle the horribly loud and embarrassing sounds. My insides feel like caving in because I’m so humiliated. Tony’s mother must have seen the whole thing—and all the other wives, too. There’s also the fact that we completely overlooked that Rafael might be crazy enough to claim the baby was his.
I stand up, shaking in anger as I stare into the mirror over the sink, tears blurring my vision. I want to smash that weak, pathetic thing. Who the fuck is she? She isn’t Jack Vittorio’s daughter. She’s just a scared little girl, too weak to handle her own problems.
The door rattles. “Elena?”
He opens the door before I can tell him to leave and steps inside, locking it behind him.
I look at his cool, indifferent face for a while. “What the hell are we doing, Tony?”
The bathroom echoes with his sharp footsteps, which make me flinch. He stops in front of me and my skin prickles as he brushes his fingers over my bare neck.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t possibly—we’re fucked! There’s no way we can keep up with these lies.”
“Sure we can. We’ll pay off those technicians to fake some tests for us.”
He sounds so sure. So confident.
“Then what happens in a few months when I’m supposed to be showing and I’m not?”
He shrugs and laughs at me, as though I’m making a big deal out of nothing. “So we fucking say you miscarried it. It’s no one’s fucking business. As for Joe Jerk-off, well, he’ll have to back off once we’re married.”
I don’t know.
His lips descend over mine and I seize his neck, leaning into him as his mouth devour me. At the same time, I hear a sound that reminds me of fabric—
BZZZZT.
The vibrator hums to life and my arousal returns with a vengeance as I open my mouth in a gasp. “Tony—this isn’t the time!”
“This is the perfect fucking time. You need to get your mind off things, and I’ll be a lot happier watching you come while you shake Johnny’s hand than watching you cry.”
His voice is sweet. I don’t expect that, and tears thicken my throat as he cradles my cheek in his hand. There’s not a tinge of doubt in his eyes, just reassuring confidence.
“Tony, thank you for what you did. Everything that you said…” My voice croaks and those wonderful gray eyes dent with pain.
“Jesus Christ, Elena, stop crying.”
I try. My lips press together and I fight to keep the pain from bursting out, but of course it does. It’s inevitable.
“It’ll be all right.” He wraps his arms around me and I’m swallowed by his bulk. “Please stop crying. Please.”
“I-I’m not upset.”
I’m just happy that I have you.
The tears subside as I swallow that down. Fuck, I’m already getting way too attached to this guy. Even his smile gives me a high. I’ve never felt anything like him before.
A tentative smirk pulls at his lips when he watches me calm down as the vibrations rip through my body.
“Now get that sexy ass back outside. You need to say hello to my mother.”
For all his banter, he turns off the vibrator the moment I take his hand. We leave the bathroom together and walk back into the crowd of people sipping drinks. The men slap Tony’s back and smile at me.
“Jesus, what a fucking lunatic!” A man with a wide grin laughs at Tony’s stony face.
“Fucking Yanks.”