Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance(51)

Roman grunts, his cheeks bulging.

“Come on, show the Princess some good manners. Say thank you.”

Roman scowls at his brother, but slowly turns his head toward me. With his mouth still full, he says, “What is this?”

I spear an olive over some pasta and roll it delicately onto the fork. “Pasta puttanesca,” I explain without irony. Puttanesca. The recipe that ladies of the night supposedly threw together between customers. Little bit of bitter humor there.

“Man, I could eat this every day,” Alek says enthusiastically. Then his eyes slide over my shoulders, dipping between my breasts and the V-neck that seems to have fallen suspiciously open while I was cooking. “I mean, among other things,” he says suggestively.

“Oh no, no no no,” I say, suddenly shaking. “You don't just come in here, take over, make me cook for you and then think I'm gonna… No way. Absolutely not.”

Roman shrugs. He never raises his eyes from his plate. “Oh yes, you are,” he says in a low, confident voice.

My head shakes back and forth urgently like it's got a mind of its own. “Nope. You can't make me… No!”

Alek pushes himself back from this plate and leans back in his chair. He rolls his tongue across his upper teeth and gives me a wink. “Oh, you don't get to play the virginal maiden with us, remember? We were there. Both of us.”

My hands tremble on the tabletop and I stuff them into my lap, twisting my fingers together to try to get them to stop shaking. I guess they didn’t know it was my first time. I thought they could tell but I guess not. Well I’m certainly never going to admit that now.

“That was just… That was a one time thing. That was a crazy day, a crazy night… You can't think I'm just gonna…”

“I own you,” Roman says slowly. His dark eyes rise slowly to meet mine, as inscrutable as a sphinx. As immovable, too. It makes me want to scream.

“You don't own a person,” I snarl. “No matter what Daddy said, no matter what you guys said… You don't just own a person.”

Alek looks at me like I've lost my mind. Like I'm speaking gibberish. “Marie, let's be reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” I say, hearing the pitch of my voice rising quickly. “Reasonable?! What's reasonable about this? Please, tell me one thing about the situation that is even remotely fucking reasonable!”

“It was reasonable to try to save your life,” Roman says softly. Something about his voice carries, though, as loud as if he had shouted it.

Something about his eyes, that cold stony glare reminds me of the way he looked at me in the airport garage. This is not someone who's accustomed to arguing. He doesn't seem to enjoy banter the way Alek does, who doesn't seem to be able to ever shut up. Roman expects to say a thing, and then just acts like I'm going to do it. Just like that.

Or else.

“You can't… No. Please no.”

“I own you,” Roman says again. I have a feeling this one of those rare times he's going to actually be willing to repeat himself.

But Alek is still grinning. He casts his eyes toward the ceiling and smiles as though there’s a camera still on him, even though supposedly he got rid of all of them.

“Well, now, Roman, we've got all the time in the world, right? All the time in the world,” he says slowly, clearly enjoying every moment of it.

Roman cocks his head toward Alek, his eyes a cold warning.

But Alek just continues as though he doesn't understand the threat. “We can be, you know… Patient. Let her get adjusted to the idea. I mean after all, she's not going to resist forever.”

“You don't know that,” I snarl.

He wrinkles his nose at me. “Oh, I know it, Princess. I know you. You pretend to be so innocent, so outraged and yet… Aren’t you the one that threw herself at both of us in an elevator? Two men you didn't even know? Monsters, as you say?”

Roman nods and stares at me, raising his eyebrows accusingly.

“No, it wasn't like that —”

“— It was exactly like that. I know what happened. You know what happened too, Roman, don't you? Wasn’t it exactly like that?”

“Exactly,” Roman agrees.

“Fuck you both.”

“Ha!” Alek barks. “See, it's that had a dirty mouth that's going to get you in trouble, Marie. You should watch what you say to me. Because fuck you both is exactly where you'll end up. Didn’t you beg for it that last time? Didn't you?”

I want to say it again, but instead I just clamp my lips shut, biting them together to keep from speaking. My whole body is hot, sweaty, flushed.

Nodding, Alek closes his eyes like he is entering a dream state. “Yes, I remember it exactly. The way you arched your back against me, the way you ground your ass against my cock while Roman plowed you from the front… That doesn't seem like an innocent little princess, does it?”