Who the hell was Nico Rossetti anymore?
To my family, I was the flighty smartass who was rarely taken seriously. To my business associates, I was the ruthless negotiator who pursued every acquisition with stubborn vigor. To the trail of women I’d left in my wake over the years, I was the charming one-night-stand who could easily be counted on for pleasure but never permanence.
To myself? I was the guy who had no axis. No balance.
A man who had always done whatever he wanted, which had yielded him nothing that he actually needed.
The problem with that was, knowing what you wanted was so much easier to figure out than what you needed. I had traveled to over twenty different countries, had more wealth than my parents had ever imagined seeing in their lifetimes, and I had never hurt for feminine attention. Yet at thirty-three years old, acquiring what I truly needed out of life was the last frontier, so to speak.
Because whoever would have thought that what I needed to make it all worth having…was a woman.
And not just any woman. Not just one woman at a time.
One. Specific. Woman.
Sure as hell not me. I’d had to go all the way to Russia to find her when I hadn’t even been looking for her. And ever since I met her, something had been making itself more and more apparent. A glaring realization had shone through all my internal denial.
What I truly needed—not wanted—in life…was to be hers.
What I’d been feeling for her wasn’t just emotional. It boiled down to a physiological need to keep this woman close to me. Otherwise, I couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t form rational thought, couldn’t even function normally if I didn’t have her nearby to ground me.
She had become my axis.
My fulcrum on which my entire world pivoted.
My world had begun to rotate around her. Balance itself on her.
So, who the hell is Nico Rossetti?
Apparently, I had become the guy who put others’ needs before his own. A man who had started to accept his own regrets and planned to make amends for his past misdeeds. Someone who had suddenly found direction after years and years of wandering the earth aimlessly.
And judging from my most recent actions, I had become a man who ran into burning buildings to save the woman he needed.
Because everything that had changed inside me began and ended with her.
I had become a man who was willing to die—willing to burn from the inside out—for the woman he loved.
Who the fuck ever saw that one coming?
Seven weeks earlier
“I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss your bride.”
Where the bloody hell is the hidden camera? Because this was so obviously a sick prank of some kind.
I stared at the priest in utter disbelief—not at the man standing next to me—as he delivered those jarring, life-altering words in such a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense voice. Such impactful phrases should be accompanied by a crack of thunder or ominous dark clouds rolling in to settle over my head. Or pronounced in a booming voice just before mass destruction claimed the earth, wiping out all life forms in its path. In my case, they were the very words that would surely damn me to Hell.
Wedding day? More like Judgment Day.
Because I was marrying a man I didn’t even know.
Well, I guess married was the more appropriate tense because it was already done. I now had a husband. I was a wife. There was no ring on my finger, but I still felt the weight of it there, anchoring me like a tiny, fifty-pound collar wrapped around it. My…husband apparently hadn’t been any more prepared for these surprise nuptials than I had been. All I had to show for my new relationship status was a nauseating knot in my stomach and a tingly spot on my cheek where he laid a chaste kiss to seal the deal.
Smart on his part.
Husband or not, if he had tried to kiss me on the mouth, I probably would have introduced his American balls to my Russian foot.
American, for God’s sake.
On top of being forced to marry a virtual stranger, the man had to be an arrogant, seemingly rich, businessman from across the pond. Insult to injury right there.
And the fact that he had to be stupidly handsome only poured salt into the wound.
Nico Rossetti. Hailed from Brooklyn, New York. Thirty-three-years-old. Owned a large alcohol distribution company in the United States, and was visiting Russia on a business trip. Business with my father,