wouldn’t offer her husband’s mistress to sleep in my guest room. If she was still breathing, she’d be in the doghouse.
Mistress. Yuck. The word alone makes me sick to my stomach, much less wondering if that’s how I’m now viewed.
“No.” Rocco adds a finger waggle to his abrupt reply to the question in my eyes. “I have some random dude’s puke on my shirt and a ton of adrenaline to work through. I’m not up for an in-depth conversation on the uprising of deceased wives.” He doesn’t say how he usually expels his excessive energy after a raid, but his eyes most certainly do. “So how about we get cleaned up, fill our bellies with food, then tackle the shitstorm that comes with Audrey’s rebirth?”
When I nod, cowardly bowing out of a fight I know will be the shitstorm Rocco is worried about, his lips curl at the ends. “Do you want a piggyback ride, or would you like me to carry you to your room wedding-night style?” His smile grows when confusion strains my features. “I know you’re hurt, Princess P, you know you’re hurt, and so the fuck does Dimitri. Why do you think he was so torn up about leaving you?”
I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to confirm that Dimitri cares about me in some weird, warped way, but in all honesty, his question cuts me up a little. I don’t want Dimitri’s attention because I’m hurt, I want it because he genuinely cares about me.
“Wedding style it is,” Rocco says with a snicker when nothing but silence teems between us for the next several seconds. “It’ll get more of a rile out of Dimitri, and we both know how much I like stirring that fucker.”
Stealing my chance to reply, Rocco scoops me into his arms, gropes my butt in a way that isn’t close to being appropriate, then charges down the hall like a groom dying to see what negligee his bride is wearing under her dress.
23
Roxanne
“The faucet is as finicky as shit, but if you like your showers scalding, you’ll be happy.”
Rocco balances his drenched shoulder onto the doorjamb separating my room from the attached bathroom before running a towel over his wet head. For a woman unprepared for guests until ten minutes before we arrived, India laid out the welcome mat. My room is made up as if it’s the presidential suite at a ritzy hotel, the bathroom is brimming with toiletries that took care of the gory scent bounding out of Rocco the past three hours in less than ten minutes, and we devoured a feast fit for a king.
I could almost pretend I was whisked away for a weekend of indulgence if the right man was humming in the shower the past five minutes.
Rocco hasn’t let up on his endeavor to force a response out of Dimitri one bit the past three hours. He attempted to feed me strawberries dipped in chocolate, wipe away the dribble of a juicy steak from the bottom of my lip while chewing on his own, then sat so close to me, even if I wanted to forget I was only just freed from a baby-farming trade, I couldn’t.
The only good that’s come from his constant attention is not having the time to think about how much has changed in the past three days. I said to Dimitri I wouldn’t walk away from him as the woman I once was, but even I didn’t have a clue how honest my statement was.
I’m not close to the woman I used to be. I don’t necessarily believe that’s a bad thing. However, I’m confident walking away from Dimitri will hurt, nonetheless.
Ignoring the pain stretched from my heart to the lower half of my stomach, I maneuver out of the cross-legged position on the floor I’ve been huddled in the past hour, then pad to Rocco’s half of the room. He watches me, forever on alert, but seemingly at a loss on which direction he should take this time around.
We haven’t stumbled anywhere near the shitstorm we feel brewing on the horizon. We bunkered down instead, preferring to ride out the storm in a shelter instead of walking into it without fear as we suggested only hours ago. It’s cowardly for us to do, but when you’re facing a storm as brutal as this one, only a fool would pray for impact instead of doing everything possible to avoid it.
“I really wish you’d let someone take a look at