CHAPTER 2: WRONG ROOM RIGHT MAN
1671 Words
Sunlight hit me like an accusation.
I wasn’t sure I should open my eyes, so I rolled over to block the rays from the windows.
When I opened my eyes.
I woke to warmth that wasn't mine, a chest rising and falling beside me, and for exactly one second my mind offered me the mercy of not understanding.
Then it caught up.
I screamed.
"Gosh!—" The man beside me shot upright, one hand flying up like he was bracing for a blow.
"Calm down. Calm down."
I wondered how he wanted me to calm down when I saw a stranger in my bed.
A thought ran through my mind.
I must have been kidnapped.
Whoever this is, he had kidnapped me.
My mind moved quickly to ransom.
How many are they?
Can I take them all?
Then I felt the weakness in my body. I knew immediately my body was not ready for any fight.
They are not getting one dime from the Kings.
"Who are you… where…." I scrambled backwards off the bed that I nearly went down with the sheets tangled around my legs.
The room spun, steadied, spun again. My head was pounding like something had taken a hammer to the inside of my skull.
"You're in my room," he said. He looked like a man half-awake.
He was even bare-chested and blinking against the morning light; his voice carried the kind of authority that didn't invite argument.
“Excuse me?” I said. My head nearly exploded as I raised my voice. I couldn’t help but hold my head.
That’s when the sheets fell off, and my beautiful naked body was made open for him to view.
I tried to be fast, but I was reacting slowly.
I used my hands to cover my breast.
But my private part was left open.
Then it occurred to me, I needed the sheets
"That's not—" I looked down at myself.
My dress was gone.
My clothes were gone.
My underwear was gone, and my heart dropped somewhere around my knees as I spotted my panties draped over the back of an armchair like they'd been tossed there in a hurry.
My bra stood hanging off the edge of the mirror, across the room, like some scavenger hunt for my own dignity.
"Oh, my God." My voice cracked. "Oh my God, what did you… what did we…"
The whole setting seemed wrong.
"Nothing happened," he rattled the words slowly.
"You expect me to believe that? Look at me! Look at this room!"
He was on his feet now, and even furious, even terrified, some traitorous part of my brain noted that he moved like something built for exactly this, controlled, unhurried, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with certainty.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders in a way the loose sweatpants he'd pulled on did nothing to disguise, dark hair pushed back from a face that belonged on the cover of something expensive.
A jaw sharp enough to cut glass.
A mouth that looked like it rarely bothered with apologies.
And his eyes, dark, steady, assessing me now with an intensity that made my skin prickle even through the panic, were the kind of eyes that had clearly never once needed to raise their voice to be obeyed.
He was, infuriatingly, unbearably handsome, and I hated that I noticed it in the middle of what might be the worst morning of my life.
"I met you in my room," he said.
He looked straight at me; I was struggling with the sheets.
Of course, he knew I did not believe him.
How can he say this was his room? What game is he playing?
He raised his hands. "You were out of your mind, talking in circles, and before I could get a straight answer out of you, you'd taken off half your clothes and were trying to climb into my lap.”
“That can’t be true,” I whispered, trying to avoid the aches on my forehead.
Immediately after the words left my mouth, I remembered arguing with someone who had mistakenly entered my room with the wrong key card.
This must be him claiming this was his room.
“So why didn’t you call the hotel staff, stewards, room service or something?” I asked, demanding answers like someone who had been used.
“You were wasted,” he said as he tried smiling to create a warm atmosphere. But I was not buying it.
I had to put you to bed. Alone. I slept on top of the covers." He gestured at himself, still fully dressed from the waist down, at the untouched half of the mattress beside where I'd woken.
"Nothing happened. I don't take women who can't stand up straight, whatever you might think of me," he said.
"I don't even know your name," I said, trying to smile to see if I could get one.
"Nicco." Then there was this pause before he looked at me and said, "Moretti."
The name landed in my stomach like a stone dropped down a well.
Moretti.
"You're joking," I said.
"I don't joke about my own name."
"You have to be joking." My mind was racing now, sober fear cutting cleanly through whatever fog was left from the events of last night.
Moretti.
The most feared family on the East Coast. Ports, casinos, judges bought and paid for, a name my father had spent my entire childhood teaching me to say carefully, the way you'd say the name of a storm.
"And you are?" he asked, and something in his tone had sharpened, some instinct clicking into place the same way mine just had.
"Destiny," I said, and then, because there was no version of this that ended well no matter how I said it, "King."
He went very still.
"King," he repeated.
"Yes," I said.
"As in Orlando King," he replied.
"He's my father," I said. "Do you have a problem with that?"
The silence that followed had weight to it, the specific weight of two people simultaneously doing the same terrible math.
King and DeLuca.
DeLuca and Moretti.
Two empires that had circled each other for two generations without ever quite going to war, held apart by nothing but exhaustion and old, careful treaties, and here I was, standing completely naked in Nicco Moretti's bedroom a few weeks before my wedding, with my underwear draped over his furniture like evidence at a crime scene.
"You're the DeLuca fiancée," he said slowly, and I watched something shift behind his eyes, not quite alarming, something colder and faster than that. Calculation. "The wedding's this month."
"Three months," I said, because apparently my mouth needed something to do besides shake. "It is in three months."
“I believe someone drugged you last night,” he said. “Your behaviour was awkward, though I give it to you. You must have a strong spirit to still have some sort of control.”
I was now very much at ease. “The control that brought me to your room?” I asked.
He made a little gesture as if to say I was fortunate. “Better in my room than somewhere else.”
“All this looks strange to me. Why should I be a target to anyone just a few months before marrying Lorenzo”
"It won't matter how many months it was," he said, "once someone finds out you spent the night in my bed."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"Nobody has to know," I said. "Nobody was—"
The door slammed open so hard it cracked against the wall.
"Destiny! Oh my God, I've been looking every—" Amaro burst through the doorway, his phone already raised, the camera already recording, his voice pitched loud enough to carry down the whole corridor.
"I have proof. I saw you go into the wrong room, I got it all on camera, but we can fix this before anyone sees the other footage, just tell me who—"
He froze.
His eyes went from me to the tangled sheets, to the man standing half-dressed opposite me with the unmistakable, unhurried stillness of someone who had never once needed to be afraid of anyone.
How did he know I was here, and why would he still be recording me?
I had thought Paula sent her to ensure I was assisted to my room, but right now it was not looking like that.
"That's—" His phone lowered an inch. His voice dropped to something close to a whisper. "That's Nicco Moretti."
"Amaro, right?—" I stepped toward him, hand out, but he was already backing toward the door, phone clutched to his chest now as it had turned into something radioactive.
"I didn't— I wasn't— I have to go." He said it fast, tripping over his own feet in the doorway. "I have to go, I have to go right now—"
And then he was gone, footsteps pounding away down the hallway so fast it sounded like he was running from something far worse than my awkward morning.
I could not think right, but I heard him say other footage.
What other footage?
Whatever footage he'd been so desperate to fix before anyone else saw it was already far beyond anyone's ability to contain.
Nicco was watching the empty doorway with an expression I couldn't read at all.
"Who was that," he said quietly, "and what exactly does he have on his phone?"
I didn't answer him.
I was too busy realising, with a cold and sinking certainty, that whatever Amaro had just filmed last night before I ever found my way to the wrong room, the wrong bed, the wrong name, was already halfway out the door with him.
And there was absolutely nothing either of us could do to stop it from spreading.
- Writer
