The Don's Second Chance Bride

CHAPTER TWO: Grey Eyes

SERENA POV

The elevator opened and I stepped out.

Wide room, low light, expensive furniture nobody was using. I counted twelve men before the doors closed behind me, positioned around the space in the careful way that meant they were trying not to look positioned and failing at it.

These were not Fazio's people.

Fazio's people were soft around the edges, used to brokering conversations rather than ending them. The men in this room were something else entirely, built differently, standing differently, with the kind of stillness that came from training rather than patience.

I kept walking.

Fazio was near the far window and I found him quickly, but my eyes didn't stay on him because the room had a center and someone was standing in it.

A man. Tall. Dark suit fitted perfectly across shoulders that had not been built behind any desk, black hair, back partially toward me. His attention was on something near the window and I couldn't see his face yet.

But something about the way he stood stopped something in my chest.

That quality of stillness. The particular way he held himself, like someone who had learned a long time ago that the most dangerous thing in any room never needed to move first.

I was still walking toward Fazio when the man at the center of the room said something low to the nearest guard and made a single, brief gesture with two fingers.

The room emptied.

Twelve men filed toward the side exits with the efficiency of people who had done this before, and within thirty seconds it was only the three of us, me, Fazio, and whoever was standing at the window.

I stopped.

Not because I decided to. Because I had no idea what was happening, and walking forward when you don't understand the room is how you lose it.

"What is this?" I said.

Fazio opened his mouth. Then he closed it, looked at something past my shoulder, and moved toward the exit without a word.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I was alone in the room with the man at the window.

He turned around.

Everything in my chest locked and then stopped.

I knew that face.

I had not seen it in seven years. I had spent considerable effort not seeing it, not thinking about it, not letting it exist anywhere in my mind where it could do damage. I had been very successful at that, right up until this moment, standing in a room that had just been cleared of everyone except him.

He looked older. The softness I remembered was gone, replaced with something that had been cut clean and left to harden. The jaw was sharper. The eyes were the same, that pale grey that had always seen more than it should, but the warmth that used to sit behind them was not there anymore, or if it was, it was buried somewhere I couldn't see.

He crossed the room toward me in long, unhurried strides, and I made myself stay still, made myself breathe, made myself look like a woman who had not just felt the floor shift under her feet.

He stopped less than a foot away.

Up close he was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I had simply chosen to remember him smaller, because smaller was safer and safer was how I had survived the last seven years.

"Adriano." His name came out steady. I was proud of that.

"Serena." His voice was different, lower, controlled in a way it had never been when we were young, the Italian accent smoothed down to something barely present.

I looked up at him and kept my face completely still and said, "What the hell are you doing here."

He almost smiled. Not quite. Something at the corner of his mouth shifted and then stilled, and he leaned in close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him and said, softly,in Italian, "Ho aspettato sette anni per sentirti fare quella domanda."

I had waited seven years to hear you ask me that.

His hand came up and pressed flat against the wall beside my head, and I was so focused on keeping my expression neutral that I didn't register what he was doing until my back was against the wall and he was looking down at me with those pale grey eyes from a distance that was no longer appropriate for any conversation I was prepared to have.

He inhaled. Slow, deliberate, his face dipping toward my hair for just a moment, and something about the intimacy of it, the fact that he had simply decided to do it, made my pulse go completely wrong.

His other hand came up and wrapped around my throat. Lightly. A suggestion of pressure, not a threat, fingers curved against my pulse point like he was taking my temperature.

I could feel my own heartbeat against his palm.

"I want you to be my wife," he said.

The words landed flat and certain in the quiet room.

"Not a mistress," he continued, those grey eyes moving over my face with an attention that felt invasive in a way I had no defense against. "My wife." A pause. "You should count yourself lucky, cara. Do you know how many women would give anything to be standing where you are right now?"

His thumb grazed my cheek. Slow. The lightest possible touch, like he was reminding himself of something.

My legs were doing something I absolutely refused to acknowledge.

I held his gaze and said, flatly, "I'm not other women."

"No," he agreed, and something shifted in those grey eyes, something darker, something older. "You never were."

"Get your hand off my throat, Adriano."

He didn't move. "Say something worth listening to first."

"I don't perform on request," I said. "That hasn't changed."

He was quiet for a moment, close enough that I could see the slight tension in his jaw, the way his breathing had evened out into something careful.

Then I looked at him, really looked at him, at the suit and the cleared room and the seven years of absence wearing on his face, and I said, "Damn. You have changed."

Something moved through his expression. Fast, and then gone.

"You sound surprised," he said.

"I am," I said honestly. "The boy I knew would never have had the nerve to arrange all of this." I held his gaze. "Who helped you? Because this took more than nerve. This took architecture."

His jaw tightened.

"You want to tell me you did this alone," I said, "but you're smart enough not to lie about something I can verify." I tilted my head slightly, still pinned to the wall, still refusing to look like I was pinned to anything. "You built something. Over years. And tonight you finally used it."

"Tonight," he said quietly, "I finally came home."

The words settled in the room between us and I let them sit there, because answering them would have required me to know what I felt about them, and I didn't.

Not yet.

"Move," I said.

He held my gaze for one more second. Then he stepped back, and the air rushed back between us, and I breathed in slowly through my nose and told my pulse to find its professional register.

"Sit down," I said, and pulled out the nearest chair, "and tell me exactly what you're proposing."

Something shifted in his expression, something I almost recognized from a long time ago. Then it was gone, and he pulled out the chair across from mine and sat, and the negotiation began.

I folded my hands on the table and looked at him steadily and waited.

He looked back at me with those grey eyes, and underneath all the years and the hardness and the careful control, something looked back at me that I recognized.

I filed it under danger and kept my face completely still.