32
DAPHNE
Antonio Drago didn’t beg. The thought came to me while I organized bookmarks in their display case at the end of my shift at the bookstore.
After I crawled back home from Mexico, beaten, defeated—he waited.
The first moment I met him, after I’d been away to college, he cornered me in Chapman’s. “I’ve been waiting for too long to shock, sin, and shame you. Now my time has come.”
The words made a hot blush settle over my cheeks. But they were nothing compared to the sinful spells he cast upon my body.
More telling was the way he kissed my tears away, filling me with new happiness. Even surrounded by the Cartel, in a foreign land, my sister missing—through it all, with him at my side, I was content, alive, buoyed up by his love.
Love, yes.
He’d said it first.
After the init
