My nipples beaded beneath my hoodie, but the fabric was too thick to betray me.
Anger sparked through my blood like a delayed fuse, heat racing out from my heart to set my entire body on fire. I didn’t move back. In fact, I took one daring step closer and fisted my hands on my hips. My head was forced back at an awkward angle to maintain eye contact with the tall beast of a man, but I didn’t care.
This jackass was not going out with my mother.
I bared my teeth at him. “If this is how you normally greet your girlfriend’s family, it’s no wonder you were still single when you met my mother and it’s even less of a wonder why you’ll be single again after tonight.”
A slow grin, somehow more vicious for its calculated movement, claimed his handsome face and made it acutely beautiful. “You are operating under the assumption that Aida cares enough about your opinion to end our relationship because you’re embarrassed I caught you making a pass at me.”
My mouth flapped open, then closed. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. Never in my entire life had I faced such a rude, horrible man.
“Making a pass at you?” I almost stomped my foot in outrage and just managed to resist the urge. “You show up at our doorstep and speak like this to a teenager? What kind of man needs to put down a little girl in order to make himself feel big, hmm?”
“At least you acknowledge you are a little girl,” he said with faux pride. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t give a single fuck what you think of me. I’m dating your mother. Not you.” His pale gaze, a green so light they glowed almost unnaturally, seemed to burrow into me. Past my dark blue eyes straight into my brain, reading my thoughts like an X-ray machine read bones. “Though, it’s obvious you wish things were different.”
Outrage crackled in my chest, my lungs steaming with it, my ribs creaking as they threatened to cave in on the fiery rage in my heart.
I was a fairly good-looking girl though I knew I was no Aida Belcante. Still, enough of her boyfriends had hit on me when she wasn’t looking. They cupped my ass while I reached for a cereal bowl, complimented me lecherously at the pool, watched me walk to my room when I came out of the shower. They were all the same, eager for some woman to make them feel like a king. So, his comment rankled me more than it should have.
I’d dealt with innumerable men in my mother’s life, but never someone like him.
A demon in a suit more expensive than three months’ rent.
I gathered myself, rising to my full five-foot-three height as I pinned him with a look I wished ardently had the power to kill him.
“I wouldn’t date a jackass like you if you were the last goddamn man on the planet.”
He stared down at me, utterly unmoved, his perfect, stupid face a study in symmetry. “I don’t date little girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with me and I don’t have the patience to teach bumbling virgins. Now, be useful and go get your mother for me.”
“You know I’ll tell my mother you treated me this way,” I warned through my teeth.
His blink was a slow-motion condemnation of my character. “Yes. I expect little girls to tattle.”
“Oh, you’re here,” my mother called in her breathy tone from somewhere behind me. “Bianca, don’t make the poor man stay out in the cold.”
I hesitated, staring into those fathomless eyes as cold and pale as the Arctic tundra and I wondered what kind of monster my mother was asking me to invite into our home.
“Bianca!” she reprimanded.
I was seventeen, nine months away from freedom, but years ahead of my peers in maturity because I’d stopped being a kid the moment my little brother was diagnosed with epilepsy four years ago. I had been Brando’s primary caregiver since he was born because Aida wasn’t exactly maternal and we didn’t have the money for a nanny the way we did when I was young, yet the law said because she was older, because she had spent a few hours pushing us out of her vagina, she deserved to make life choices for the two lives she barely noticed most days.
Which was why I’d started referring to her as “Aida” instead of “Mom” in my head when I hit puberty and realized I had to take responsibility for Brando and me.
She brought men into our lives without any thought to us.
Men who hit on me. Men who ridiculed Brando for peeing his pants after some of his seizures. Men who treated Aida like pretty garbage, something to own and use without any need for niceties.