“This is Cosima Lombardi’s room,” the other sister, Giselle, told me softly.
I looked down at her, noting her curves and the stain of orange acrylic paint left over on her right hand. This was the sister of gentle affection and dreamy observation, of France and pearls, lace and fancy.
I’d known them for less than a minute, hadn’t even been introduced, but after years of watching from afar, their personalities labeled for me in Cosima’s own recollections, I felt as if they were my own sisters.
In a way, they were.
“Perhaps you are in the wrong room,” I told them coolly. “This is Cosima Davenport’s room.”
“What?” Giselle breathed.
“Excuse me?” Elena barked at me.
I adjusted my gold cufflink emblazoned with my coat of arms and took comfort in knowing the same image was branded on my wife’s buttock.
“The woman you are trying to hide from me,” I said idly, “is my wife.”
The bomb detonated as if in a silent movie, the room so quiet you could hear a pin drop, but the sisters’ reactions were explosive.
“What?”
Giselle’s entire body filled with air as she struggled to suck in a breath, then exhaled loudly, painfully as if punctured.
“Excuse me?”
Elena looked the picture of betrayal when her face collapsed with shock.
The dark side of my heart reveled in their reactions. I wanted them to know the truth, to feel it so acutely it would be carved into their hearts and minds forever.
Cosima was mine, and I would never tire of demonstrating my ownership over my most precious possession.
“Who are you?” Giselle breathed with reverent terror as if I was the devil.
I felt high off her fear, made invincible by my legal right to be in that room with Cosima.
“Her husband,” I told them somewhat redundantly, just to reinforce my point. “You may call me Alexander, seeing as we are family.”
They gaped at me as I strode past Giselle and grabbed an empty chair to place beside Cosima’s bed. My arse was barely in the seat as I leaned over her, shielding her from the others with my broad back so that I could have this one semi-private moment to grieve her state.
“My beauty.” My voice was heavy and wet with sorrow as I looked down into her tragically beautiful face, her skin too pale and too cold beneath my fingers as I trailed them down her gaunt cheek. “My sleeping beauty, it’s time to wake.”
The sight of the most vivacious person I knew lying so still, so close to death, lit my heart on fire like a flint to stone.
Over the crackling roar of my incinerating organ, I heard a sharp voice say, “Cosima isn’t married.”
“She is,” I said drily, focusing on my derision instead of the calamity of grief making a ruckus in my chest. “I was at the ceremony.”
“She would never get married without telling us,” that same voice bit out, hard and awkwardly anglicized.
I glared over my shoulder at Elena as she stood up to shake a finger in my face. “You are some freak stalker who has seen her in magazines and fixated on her. Get out!”
I stared at her, darkly amused that she attempted to hold my glare when I’d been outstaring men as twice as old and powerful as her since I was a lad.
Cosima would have told me to go gentle, to empathise with her sisters who were clearly grieving, anxious, and completely derailed by the arrival of a previous unknown husband to their favourite sister.
I didn’t give a shit about empathising.
I wanted to be alone with my wife. I wanted to stroke her skin until it was warm and flushed, to wake her up with my Dominant voice and then kiss her so deeply that she would be able to taste the ash of my eviscerated heart on my tongue and know the horror of my despair.
Then I wanted to leave Riddick at the door, more men at the entrance of the hospital, and set out to find the dead man who had dared to lay a hand on my beauty. I knew that Noel must have been behind the order given his whispered admission at Pearl Hall, but I wanted the man behind the gun.
Only then, after I had blood on my hands—wet, warm, and right—would I bloody well consider the selfish, irascible feelings of the other Lombardi women.
“I would say your goodbyes,” I suggested coldly, turning my back on them once more to take Cosima’s hand between mine. “Visiting hours are over, and I am the only one who has been granted the choice of staying the night with her.”
“Like hell you are,” Elena snapped. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”
“He is her husband.”
My shoulders stiffened involuntarily at the sound of my brother’s mongrel European accent. I didn’t turn to face him, hoping as I had when I’d been only a boy, that if I ignored my little brother, he would bugger off.