Free Spin Ruin: (A Mafia Romance Two-Book Bundle) by CD Reiss Page B

Forgiveness didn’t sit across the room. He stood as I took my seat.
    “Thank you,” I said. When our eyes met, I was sure he knew what I’d just done.

twelve.
    he next morning, two things happened simultaneously. One. A dozen red roses on Pam’s desk.
    “Wow, these from Bobby?” I asked.
    “They’re for you.” She tapped a pen to the desk blotter, as if writing a song in her head.
    Before I could open the paper flap of the card, the second thing happened. I caught the image on my assistant’s screen of Antonio and me in the hallway. It had been shot through the window the moment before we kissed. Next to that image was one of Daniel and me sitting together at dinner.
    I’d feared looking weak. I’d feared the op ed pieces about my neediness and desperation, about Daniel’s ambition and mindless drive for power. The inevitable comparisons to greater women’s choices about cheating political mates. Maybe I should have worried about looking like a whore.
    “Who’s that?” Pam asked.
    Who was he? I ran the question over and over in my mind, and I didn’t have an acceptable answer. He was a man I’d met the other day. He was a magnet for my sexual hunger.
    “He’s being investigated for fraud,” Pam said, as if he was just a guy on the screen and not someone I had been standing so close to I could feel his heat. “Is he the same guy with the cars?”
    “Same,” I choked. “What’s the article say?” I opened the envelope so I wouldn’t have to look at the screen. I figured the flowers were from Daniel, asking for another reprieve.
    “Says you and Antonio Spinelli are friends through WDE. And you’re reconciling with Daniel Brower.”
    “They used that word? Reconciling?” I looked at the card.
    One more question.
    No name. An arrogant avoidance of redundancy. I folded it back into the envelope.
    “Yeppers,” Pam said. “Right next to that picture with the hot Italian guy. Sneaky.”
    “Journalist. In Latin it means ‘to say everything while saying nothing.’”
    “Really?”
    “No. But if the ancients had known anything at all, it would.”
    ***
    I’d gotten up and dressed like any other morning, expecting nothing more than the usual inconveniences. Traffic. Runny stockings. Coffee too hot/cold. Daniel and I had parted amicably the previous night, with him whispering “think about it,” in my ear. I promised to, and I would, but it was hard to think of Daniel when I woke up with a soaked, sore pussy courtesy of Antonio.
    I relieved myself, fingers stroking the soreness. I loved the pain of remembrance. He’d been so good, so hard, and talking during sex was something new. I whispered to myself fuck me fuck me fuck me hard until I came, ass tightening, hips twisting, balancing my whole body on the top of my head and the balls of my feet.
    Only when I took my first panting breaths, cupping myself in my palm, did I consider how poorly we’d parted. I couldn’t be with someone so closed off. Later at work, when Pam told me he was under investigation, I knew why he didn’t like being interrogated. I had her hold my calls for an hour.
    One more question.
    What would it be? More about Nella? Another reason to land in Los Angeles besides easy Bar exams? No. All that was too facile and obviously loaded for him.
    I locked my office door. I had a million things to do, but none would happen while those pictures sat in my mind. I needed to solve all of it immediately with an internet search.
    If I could have bottled the next hour in a fragrance, it would have been called frustration. If the size of the bottle contained the amount of information I found on Antonio Spinelli, it would be one ounce, not a drop more, and the contents would be worth less than the vessel.
    In other words, one sidebar article in Fortune had not one undigested word. I found one professional photograph in which he looked gorgeous, an unsubstantiated complaint in the comment section of a real estate blog bitching about