He caught her chin before she could hide from him. At once she read satisfaction there. “Say it for me.”

She moistened her lips and nodded. “Yes.” A commitment then. To him. To them. Maybe before she died, she’d leave behind a book of beautiful Japanese art for Ricco. Someone would know she’d lived, and maybe he would think of her occasionally.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ricco stood outside the door of Mariko’s room. That rage in him he never quite managed to keep suppressed had risen to the surface as he’d carried her from his studio to her room. He’d placed her carefully on her bed, told her to drink lots of water and get some sleep. He’d thanked her and had to leave abruptly because she looked so beautiful and delicious lying on her bed he’d wanted to kiss her senseless. Kiss her until she gave herself entirely to him.

Every step back to her room, she protested she was too heavy for him to carry. At first, he’d been insulted. He might not be the tallest of his brothers, but he was in the best shape. No one trained harder or worked out more. He ran. He lifted. He did both heavy and speed-bag work. He took down his brothers and any other rider asking to train with them. Just because he’d been in an accident didn’t mean he was unable to carry a woman weighing less than a hundred and twenty pounds around. It was a blow to his pride – at first.

He realized when he got a good look at her face, when he’d forced her to quit hiding against his chest, that her protests weren’t about his lack of strength. They weren’t about him at all. They were all about her. She believed she was far too heavy, and who had done that to her? Who had made her believe she was anything but beautiful? He knew women much heavier who, to him, were gorgeous. It wasn’t about a woman’s weight, it was about who she was, if that brightness shone through her eyes and skin and hair. Ricco found beauty in art. Women were a form of art. All shapes and sizes. All body types.

The thing that enraged him was that Mariko, by any standards, would be considered a beautiful woman. She had beautiful symmetry. She had gorgeous bone structure. Her hair was thick and wild, silky soft. Hair a man wanted to see on his pillow. Hair he’d like to grip in his fist when he was kissing her or she had her fantasy mouth wrapped around his cock.

She had a completely false image of herself. He had seen the stunned look in her eyes when she’d looked at herself in the mirror – as if for the first time she saw beauty. It probably was her first time. At least he’d been the one to give her that, but she should have had it from the time she was an infant.

He put his palm on the door, level with where her head would have been. He just stood there. Silent. He had never believed a woman could accept what was inside of him. He’d worked hard to get rid of his demons, but it had been impossible. In the end, he’d accepted who he was because he had no choice. He had demons. He lived with them. He would be asking Mariko to live with them as well.

There were two ways he could ease the rage when it overwhelmed him, when the devil rode him hard. He could beat the shit out of a heavy bag until his hands bled right through the wraps, or he could use his ropes. He needed a woman willing to accept those things in him. The good thing, he reminded himself, was that he knew what he was asking, and that made it easy for him to accept a woman the way she was.

He might be accepting, but he’d never connected with a woman on any real level. Not until Mariko. He wished things were different. He wished he were different. He wished he hadn’t done so many of the stupid things he’d done publicly. He couldn’t take those things back or sweep them under the carpet.

“Okay, baby,” he whispered softly. “Give me time before you decide to kill me or run. I can feel that in you, the need to run away from me, but you’re really trying to run away from yourself.” All of them were. He was. Mariko. Nicoletta. He knew all about running away from one’s demons. He had them, and he often didn’t want to face them. He used everything he could to escape them. Nicoletta had them. Mariko had them. Maybe most people did, just not quite as ugly as the ones he carried.

He sighed and glanced at his watch. Vittorio was keeping watch outside of the Fausti home. It was past time for Ricco’s shift. All of them were working in shifts tonight to keep Nicoletta from running away – also, on the off chance she’d been the target, to keep her safe. He knew they thought he’d drive to her house – he wasn’t supposed to go into the shadows until he was completely healed – but he was late. A bad feeling had been growing in his gut and it was growing worse.

Working fast, he stripped and pulled on his pin-striped suit. The material was made just for the riders and blended into every shadow easily. The moment he was dressed, he turned and headed for the door, moving fast, suddenly worried about both Nicoletta and Vittorio. His gut had never steered him wrong. As he pulled open his door, that feeling got so much worse. There was no waiting. He was faster in the shadows than any other rider. They’d tried clocking him on one of the longer runs, but no one, not even Stefano, could believe the time.

He chose his shadow and stepped into it. The wrenching on his body was familiar, but it had never felt like this. Not even in the early days when he was just a child and practicing. Now it was second nature, but his body felt like he was being torn apart. He never would have made it if he hadn’t believed his brother was in trouble. The pain was excruciating, worse than when he’d woken up from the accident. He’d had pain meds then; now his body was molecules, being pulled through the tube at reckless speed.

He could barely function, making the jump from shadow to shadow to take him to Amo and Lucia’s home. It was in the middle of Ferraro territory, just down from the businesses in a quiet little cul-de-sac. All the homes were kept up, the yards filled with flowers and trees. He stayed in the mouth of the tube, gritting his teeth and enduring the way his body flew apart, the wrenching so terrible there wasn’t a single molecule that he didn’t feel as pure agony.

Ordinarily a rider took a moment at the end of the tube to let his body reorient, but the pain was so overwhelming he kept moving, bursting out of the shadow. He knew instantly, even as he was emerging, that he’d fucked up. He felt the attacker before he caught a glimpse of him. Turning as he emerged, he tried to block the swing of the bat. It hit him on the back of his right shoulder, but he kept turning despite the pain radiating through his body.

His roundhouse kick took his assailant high, in the face, driving him to the ground. Ricco was on him instantly, reaching to drag him up before he realized there were several men surrounding his brother. Nicoletta burst from the house as he rejected the idea of keeping his attacker alive. He snapped the neck of the downed man. He couldn’t afford to have someone coming at his back.

He heard Vittorio grunt and saw the flash of a knife. Nicoletta jumped into the air and caught the knife wielder by the arm and yanked him back and away from his brother. She landed on her butt, and immediately one of the men surrounding Vittorio turned, a gun in his hand.