Page 62 of Lawbreaker

“That doesn’t sound like you,” her friend pointed out. “And you haven’t been sleeping well. Go to bed and don’t think about it. Problems solve themselves if we wait patiently.”

“How about if we wait impatiently?” Odalie asked.

“Go to bed anyway,” she replied with a smile. “Sleep well.”

“You, too,” she said, knowing that she’d lie awake all night with Tony’s heart-crushing words ricocheting in her mind.

The next morning, she was on her way out the door with her coffee in a travel mug when she noticed a solitary man across the street, staring out toward the traffic in the distance.

Luckily, her taxi pulled up before he spotted her. She jumped into the cab, and they sped away before Tony could get to her. She didn’t want anything to do with him ever again. If it took her years, she was going to pry him out of her heart.

The voice lesson went very well. Her voice teacher advised her to go by the Met and speak to a certain man backstage. It sounded odd, but she did as he said and made a stop at the complex on her way home.

Mr. Perkins was the manager, and he already knew about Odalie’s talent and her reluctance to participate in the regional competition. He’d also heard the recording that her voice teacher had made, and he was impressed. He gave her a date for the private audition, and she agreed with tears in her eyes and many expressions of joy.

Now all she had to do was show up and sing. Surely she could do that. She’d have to get used to looking out at a much bigger audience when she sang in an opera. She’d been afraid of it from the very beginning, when she’d performed in other venues. The tension was back again as she faced the new challenge. She could do it, she told herself. She could do it. Maybe.

The cab pulled up in front of her apartment. She paid the driver and thanked him and started to open the door. And there was Tony, sitting on the steps. It had been almost two hours since she’d walked out the door.

She couldn’t face him. Not yet. She moved away from the door and told the cab driver to go around the corner without stopping. Then she walked into a small bookstore near her apartment and bought a book she really didn’t want, just to kill time. Maybe he’d be gone when she got back.

It was clouding up two hours later. It looked as if a storm might be on the way. The wind was rising, and the heat was blatant.

As she turned the corner, there was Tony, all at once, tall, dark and raving mad.

“You saw me sitting there,” he accused angrily, pointing at the steps. “And you had the cab driver go right by me!”

She drew in a breath. She was hurting inside and out, and her temper, usually nicely buried, stood up and blew flames at him. “You!” she accused. “You think I can’t wait to see you, after what you said to me?” she raged. “What do you think you are, some pinup male model that I can’t keep my hands off of?! I slipped! I wasn’t trying to seduce you in front of a crowd of art patrons! What kind of a stupid idiot do you think I am?!”

Tears of pure rage were running down her cheeks.

“You don’t have any idea what I think of you!” he raged back.

“And I don’t care anyway!” She turned on her heel, unlocked her door and slammed it shut behind her.

Tony stood there with the door in his face. He was smoldering inside, so full of rage and passion and fury and desire that he could barely get his breath. She was the most maddening damned woman he’d ever known in his life. He wished he’d never met her. She was driving him nuts!

He boiled over all at once. He threw open the door and slammed it shut behind him.

“You get out of my apartment!” she sobbed. “You...you hoodlum!”

“You don’t even know how to insult people,” he grumbled, making a beeline for her.

“I do so! I can...!”

“You can what?” he asked, his voice husky.

Before she could come up with an answer, he had her up in his arms. His mouth hit hers like a storm, sudden and hard and insistent. And delicious. Maddening. Expert. Drowning her in pleasures she’d never experienced in her whole life.

She should protest. She should hit him. Or something. But his mouth softened almost at once on her lips, gently insistent, caressing, hungry.

Months of suppression hadn’t helped his humor. He’d ached for her since his first sight of her, and this was like a feast following a prolonged fast. He waited for her to slap him, push him away, protest.

She did nothing of the sort. She was as hungry as he was. Her arms met around his neck, and she pushed up against his mouth, inviting something even more insistent than before. And when he obliged her, she moaned, a soft, sweet piercing sound that brought his blood up so hard, he thought he’d choke on his own desire.

“Bella mia,”he whispered deeply, his voice rough, his big, beautiful hands sliding all over her back, caressing and slow and arousing while his mouth devoured hers. He wouldn’t have stopped if a gun had been pointed at him. This was feast after famine, ecstasy beyond ecstasy. Locked in each other’s arms, they gave in to the passion that had been denied for so long.

Her mouth opened under his and she made a wild little sound as his became more demanding, as his arms folded her so close that she could feel his heart beating.