Forever Wicked: A Wicked Lovers Novella (1001 Dark Nights) Read Online Free

afternoon, we were married. We had the penthouse at The Venetian, along with all the room service and champagne we could consume.”
    And they’d had each other. That incredible night—the only he’d ever spent with her as his wife—was forever etched in his memory. Hands down, it had been the best of his life.
    “When did things start to roll downhill? From my vantage point, it looked awfully fast.” The Dungeon Master swallowed back the last of his booze, then glanced at Callie as she pranced past his door again.
    Thorpe didn’t like having emotions for the girl. A hundred bucks said they made him feel somewhere between uncomfortable and unwise. Jason related.
    “That Sunday at four a.m., Gia received a call from her father saying that her brother had been killed in the line of duty.”
    “I heard. He was a cop too, right?”
    “Yes. His partner at the time was the only one who witnessed the shooting deep in South Dallas gang turf. He apparently stayed with Tony rather than running the asshole down. None of the other units were willing to come into that neighborhood to back him up and track the thug down. Gia was heartbroken. We rushed home. And that’s when things went wrong.”
    That’s when the terrible hemorrhaging had set in.
    “She was going through a lot,” Thorpe pointed out.
    “And like an idiot, I stepped back to give her space because she asked me to.” He rubbed at his forehead, where he felt a headache developing. “During that conversation, she admitted that she’d never told her parents about me. She hadn’t met my mother either, so I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t really understand what a big deal family was to her until it was far too late.”
    “Did she say why she turned you into her dirty little secret?”
    “Yes. She’s from a family of police officers. Her parents wanted her to marry some guy named Enzo, another cop they’d handpicked for her. He’s a member of her church, and she’s known him all her life. Gia swore that she married me because she loved me. Whatever that means.” Probably not relevant since it hadn’t lasted.
    “I don’t think she’s the kind of woman who would lie about her feelings.”
    “Intentionally, no. I think she liked the fantasy of me better than the reality. When faced with the prospect of telling her family about the guy who wasn’t Catholic and didn’t have a drop of Italian blood in his veins…not so much.” He shook his head. “Until then, I’d never heard that money didn’t fix everything.”
    “Maybe she just needed time to tell them gently.”
    “I understood why she didn’t want to spring the surprise on them the day her brother died, but I thought she’d do it in the next few days. Certainly before the funeral. But she didn’t. Instead, she attended without me.”
    “Ouch.”
    Jason hated to admit even now the agony that had caused him. He’d needed to lend her support, hold her hand, and be her rock. But she’d turned away from him and anything he might have provided her. Instead, she’d disregarded their vows and elected to do everything for her family alone. In some ways, he’d been proud as hell. He’d been fucking infuriated, too.
    “She barely called that first week. Never came to see me. I left her umpteen messages. It didn’t take long before she stopped returning them. A week slid into a month. I’m not unfamiliar with the mayor. I asked him to poke around to find out what the hell was wrong. He did some digging, and I learned that Gia was consoling her parents and helping her sister-in-law through an injury of some sort. She was also caring for her nephew and newborn niece.”
    “She had a lot of people counting on her. Her communication could have been better, but you can’t fault her heart.”
    “No. However, I can fault her for turning into a one-woman vigilante squad, determined to bring down the gangster who’d killed her brother.”
    “Yeah, if you discovered that she was gunning for