He had looked at her then a little more than one second and made the kind of arrogant assumption men like him always made about women they thought belonged to them. He had thought she would be docile.
A bride bred for duty. A woman whose favourite words would be no more than yes and amen.
How wrong he had been. Maybe if he had actually taken the time to know the woman he was marrying, to look past the arrangement and the surnames and the convenience of the alliance, he would have discovered sooner what kind of ice lived under Bianca's skin.
"Julian is dead," Luca announced.
"As he should be," she said.
"You really think so?"
For all her poise, she didn't realise she was standing in the wrong room at the wrong time in front of the wrong man if she thought he had called her in merely to share family updates.
His fingers tapped once against the desk, close enough to the gun to make the point without using it. He kept his eyes on her.
