All Chapters of UNDRESSED BY THE MAFIA LORD: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

POV: EVEShe'd moved to the living room by the time the afternoon light started going golden, tucking herself into the corner of the large grey sofa with a different contract....one she was actually managing to read this time and a second coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago.Dimitri was in the kitchen. She could hear him moving around, the quiet sounds of him making food that she hadn't asked for and he wouldn't announce until it was ready. Another new thing. Another layer of the man she was still mapping.She was thinking about Nonna's words.There will be people who want to use you to get to him.There will be enemies you cannot see coming.There is no leaving the Valentino world cleanly once you are truly in it.She'd meant every word she'd said in response. She wasn't running. She'd chosen this with open eyes and she'd choose it again tomorrow and the day after that.But Nonna was right that choosing it and living it were different things. And Eve was still learning the d

The arousal was shameful and involuntary and made absolutely no logical sense, and it was there regardless, coiled low in her stomach alongside the shock, the two things existing in completely contradictory parallel the way they had since the warehouse.She heard the shower run.She heard it stop.She heard his footsteps in the hallway.....unhurried, measured....and then the bedroom door opened and Dimitri came in.He'd changed his shirt. His hair was damp. The blade was gone. But there was still a faint darkness at his jawline that might have been shadow and might not, and his eyes when they found her on the edge of the bed were sharp and assessing and already knew everything.He crossed the room and crouched in front of her, bringing himself to her eye level, his forearms resting on his knees."Look at me," he said.She looked at him."Tell me where you are.""I'm...." Her voice came out smaller than she intended. She cleared her throat. "I'm okay.""That's not what I asked."She he

POV: EVEEve had learned, over the past five weeks, that when Dimitri said get dressed, we're going out with that particular flatness in his voice, asking questions was pointless.He'd tell her what she needed to know. Nothing more.So she'd put on the dress Marco had laid out....deep emerald, fitted, more conservative than she'd expected...and followed Dimitri to the elevator without asking where they were going. He was dressed differently tonight. No suit jacket. Dark trousers, a black shirt with the sleeves already rolled, shoes that were expensive but built for movement rather than boardrooms.She noticed his knuckles.He'd wrapped them. Both hands, clean white athletic tape wound with practiced efficiency from mid-palm to just below the first knuckle. She'd stared at them in the elevator and said nothing.The drive took forty minutes.She watched the city change outside the window...the clean geometry of the financial district giving way to older neighborhoods, wider streets, ind

POV: DIMITRIThe call came at half past ten on a Tuesday morning.Dimitri was in his office, three floors of city noise below him and silence above, working through the Rotterdam problem with Marco when his personal phone lit up on the desk. Not the business phone. Not the secure line he used for operations.The personal one.The number that only seven people in the world had.He saw the name on the screen and went very still.Marco, who had spent fifteen years learning to read Dimitri Valentino the way sailors read weather, stopped mid-sentence and stood up without being asked."I'll wait outside," he said.The door closed.Dimitri looked at the phone for two more seconds....long enough to arrange his face into something that felt nothing, which was the only appropriate expression for this particular caller....and answered."Antonio.""Dimitri." His father's voice was exactly what it had always been. Smooth. Measured. The voice of a man who had never needed to raise it because the we

POV: EVEShe woke before Dimitri for the first time.It was early....barely six, the city outside still grey and undecided about the day, she lay still for a moment just noticing it. The unfamiliar novelty of being the one awake first. Of watching him sleep instead of being watched.He slept differently than she would have expected. No iron control, no careful stillness. Just a man, deeply asleep, one arm thrown across the space where she'd been lying, his face unguarded in a way it almost never was during daylight hours. The scar along his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. His hair was disordered. He looked younger. Almost approachable.She studied him for longer than she meant to.Six weeks ago she had woken up in this bed in horror, clutching a contract she barely remembered signing, looking at this man like he was a cage. Now she woke up and looked at him like he was the most interesting thing she'd ever been given access to. The shift between those two points was so complete