Convenient Mafia Wife: Prequel (Syndicate Rules Book 1)

Las Vegas, Nevada

Mancini Mafia

RAFFAELE

My beautiful wife walks to where the bra she tossed is in a puddle of pink lace on the floor, her large breasts swaying with each angry step. Damn, she turns me on when she’s like this.

‘He threatened to sedate you?’ Lara didn’t say anything about that in her text.

While a lack of chattiness can be an asset, sometimes the Marine trained bodyguard can be too taciturn.

‘Why the heck do you think I shot Dolf?’ my wife demands.

She shot someone? What the fuck went down in that clinic? ‘Who is Dolf?’ And why did my gentle and proper wife feel the need to shoot him?

‘I thought Lara texted you.’

‘Her text said your appointment didn’t go well and that you wanted to talk to me. I thought you were upset by bad news.’

Her bra dangling from her hand, Giulia’s brows furrow. ‘Then how did you know about the IUD?’

‘Dr. Hewitt emailed me.’ Along with a summary of the visit, that does not include shots fired, the email has a recommendation for a psychiatrist I do not mention.

I assume the birth control somehow damaged my wife’s ability to conceive. Dr. Hewitt believes she needs someone to help her work through that. Setting aside my personal disappointment at not having any more children with her, I am determined to be that person.

Not some damn shrink.

I had my admin reschedule everything on my calendar for the rest of the day, after my meeting with the capos. I hadn’t expected Giulia in avenging Fury mode to come pounding on my office door.

She slides her arms through the straps of her bra and pulls it up, covering her luscious tits and reaches behind to do the clasp.

‘Don’t get dressed on my account.’ I let my eyes roam over her lust inducing curves.

I cannot get enough of her fuller figure since giving birth to Neri. Her pillowy softness is as much of a turn-on for me as her tight, wet pussy.

She ignores me and fastens her bra, hiding her mouth-watering tits from my gaze. Standing in my office in nothing but her black bra and panties and vibrating with temper, my wife is fulfilling one of favorite sexual fantasies.

‘We might as well take advantage of the free time in our schedules.’ And this unexpected opportunity to live out that sexual fantasy. But as soon as I say the words, I realize they are the wrong ones.

Giulia’s body goes stiff and eyes that are shooting daggers at me once again glisten with moisture. Her temper is sexual kryptonite, but I hate seeing the hurt in those pretty brown depths.

Okay. Talk first. Sex after.

‘Tell me about this morning.’

Giulia doesn’t start talking. That would be too easy. She goes hunting for her dress and then puts it on.

‘Why did you strip in front of my capos?’ I ask her. I get she was angry. Still is angry, apparently.

But to reveal her body to my men?

And they are my men as much as they are my father’s. To be loyal to the don is to be loyal to me, his oldest son and underboss.

But some capos are more loyal to me than others. Those men were three of them.

My threat to gouge out their eyes wasn’t hyperbole, however. But my men are smart. The second she climbed up on my desk, giving them a view up her skirt, they averted their eyes.

She faces me defiantly. ‘You didn’t care about stripping me bare in front of that doctor.’ Her tone is scathing when she says the word doctor.

‘I did not strip you.’ I knew I should have gone with a female specialist, but my father had been adamant that Dr. Hewitt was the best.

The more the men look to me for leadership, the more my father seeks to show assert his authority in my life, not just la famiglia’s. I thought going with his suggestion for the specialist was an easy give.

Clearly, I was wrong because my beautiful wife is upset.

‘Didn’t you?’ she taunts.

Giulia is not being literal. Damn it. There’s no winning when her words mean something different than what she says.

I try anyway. ‘You believe me sending you to a specialist took something from you?’

‘Ding. Ding. Ding. Give that man a prize.’ Her small hands are curled into fists at her sides and there’s not one relaxed muscle in her body. ‘You should never have sent me to him. You are my husband, not my parent. And regardless, I am no longer a child.’

Telling her that my father insisted she seek fertility treatment is more likely to fan the flames of my wife’s anger than douse them. Even if he is her don.

We both know that I could have refused. I didn’t. Assuming she was probably as concerned as I was by the fact she hadn’t gotten pregnant again since Neri’s birth, I went along with my father’s suggestion.

A miscalculation on my part.

Giulia believes my father is overbearing and too involved in our marriage. I’ll do no favors reminding her he is only as involved as I allow him to be.

Her father was a don in the Five Families and a very different man than mine. His death five years ago has nearly canonized Enzo De Luca in my wife’s mind.

‘I went first,’ I tell her.

She stares at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw Dr. Hewitt first.’ If the problem had been with me, then my wife would not have had to undergo any tests.

‘To talk about me?’

‘To discuss potential reasons for the lack a pregnancy since Neri when I thought we weren’t using birth control.’

Not looking even a little guilty by that reminder, she just narrows her rich chocolate gaze.

‘He tested my sperm count.’

‘You gave him a sample of your semen?’ she asks. ‘How?’

‘I jacked off into a cup. Does it matter?’

‘No. I suppose not. Only, I find that really hard to picture.’

‘Maybe we should rectify that.’ Not that I will use a cup, but the idea of having her eyes hot and needy on me while I jack myself has my already hard cock twitching.

Her temper trips my switch every damn time.

‘Sex doesn’t solve everything.’ Her ire deflates, leaving behind a sadness I do not understand. ‘You can get back to your meeting. I won’t interrupt you again.’

Why do I hear ever…for anything echoing around us?

‘Neither does barging into my office and stripping in front of my men. We both have our ways of coping.’

‘Fuck you, Raffaele.’ Just that fast, she’s pissed again. She skirts around me and grabs the door, but it doesn’t open. ‘Let me out.’

‘No.’

She makes an adorably frustrated sound and spins to face me again. ‘Stop with the games, Raffaele. You have work to do and so do I.’

‘I cleared my schedule for the rest of the afternoon.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

I just look at her. Does she really think I didn’t have the foresight to text Janine on her behalf?

Giulia makes a sound like steam coming from a tea kettle. ‘After everything else, you had the audacity to cancel my afternoon appointments?’

‘I am efficient that way.’

‘Damn it, Raff!’

At least she’s calling me Raff and not Raffaele.

‘Come and sit down with me.’

She storms over to one of the couches in the seating area that almost never gets used. I prefer to meet people from behind my desk.

Our made men are not my colleagues. I am the underboss. The only man with more power than me in Las Vegas is my father, the don. The only time I use the couches by the window is on the rare occasions my father or his consiglieres come to my office.

Even Giulia’s brother, Miceli, sits in a chair facing my desk when he comes to Vegas to discuss business. And like me, he is underboss. Their older brother, Severu, has been don since Enzo’s death.

As much as I would prefer to sit beside her, I don’t. She didn’t react well to me putting her on my lap earlier. Though I did so because I thought she needed comfort. Her telling me she didn’t want me touching her makes it very clear that if she wants comfort, it is not from me.

I don’t like it. However, for now, I will respect her wishes.

Her impromptu striptease still confuses me, but I now get it was motivated entirely by rage. At me.

We sit in silence for a tense minute before she says, ‘You’re the one that won’t let me leave until we talk. So, talk.’ She waves her hand at me in a come-on gesture.

‘You knew we expected you to have more children.’

‘We,’ she derides. ‘Is that we, you and your father? Or we, you and your parents?’ She shakes her head. ‘Only I have a hard time believing your mother cares one way or the other whether we have another child. She sees Neri less than my mom does.’

I cannot deny the truth. Aria lives in New York, but she visits several times a year and my wife goes back to New York at least once a quarter.

‘My mother has yet to reconcile herself to being a grandmother.’

‘Neri is three years old. Do you think that is ever going to happen?’

‘No.’ Why sugarcoat it? Viola isn’t maternal. Becoming a grandparent did not change that.noveldrama

My son calls her Bea just like me and my brother.

Aria De Luca is Neri’s only real nonna.

‘So, the Mancini family expects me to pop out babies like a brood mare.’

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know that having children in the plural was part of the bargain.’ Hell, our fathers had negotiated the point when Giulia and I were promised. I had been seventeen, but Giulia had still been a child of twelve. ‘Even your sainted father agreed that you would bear a minimum of two children.’

‘He’s not sainted.’

‘I was certain you thought he was.’ She has compared our fathers too many times to count during our marriage.

Mine never wins in the comparison. Of course, he is alive and able to interfere in our lives…in her life. De facto, Patrizio Mancini will never be able to compete with the dead don who by all accounts was both a good don and father.

Patrizio is a good don.

However, my uncle and nannies can take the credit for any real parenting my brother and I received growing up.

‘You’re being sacrilegious.’

‘And you are avoiding the point.’

‘Yes, I have always been aware that you and Patrizio expected me to carry more than one child.’

‘So?’

‘I have an appointment to have the IUD removed next month when Neri and I go to visit my mother.’

‘Why did you go on birth control?’ And why not tell me about it?

She looks at me like she can’t believe I asked that. ‘Do you even remember how hard my pregnancy with Neri was on my body?’

I remember how sexually hungry she was.

After the first few months of debilitating morning sickness. That had been rough on her, but I hadn’t been around much because we’d been dealing with a bratva infestation in Reno.

I’m a hell of an exterminator. The Mancini family controls organized crime in Nevada, not just Vegas.

Giulia had told my father that either someone else had to plan the money-laundering charity events during her pregnancy or they had to be cancelled. She’d also taken a lot of naps her last trimester.

‘You didn’t have your usual energy. I thought that was normal.’

‘Based on?’

I shrug. I am an expert on running our mafia. I am not an expert on pregnancy. ‘If it wasn’t, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘My being unable to work for almost my entire pregnancy didn’t clue you in?’

‘Viola doesn’t work at all.’

My aunt had run the charity events before Giulia took over, and she still helps bring in big name celebrities.

‘I am not your mother.’

‘No.’ That became even more obvious after our son’s birth.

While still running the galas with the precision of a general, my wife is nurturing and present in Neri’s life.

‘My OB said I should wait at least a year before getting pregnant again after Neri’s birth,’ Giulia says, like she has to force every word out.

‘She said nothing to me.’

‘Wow, shocking,’ my wife mocks. ‘Only you are not her patient.’

I grit my teeth at her sarcasm, but right now I need information and the only way to get it is patience. I know my wife that well at least. Though clearly there are things about her that I am in the dark about.

‘You didn’t say anything either.’

‘We don’t talk about stuff like that.’

‘Things like your health?’ Okay, so my own sarcasm slips past my grip on my patience.

She crosses her arms, lifting her gorgeous breasts into prominence. ‘Yes, things like my health.’

‘I asked how you were doing every day when you were pregnant.’ She’d been carrying my child. ‘And you told me you were fine.’

‘I was fine.’

‘No, you were not.’

She sighs. ‘I didn’t think you wanted a blow-by-blow of my fatigue, lower back pain and swollen ankles.’

‘You were wrong.’

‘Fine. I’ll make sure and tell you every time I have to throw up and how often I have to pee and all the rest of it with the next pregnancy.’

Does she think that bothers me? ‘Good.’

‘We’ll see how good you think it is when it’s happening.’

‘Bring it.’

‘You can be ridiculously competitive.’

‘It is not competitive to want to be made aware when my wife is finding the side effects from pregnancy difficult to navigate.’

‘I never said they were hard to deal with, just hard on my body.’

‘Noted.’

‘I don’t want something like this morning happening again, Raff.’ And we are back to what caused her to come pounding on my office door.

‘Tell me about the appointment.’

‘Let’s see, I arrived at the clinic believing I was going to see a doctor involved with heart research, but I was shown into an exam room and told to change into a gown. Do you have any idea how humiliating it was to realize you’d made an appointment with a doctor for me without talking to me about it?’

‘It is my job to take care of you.’

‘Your idea of taking care of me is telling one of your men to do it.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You abandoned me on our honeymoon and left guards to watch over me.’

I barely knew my wife when we married. I assumed it would make little difference to her enjoyment of Paris, if I was there, or not. ‘You know I had to leave.’

‘When I am sick, you move into a guest room and the staff takes care of me,’ she says as if I have not spoken.

‘I check in on you nightly.’ But I keep my distance and do it from the doorway because I cannot get sick.

No weakness is tolerated in an underboss. Not even the flu. The few times I have been ill in my life, I have hidden it and soldiered on.

Just as my father expected me to.

‘What about your detached version of taking care of me would make me believe you want the nitty gritty details of my life?’

‘Going on birth control is hardly a tiny detail. You should have discussed it with me.’ Damn it. I boxed myself into a corner with that one.

‘You mean like you should have talked to me about visiting a fertility clinic?’ she asks with sugary sweetness.

‘In future, I will discuss it with you before making doctor’s appointments for you.’

‘How about you discuss any medical concerns you may have in regard to my body with me and I will make whatever medical appointments I deem necessary.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Just think, if you’d brought up your concerns to me, you could have avoided masturbating into a cup.’