Chapter 2 - Damian Cross Knew Derek Was Using Harper, but He Never Expected Her to Carry the One Secret His Enemies Had Been Hunting for YearsDamian drove without explanation for nearly twenty minutes.

His Curvy Wife Hid Her Pain in a Secret Diary Until the Mafia Boss Read One Line and Did the One Thing No One Expected Dante Marino had ordered men to disappear without raising his voice. He had stared down armed rivals across warehouse tables, survived two assassination attempts, and built an empire powerful enough that half of Boston knew better than to speak his name carelessly. But at 2:36 in the morning, standing inside his own mansion with his wife's blue leather diary open in his hands, Dante Marino discovered something he had no idea how to fight. The sentence was written in Elena's neat handwriting. The most frightening thing is not that Dante may stop loving me one day. It is that I have never believed I deserved his love in the first place. Dante stopped breathing. Rain blew through the shattered window of Elena's restoration room on the second floor of their Beacon Hill home. A broken antique frame lay on the hardwood. Cabinet doors hung open. Someone had entered the most heavily guarded residence on the hill, searched Elena's files, stolen the duplicate copy of an audit she had been conducting for the Marino Foundation, and escaped before security closed the perimeter. Dante should have been thinking about the intruder. Instead, he stared at the diary. He should never have opened it. He hadn't meant to. A draft had knocked it from the console after Elena went upstairs to wash rainwater from her hands. It had fallen open near his shoes. His own name had caught his eye. That should have been the moment he closed it. Instead, he had read three more lines. Everyone sees what doesn't belong. The photographers. The women at those dinners. The people who look at my body first and my face second. Dante tells me I'm beautiful. I know he means it. I just don't know how to believe him. And then the final sentence. The one that hurt worse than any bullet Dante had ever taken. He shut the diary. Softly. The sound still seemed deafening. Vincent Cole, his head of security, appeared beyond the doorway. "We found the entry point." Dante didn't turn. "Whoever came into this room," he said, "what did they take?" "The audit copy. Nothing else we can confirm." "Check again." "We are." Dante finally faced him. Vincent's eyes dropped briefly toward the blue notebook. Dante's expression changed. "This does not exist in your report." Vincent understood immediately. "Of course." Dante carried the diary upstairs. Elena was asleep when he entered their bedroom, one hand curled near her cheek. For a long moment, he simply watched her. Her dark hair spread across the pillow. Her wedding ring caught the faint light from the hallway. Her body made a gentle curve beneath the blankets. He had told her she was beautiful a thousand times. Apparently, that had never been the problem. She believed he loved her. She just didn't believe there was enough in herself to deserve being loved. Dante sat on the edge of the bed. He wanted to wake her. He wanted to tell her every thought he'd had the first afternoon he saw her standing inside a cramped South End restoration studio eighteen months earlier. He wanted to tell her he had noticed her before he noticed the priceless painting on the table. That he had admired the way she looked directly at him while men twice her size struggled to do the same. That he loved her softness, her laugh, her wide hips beneath his hands, the tiny crease between her eyebrows when she concentrated, and the way she always stole the crisp edge of his toast even after ordering her own breakfast. But the diary had already answered that. She knew he meant those things. Words weren't reaching the wound. Dante placed the journal on her nightstand. Then he walked away. Eighteen months earlier, Elena Parker had never imagined she would marry Dante Marino. She hadn't even liked him the first day they met. At thirty-two, Elena ran a small but respected art restoration studio on a quiet side street in Boston's South End. She was talented enough to repair paintings worth more than the building she worked in and patient enough to spend eight hours correcting a surface crack most people could barely see. People underestimated her constantly. Some assumed she was an assistant. Others stared at her full figure and seemed surprised that a woman with soft arms, round hips, and a stomach that didn't disappear beneath tailored clothing could also be the most qualified person in the room. Elena had learned to survive that particular kind of cruelty with humor. One Tuesday morning, an older collector looked at her, then at the eighteenth-century portrait beneath her lamp. "You do the restoration yourself?" "Every layer." He looked her over again. "I imagined someone different." Elena smiled. "Old paintings rarely care what the person restoring them looks like." After he left, her assistant Maya Collins stared at the door. "How do you not throw people through windows?" "Windows are expensive." At four that afternoon, two black SUVs stopped outside. Maya looked out. "Either we just became millionaires or we're about to die." Four men in dark suits entered carrying a climate-controlled case. Inside was a badly fire-damaged portrait of a beautiful dark-haired woman. The paperwork identified the owner as the Marino Foundation. Elena knew the name. Everyone in Boston did. Officially, Marino Maritime controlled shipping interests around Boston Harbor. Marino Development owned commercial property across Massachusetts. Unofficially, people became careful when discussing Dante Marino. Elena ignored the reputation. Paint was paint. Under ultraviolet light, she found something strange beneath the visible portrait. Another image. Someone had hidden a second composition beneath the first. Even stranger, clear resin along the frame had been applied years after the fire that supposedly damaged the piece. The restoration records mentioned nothing about it. "Your paperwork is wrong," she told the armed men. A calm voice came from behind her. "Show me." Elena turned. Dante Marino stood in her studio wearing a charcoal overcoat dusted with melting snow. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, and controlled in the unsettling way of a man accustomed to having entire rooms obey him. His guards straightened. Maya nearly stopped breathing. Elena pointed to the painting. "The records say nobody touched this after the fire. Somebody did." "Open it." Dante reached toward a damaged layer. Elena grabbed his wrist. Every guard moved. Dante looked down at her hand. Then at her face. "Don't," Elena said. No one spoke to Dante Marino like that. Elena didn't care. "If you pull that canvas another two inches, you'll destroy whatever your mother was trying to protect." His eyes changed. "Who told you that was my mother?"

10 chapters