Read Online A Starlet in Venice by Tara Crescent - Free Book Online Page B

abandoned willingly by my parents. I’d been abandoned unwillingly by Antonio and Enzo. Family after family had declined to adopt me. When most men looked at me, I was tits and ass and pussy, and nothing else.
    Everyone except Liam, who had taken the time to get to know me. He’d never made a pass at me. He had waited for me to make the first move.
    Did I believe the truth of his words?
    “You want to date me.” I said those words out aloud, half-expecting him to laugh at my presumption. He was whole and I was broken. How could I even dare to want him?
    “More than I’ve ever wanted anything before.” There was absolutely no doubt in his voice.
    “Why?”
    ***
    Liam:
    She saw weakness when she looked in the mirror. I saw only strength.
    Tainted by the way men treated her, yet she still let me in. Constantly judged and envied by women, yet Lucia and Alice were her good friends.
    Everything she had built, she had built by herself, rejecting Antonio and Enzo’s help. Sometimes, she struggled, but she forged her own path, and god, I admired her for the way she’d never opted to take the easy road. She took night classes because she never went to university, and I hadn’t ever seen her slack off. She could so easily have become some rich man’s pet. She was beautiful and her body invited sin. Just the image of her kneeling, waiting demurely for me sent my cock aching hard.
    But I wanted Tatiana for more than her body. I wanted her because when I asked her last year to be my friend, she’d responded with generosity and sweetness and kindness. I had felt myself starting to get cynical. I had started to take women for granted in my role as the manager of Casanova, and I had hated who I was becoming. And Tia had been there for me, and she’d prevented me from becoming a caricature of myself. She’d given me my humanity.
    “Because I think we’ll be perfect together.” She turned to face me, looking doubtful. “We already get along well. The sex was amazing.”
    She frowned. “Liam,” she protested. “That could have been a one-time thing. What if I can’t orgasm again with you? What then?”
    “Do you think it’s going to change the way I feel about you, Tia? That’s never going to happen.”
    She didn’t meet my eyes for what felt like hours. “There are things you need to know about me,” she said. “My mother got pregnant with me when she was eighteen. She’s alive. She lives in Siena. She just left me at the orphanage and went on with her life. My father went back to Russia. That’s why I had an abortion. I didn’t want to do that to my child.”
    There was nothing I could say. I just enveloped her in my arms, and hoped that I could convey everything I felt for her in my embrace. Even more so, I was in awe at her strength, and I was in awe that she hadn’t come out of that experience bitter and hard. She was so sweet, my little rabbit.
    “Was it hard for you to come here?” Though I hadn’t known, I was inwardly cursing myself. It couldn’t have been easy to see the Callahans, loving and untroubled, when her life had been so much more difficult.
    “A little. It was nice though. I got to see a little bit of you that I don’t get to see in Venice.”
    I kissed her. It was meant to be a brief kiss, one that told her that I loved her and I wanted her, and she was beyond precious to me. But our kiss deepened. Mouths collided, need grew, tongues danced in a duet, and teeth nipped gently, and we were both panting by the time we pulled away.
    She gave me the smallest of nods. “Okay.”
    “Okay what?” Wait, did she just agree to date me?
    “Okay, I want to date you too,” she said with a smile and a cheeky roll of her eyes. “Keep up, Liam.”
    I felt a smile break out on my face, because heaven help me, these were the words I’d been aching to hear for the last year. I spanked her butt. “Brat,” I chided in response to the eye-roll, and her smile dimmed.
    “There is one thing though,”