Book 1
Gia Salvatore does not like to feel tied down. Tired of answering to her controlling father, she ran away the night of her high school graduation and moved in with a secret older boyfriend, glad to cut ties with her toxic family.
But four...
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Gia's eyes fluttered open, the darkness of her apartment illuminated only by the Philadelphia streetlights peeking through the not fully drawn curtains. She wasn't sure what had awakened her until she felt the weight of her boyfriend, Robert, climbing into the bed behind her, groaning loudly with his efforts.
Gia peeked a glance at the cable box across the room, a digital clock telling her it was nearly four o'clock.
"You're not going to want to get up in the morning," she said, trying to disguise her irritation.
Recently, Robert had been going out late nights with his friends and while his absence didn't bother Gia, it was his ill concern for her own sleep that did.
Robert responded with another groan, turning in the bed and swinging his arm across her. He nuzzled his chin into the crook of her neck, exhaling deeply from the effort and expelling the smell of cognac past Gia's face.
She closed her eyes then, burying herself deeper into his embrace. She was grateful in the least that he had made it home safely.
"It was thoughtful of you to shower," she said inhaling the fresh scent of his body wash. The bare flesh of his arm was still damp where it laid against her own.
"Maybe next time you could brush your teeth," she ventured, a small smile forming on her lips.
A deep and drunken snore was her only reply and Gia drifted back to sleep feeling safer with him home.
The sound of a blaring car horn and screeching tires snapped Gia's eyes open just a few short hours later. She sat up with urgency at the same moment vehicles collided just outside her window. Her eyes landed on the digital clock that now read 9:10 A.M. and her heart dropped, realizing she had slept through her alarm.
She swung the blankets off of her and on top of Robert who was incapacitated and on his stomach, limbs splayed across the bed.
"Shit!" She curses, jumping up from the bed.
Gia was confused for a split second when her feet landed not on hardwood floor but on something lumpy and fuzzy. There was a yelp and the sound of nails scattering as their German Shepard, Dino, scrambled from his position at the foot of the bed and went to lay instead in his over-sized dog bed across the room.
