by Laura Sutton
La Famiglia: Elias
The diRuggiero Mafia Family Saga
Laura Sutton
Copyright © 2020 by Laura Sutton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copy write law. For permission requests write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
408 hwy 77 South
Robstown, Texas 78380
First Edition Published September 2020
Cover design by Michelle Ruggiero
Formatting by The Nutty Formatter
Prologue
The priest was talking, something about ashes and returning to dust, but Elias hadn’t heard a word. Elias – the name his beautiful, vibrant, brilliant mother had given him, and now she was gone, gone far too soon and too violently. The woman who taught him to appreciate Chaucer and Miguel de Cervantes, the person who taught him to dance and reminded his father to smile, the only one that brought laughter to his family’s dark world. Stolen away.
One minute she had been sitting outside a café, drinking coffee and reading, enjoying the day like any other, and the next she was gone in a hail of bullets.
Not that violence was new to his family; hell, the di Ruggieros thrived on it… well, most of them did. For Elias, it wasn’t something he welcomed, like his father and his older brother Dante did, or something exciting, which was what his younger brothers thought. No, for Elias, the danger was a liability and not what he wanted. Not anymore. Probably not ever, if he was completely honest with himself.
“You’re either all the way in this family, or you’re not.”
That was what his brother had told him six months ago, when Elias’s legal expertise had been needed to help la famiglia, the family. He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t wanted to sully his soul to get a lighter sentence for one of his grandfather’s lieutenants, arrested trying to smuggle a truck full of cocaine through Texas. Eli had done it, though, because it was for the family. It was what was expected of him.
“Now we lay Marissa di Ruggiero to her last rest.” The priest’s words broke through his musings, his pain, and he stood in concert with his father and brothers and grandfathers. A group of seven: powerful, dark, dangerous men, and Elias probably the least dangerous of them all.
He stood, the single white rose, his mother’s favorite flower, clenched in his hand, and watched as the beautiful silver casket was lowered into the ground. Even in death, his father had ensured only the best for the love of his life. His father, who kissed the petals of his own white rose and placed it on the coffin, his fingers lingering on its metal surface. His father, whose eyes had gone flat and hard and empty the moment he’d learned of his wife’s death. His father, the scariest of them all.
Elias watched as his brothers and grandfathers placed their own roses on the coffin, each vowing revenge in their own way, until it was his turn. Oh, there were others waiting, hundreds even; their families were powerful and his mother well-loved by many, but they would all wait while her own family said their goodbyes.
Elias walked up to the coffin, kissed the petals of the rose and then genuflected and said a prayer, a prayer to a god he wasn’t sure he believed in, but one he knew his mother had. He unwrapped the rosary off his wrist – the rosary that his mother had given to him when he took his first communion – and laid it over the roses. She’d taught him that the little glass beads and the prayers said over them would protect him, help guide him, help ground him. For a time he’d believed her, been a dutiful son. Then he’d grown up, seen the world they all lived in for what it was, and knew the beads would do nothing… but maybe some small, almost-dead part of him thought maybe they would protect her now, wherever she may be going.
“Goodbye, Mama,” he whispered.
His brothers were huddled under a tree, their father standing apart from them, scanning the crowd of people… for whom in particular, Elias was afraid to ask. He took a deep breath and, with one last look at the coffin, straightened and headed over to his brother.
Marissa wasn’t the only di Ruggiero who was gone. Elias was, too; they just didn’t know it yet. He couldn’t be loyal to the darkness anymore, not now that the sun had disappeared forever behind the clouds.
Part I
Chapter One
Samantha
Samantha reached for her drink, the frozen concoction calling to her as the warm Costa Rican sun slowly pinkened her skin. She plucked the tiny blue decorative umbrella from her drink and took a long sip. The cold, sweet drink– with just a bite of rum– tickled her throat.
“This was your best idea ever,” came a relaxed, almost sleepy, voice of her best friend Roxy, sprawled next to her on the twin to Sam’s lounge chair.
“What was? Coming down to the beach before we unpacked?” Sam asked, setting her drink back down on the little table between their chairs and laying back against the pillows.
“The whole damn vacation,” Roxy replied and Sam grinned, her eyes closed behind her dark sunglasses and her face shielded from the sun with a big straw hat. Sam felt almost glamorous in it and her modest black one-piece bathing suit.
Sam was anything but glamorous, though. She and Roxy had just graduated law school at Tulane University and this was their celebration trip. They’d worked long, hard hours and had the pasty skin and undereye circles to prove it.
“I’m so glad you dumped that loser and brought me instead,” Roxy murmured and Sam nodded.
A scant few days before finals and graduation, Sam had found her long-term boyfriend – the man she had dated throughout law school, the man she had thought she would one day marry, maybe have a child or two with – in their bed with a barista. Not just any barista, but one from her favorite coffee shop, no less. She lost not only her boyfriend that day, but also the place where she studied and got her favorite latte.
She was more broken up about the latte than she was about Rick, to be honest.
“I’m glad you could get a flight and come with me. This trip would’ve been boring alone,” Sam said as she turned and smiled at her best friend. Roxy was not just bright and talented, but drop-dead gorgeous, too. Roxy’s body, displayed to perfection in a tiny red bikini, was curvy, flat and trim in all the right places… where Samantha’s was not. Roxy’s bronze skin, dark thick hair and dark eyes made her look exotic and interesting, while Sam always felt chubby and plain, her blonde hair limp and prone to frizz on humid days. Even her eyes, while gray in color, weren’t a striking or unusual gray but merely a pale and boring gray.
In fact, Sam always felt ‘boring’ was the best description of her body. She was chubby, but not in that sexy way that guys seemed to go for. Just chubby. Her breasts weren’t overly large, her butt and thighs were a tad too large, and her stomach wasn’t flat. It curved out in a way that wouldn’t exactly get men panting in her DMs on social media.
She had accepted this about herself long ago, but Rick’s betrayal had made old insecurities bubble to
the surface. Sam hoped with time and distance away from Rick and New Orleans would help heal new and old wounds alike.
“I don’t know, maybe you should have come alone, or invited one of those hot guys you met at the club a few weeks ago,” Roxy said with a leer, and Sam was grateful for the hat and the sun already warming her face so Roxy couldn’t see her blush.
Right after Sam had caught Rick and moved out of their apartment Roxy had dragged her out to a club: one, to celebrate finishing their last final in law school; and two, to help her move on.
“The fastest way to get over one guy is to get under another,” Roxy had teased that night as she convinced Sam to wear a too-tight, too-short black dress.
The night had been surreal, to say the least. She had met not one but two handsome men... that she had spent the night with. Her – boring, plain, chubby Sam. It still made little sense to her, and if Roxy didn’t tease her about it at least once a day, she would’ve sworn it had all been a dream.
A hot, sexy, amazing dream, but still a dream.
Dean and Jason had been more than hot, though; they had been nice and sweet, too, a much-needed balm on her bruised ego after Rick’s ridicule and betrayal.
“That was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I doubt I’ll meet anyone here like them,” Sam answered, taking another sip from her drink.
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know why you didn’t follow them back to Texas. I would have – two smoking-hot cowboys, sexy and good in bed. You couldn’t drag me away.”
“Right, and if you did, Carlos would follow you and try his damnedest to win you back,” Sam teased. Roxy rolled her eyes, but the warm smile that played around her mouth betrayed her genuine affection for her boyfriend of two years.
“I guess,” Roxy mumbled and drained her drink, her straw making a loud slurping sound as she got the last of the liquid out of the glass. “I’m out!” she declared, slamming the coconut-shaped glass down on the table. “Where’s that cabana boy?” The rum was obviously taking effect.
“I don’t think we should call them ‘cabana boys’, Rox,” Sam said with a laugh and sat up, swinging her legs to one side of the chair. She dug her toes into the fine, warm sand of the beach. She couldn’t wait to spend the next fourteen days exploring the beaches and the jungle and all that Costa Rica had to offer.
“Here, give me your glass, I’ll go up to the bar and get us two more.”
Sam stood and reached for her glass and took Roxy’s as well.
“You’re a doll. Tell the bartender I want two shots of rum. I plan to take full advantage of the all-inclusiveness of this resort,” Roxy said, leaning back into her chair with a happy sigh.
Sam just shook her head in amusement. She would miss Roxy, her first and closest friend in New Orleans. Roxy had secured a clerk position with the state of California, and Sam would be in Virginia, where she would also be clerking for a judge while studying for the bar. She was excited to be closer to her family again, her parents and little brother, but she would miss the woman who had become like a sister to her in college.
Sam made her way through the handful of people milling around the bar. It was late in the afternoon and people seemed to be leaving the beach area of the resort to head into the hotel, probably for showers and dinner, something she and Roxy should probably think about doing. After one last drink, that was.
Sam found space at the bar and waited. There were three young women, exquisitely lovely, oohing and ahhing at the bartender as he very extravagantly made their drinks. He even tossed a bottle or two in the air. Sam settled on a barstool to watch the show and wait for the bartender to notice her. However, judging by how small the bikinis were on the three very tanned women and their loud giggles, it might be a while.
“What are you drinking?” a deep masculine voice asked beside her.
Sam almost jumped at the proximity of the man leaning on the bar next to her. She hadn’t noticed him at the bar when she walked up. She couldn’t stop her eyes from drinking him in.
He was beautiful. His body was lean and hard with broad shoulders and sculpted arms, and his skin, deeply tanned and golden, was in stark contrast to her own pasty paleness. The muscles on his chest and stomach were so well-defined, he looked like he must live in a gym. On his chest was a tattoo of a large black eagle with two spears crossed behind it. In its talons, it carried a banner with words she recognized as Latin– though not their meaning– from law school She caught herself wanting to touch his chest, to run her fingers over the ink, see if it had left marks on his skin.
Her eyes traced his body down. Loose dark blue swim trunks sat very, very low on his hips– so low she could see those defined lines only very fit men have. Roxy called those lines ‘the path to heaven’, and Samantha imagined that whatever was under those trunks could be heavenly indeed.
His chuckle made her eyes fly up to his face, embarrassed. How much rum had been in that drink, anyway? She’d never checked out a man so openly in her life.
“I’m dying to know what you’re thinking about to cause such a deep blush,” the man said, his voice husky, all sin and whiskey over ice.
She finally brought her eyes up to his face, and of course it was just as beautiful as the rest of him. He looked like someone who just stepped out of an Italian movie.His dark brown hair was on the longer side and seemed to curl in the humidity. His eyes were brown, the color of expensive dark chocolate, and his jaw… well, she had never seen such a perfect jaw on a man before in her life. You could cut glass on the line of his jaw, she thought ruefully. And on that perfect jaw was dark stubble that gave him a mysterious and powerful air.
“So what are you drinking?” he asked again, and Sam cleared her throat. She couldn’t seem to find any words while she looked up at him, something magnetic making her body sway towards him, like he was the earth and she was the moon, drawn to his gravitational pull.
Definitely too much rum, she thought, and cleared her throat once more.
“Oh, um, the waiter said they were painkillers. The best way to start our vacation,” she finally got out, nodding to the empty fake coconut shells as a way to explain.
“Our vacation? Are you here with a boyfriend? A husband? A girlfriend?” he asked, his eyes drinking her in. They traveled down her body, feeling almost like a caress, a hot caress that caused a prickle of sweat to form… as well as a dampness between her thighs.
“Oh... a– a girlfriend,” she managed at last.
His head jerked up at that and she could've sworn there was disappointment in his dark eyes. “Not a girlfriend-girlfriend,” she hastened to clarify. ”My friend, Roxy. We’re here on vacation for two weeks.”
The lazy, almost predatory, smile that graced his mouth made her want to kiss him. She wanted to claim him… or be claimed by him. She wasn’t sure which, really.“Oh… that’s nice.”
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked, finally noticing there were other customers besides the giggling beauties. Sam turned to face him so fast she lost her balance on the stool, and the handsome stranger put his arm around her waist to steady her.
“Woah, there,” he whispered in her ear and settled his body against the back of hers.She didn’t have the willpower or the desire to pull out of his grasp.
“She needs two more painkillers, and I’ll take a beer,” he answered the bartender for her… and he still didn’t release her. His hand on her waist should’ve unnerved her; it was her least favorite part of her body– and she had many– but it didn’t. His thumb rubbed small, comforting circles on her back, and she wanted to lean into his stronger, larger frame and rub against him like a cat.
Was she drunk? Surely she had to be. But Sam knew it wasn’t the rum; it was something about this handsome stranger.
“Here you go,” the bartender said, putting two new plastic coconuts in front of them with a bottle of beer. “Room number?” he asked, poised in front of a touch screen.
“3125,” the stranger answered before she could even
open her mouth.
“Thank you, sir.” The bartender smiled and moved on to the next thirsty patron.
“So, um…”
“Samantha!”
Roxy strolled to the bar with a knowing smile on her face. “Girl, you’ve been gone forever!” she declared. She leaned against the bar, her knowing gaze taking in the scene and how Sam was still snuggled into the handsome stranger’s embrace. “Hi! I’m Roxy,” she said cheerfully, holding out her hand for him to shake. Sam mourned the loss of warmth when he took his hand from her waist to shake Roxy’s.
“Eli,” he answered, and his hand was back on her again. Like he had staked his claim, and she was his.
Sam flushed at that thought,embarrassed that she hadn’t even known his name until he’d introduced himself to Roxy.
“Nice to meet you, Eli,” Roxy said, her bright eyes dancing. “Sam, I’m getting hungry. Maybe we should get dinner?”
Roxy was right, they needed to eat; they’d had nothing since lunch at the airport in New Orleans. But Sam didn’t want to go to dinner, not yet. She didn’t want to leave Eli’s arms, and she was afraid if she moved, it might break the magic that had seemed to wind itself around them.
“I suppose we should,” Sam sighed, but didn’t move. In fact, Eli’s arm tightened a bit around her waist. He didn’t want to let her go, either, it seemed.
Sam turned her head and looked up at him. He was so much taller than her own five-foot-seven frame, and it was nice to feel dainty around a man for once. “Maybe you would, uh, that is, maybe you could,” she stuttered, and he grinned and then bit his lower lip. Fuck, now all she could think about was him biting her lip, or her biting his. Whichever, or both.
“I would love to have dinner with you, Sam.” He grinned and added, “You and Roxy, of course.”
