by Olivia Fox
Punishing Thirst: Mafia Romance
Rough Redemption Book 1
Olivia Fox
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Brando:
My family doesn't take “no” for an answer. Not in the boardroom, the courtroom nor the bedroom.
Lucia will learn I'll be her one and only sugar daddy from now on.
She'll learn to call me “Sir”, and if she can’t remember, I’ll teach her.
I'll make her a slave to new sensation, willing to do anything for more.
My pet.
I’ll put her in a God damned cage if I have to.
She's my good girl.
My naughty girl, too. I'll make her show me what that pretty mouth can do.
I'll look after her, and she'll let me.
Miracles happened to those who believe, right?
This Juicy Mafia Romance has a super hot, alpha male who stops at nothing to protect his girl. It’s a prequel to the Rough Redemption Series complete with an HEA and no cliffhangers.
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1
Savanna
Five thirty in the morning was way too early to think about stalkers.
Just my luck, I was fifteen pounds overweight, what my Aunt Teresa called an “unconventional beauty,“ which was an acceptable way of saying my front teeth stuck out, freckles splashed my cheeks, and no one would mistake them for beauty marks. Despite all this, Mathew had stalked me as if I were a modern-day Marilyn Monroe.
The police officers who failed to lock him up told me every stalker had a type, and it just so happened I was his.
I’d found a semblance of peace these past few months, pounding flour and yeast into bread, rolls, or donuts while working in my auntie‘s bakery. So much so that it caught me by surprise when I spun around to spot the danger and went into full-body tremors when the delivery dude slammed the giant sack of flour on the counter behind me.
A single flashback pinned me to the asphalt, one of Mathew’s knees on my shoulder, his hand on my neck. I couldn’t scream for help. Mathew pulled a gun from behind his back and aimed it at my head.
“Click!” he said and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber.
He smiled a hateful grin, full of malevolence and death, and I knew months ago when it actually happened, I’d never get his expression out of my head.
I was right.
One sack of flour tossed too hard behind me, and he was suddenly holding me down again while I struggled to hold back a scream.
No place was safe. Not even this small town in the middle of nowhere.
Telling myself to snap out of it, I sucked and blew air like a freight train, lucid again and aware of my surroundings. My chest ached as if I was at the end days of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“Hey, you okay?” The delivery guy asked, and I started involuntarily.
I am safe, and all is well... I am safe and all is well...
Repeating the mantra recommended by my damned therapist didn’t do shit, and it was too early for a glass of wine.
“Yeah. Fine, “ I answered. I’d given up trying to explain my weird behavioral quirks. Most people didn’t understand how harassment and unwanted attention turned so sick and twisted, I ran away from my own life to escape it.
To be on the safe side, I went to the window and pulled back the curtain.
Mathew’s car wasn’t in the back parking lot.
The sound of the industrial mixer started up in the next room, grounding me, followed by the yeasty smell of bread dough. My clenched muscles relaxed in an unexpected release of tension, and tears welled up behind my eyelids.
There was no danger here with Aunt Teresa.
Chill out, Savanna. I told myself. Mathew has no idea where you are.
Aunt Teresa came in, unaware of my minor panic attack, and plopped a dome of her famous cinnamon bun dough on the marble counter. Watching her move under the puffs of flour dust, backlit by morning sunlight that streamed through the overhead antique skylight, my throat felt tight and a little sore.
Right about now, my best friend Kate would be cleaning puppy cages, and feeding the rabbits, kittens, and assorted animals at the shop we had opened: Muddy Paws.
“Coffee’s ready,” my auntie said cheerfully. “Help yourself to that and the granola I made yesterday. Then if you’d make the cream cheese frosting for the carrot cake, we’ll be all set.”
The custom made, marble-topped island filled center of the room. Redwood wainscoting covered the walls and Aunt Teresa had painted it her favorite color: tiffany blue.
Her capable hands went over the kitchen surfaces a million times a day. She was as reliable as the waves of the tide lapping at the shore, elemental and reassuring.
Gradually I’d learned how to help make her secret recipes. We cast kitchen spells by melting butter, mixing batter, sprinkling cinnamon... hoping they helped our everyday difficulties dissipate like a sugary glaze dissolved on the tongue.
I gathered my hair on top of my head in a high ponytail to keep it away from the baking equipment. My aunt told me stories of bakers pulled into an industrial mixer, kissing the rest of their days sayonara.
As if I weren’t flinchy enough.
It was weird in Briarville, a tiny, picturesque “Victorian village” on the northern coast of California—vastly different from the city of Oakland where I had gone to business school, graduated, and opened a shop with Kate.
People here looked you in the eye when they passed you on the sidewalk.
I turned over the “Open“ sign and unlocked the front door of the bakery where three cowboys waited on the black and white octagonal limestone tiles my auntie paved the entry way with. It didn’t matter to her that her customers tracked dirt and grime in from the fields. “Working-class people deserve first class treatment, Savanna,” she’d remind me.
The first customers entered the bakery as if they were entering a church. A temple where it was okay to slap each other on the back, kid one another about how they needed to “wake up sleepy head!” and dish about what happened last night at The Saloon. There was also catching up on daily chatter. “Did you hear about Ingrid? She got kicked in the head by a bull yesterday, tying an elastic band around its balls.”
The holy water in this church was coffee, its communion, baked goods.
A smiling cowboy, the same one who said to me the first day I met him, “You’re real pretty.” Stepped up to the counter and asked me, “You getting used to these crazy hours your aunt keeps?”
“Pretty much. I just go to bed early.” I slid his triple foam cappuccino across the counter with a blueberry scone, not about to go into my chronic insomnia with a virtual stranger.
I sometimes wondered if it was being overly friendly that got me into trouble with Mathew.
Teresa reassured me that cowboy Bart was harmless enough, after I about shit a brick from his initial attentions. One advantage of small-town living was t
hat it was hard to hide your sins in a place like this. The creepers got called out, so you knew to avoid them.
The rhythm of the bakery continued, and I went into the back kitchen to brush butter on the sandwich rolls and slide them in the oven, and I ran a stack of crumb- covered plates through the dishwasher.
Pulling down the door of the commercial machine, I heard my aunt murmuring affectionately from the front of the shop, “Dante Drago, as I live and breathe. We’ve missed you around here.”
The reply was so deep it tickled the bottom of my belly and spread to the base of my spine, “Not many reasons to get out, Teresa. This is one of the few places worth stopping by. You have any of your famous carrot cake left?”
“Oh.” I hear the unmistakable sound of my auntie assembling a cake box, “You haven’t met my niece yet.”
On cue, I picked up the cake smeared with cream cheese frosting and decorated with edible nasturtiums, hefted it proudly above my shoulder, and walked it up front.
At least, that was what should have happened.
Instead, I wound up slipping and tripping ass over tea kettle upon glimpsing the best-looking man on planet Earth.
Men like Dante Drago were blessed by Mother Mary in Heaven. Invisible tears shed by women everywhere kissed his muscles when he walked past without stopping to give them the time of day.
I guess falling on my ass in front of him was one way to get his attention.
2
Dante
“Just don’t flex too hard if you like that shirt, “ my cousin Carlos remarked as we got dressed at the gym that morning.
“Funny.” I had to say the word. It wasn’t possible for my face to form an expression of amusement or for my lips to curve into a smile.
My features had turned to stone the day the cops came to my construction site and delivered news that shoved my heart so far beneath the ice it hadn’t yet defrosted.
So, yeah, fuck it.
Carrot cake.
For the first time since forever, I remembered how much I loved the taste. Not like I needed to watch the calorie intake. I was in the best shape of my life.
“You still in construction?” Teresa asked, snapping me back to the present. I’d placed my order, and we were waiting on her helper in the back.
“I am.”
“Well, the hard work shows in your physique.” She looked as if she was trying to hide her appreciation of my biceps.
Hey, I take female recognition wherever I could get it, even if Teresa was a little out of my age range.
The days of being led around by my dick were long gone.
It was like the heat-seeking missile features of my cock were left out in the rain and rusted in place.
Until I saw her come around the corner looking like three servings of disaster on a platter. She blew a golden strand of hair off of her forehead. With one hand she shoved the thick black plastic glasses up her nose, and with the other held a cake above her head as she came way too fast around the corner. Sure enough, her foot slid out from under her, and she went down.
I leapt towards her and stretched out my arms to catch her. At the last second, she caught herself on one foot, yanked away from me and crashed onto the floor, flat on her bottom. It had to hurt, but instead of crying, she held the cake stand level, extended over her head like an Olympic torch. The frosting- covered prize was completely intact.
Which was more than I could say. My heart spiked a beat, and my mouth had gone dry.
And then I felt it.
The way this girl did seductive, dark things to me.
Inside me, something came to life. Like a bear that had been hibernating for many, many seasons. It stretched its stiff limbs, scented something edible in the air, and lumbered toward the delicious morsel. The wild thing felt in its belly it had not eaten for a very long time.
And it was ravenous.
Why her?
Why now?
The unexpected effect she had on me made me scold her, “You shouldn’t be in such a hurry.”
It wasn’t like this girl was making any overt attempt to get male attention, but like it or not she had mine.
Goofy glasses, her eyes opened wide as if I were going to lean down and puncture her neck with my incisors. She wore an enormous body camouflaging t-shirt with a kitten sitting on a stack of books. They all added up to one thing, and it practically glowed like a neon sign. “Don’t look at me.”
Everything about her was exactly the opposite of what attracted me. I preferred leggy redheads. And yet, my body was telling me otherwise. Her mouth was half-open and swear to God I wanted to lean down and cover her lips with mine just to see what she tasted like.
She smelled like flowers, but not the kind from a bottle. It was the scent you breathed when you lowered your nose to a wildflower bouquet and took a whiff.
It didn’t help one bit when she let out a breathy little groan as she tried to help herself up off the floor. Instead of letting her, I gave her my hand, and scowled down at her soft, pillowy body.
Suddenly, my rusty, neglected cock became unhinged, unfolding in my jeans and rising rigidly, perceptibly beneath my zipper.
Shit.
“You need to be more careful,” I snapped. It came out harsher than I intended, but the thought of her hurting herself, combined with the unfulfilled ache of my no longer slumbering dick, made me cranky as fuck.
“I didn’t mean to. I don’t know how I... I slipped on the floor even though I have my anti-skid shoes on.” She looked down and pulled the thick mane of her ponytail through her hand and rubbed the back of her neck.
The gesture caused a vision to whoosh across my imagination, me with one hand wrapped around her throat, the other shoved between her legs, while I whispered into her mouth, “Who do you belong to?”
I shook my head.
Later, of course it was always after the fact when you realized you’d pulled off something stupid, I asked myself what the hell I was doing.
The girl was so clearly not right for me, and she was Teresa’s niece.
I wasn’t right for anyone after what happened to Lilly… my heart shriveled like a walnut. This was nothing more than hormones talking after waking, for reasons unbeknownst to me, from their long period of inactivity.
It was getting awkward, me staring down at her. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Her voice was taught like a tightrope. “I just slipped.”
Yep, all wrong for me.
Sassy.
Goofy.
Clumsy.
Which was why I asked myself later what the fuck I was doing when I returned to the front counter and said to Teresa, “I’ll be by after work to take measurements for non-skid flooring in this corridor. I don’t want another accident.”
That was it. I was making sure nobody got hurt around here.
This wasn’t about a suddenly twitchy palm, or my fantasies of punishing her across my lap until she learned to be more careful.
Or so I told myself.
Great. I was turning into the thing I hated the most.
A liar.
3
Savanna
“How the heck did you end up on the floor so fast?” my Auntie asked.
It happened in a flash, and in that blink of an eye, I surmised that like still waters, Dante was a man with dark and unplumbed depths.
So, why didn’t he scare me?
Nearly every man I’d met since Mathew became a delusional, hard-up lunatic, frightened the piss out of me.
I tried to wipe the grin that wanted to drape itself across my features off of my face. Just one encounter with the beefy construction dude had my panties soaked. The thought of his return to install the flooring this evening while I was here alone made my heart beat fast and my fingers itch with the urge to stroke his biceps to see if they felt as hard as they looked.
I didn’t want the entire town hearing about my little crush. Lord knew if one customer heard about me practically falli
ng into his arms, it would be all over Briarville faster than flames across a dry forest floor. The last thing I needed was to be the center of town gossip.
I’d had enough unwanted attention to last me a lifetime.
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson but try to tell that to my ovaries or galloping pulse.
While I was bagging up day old pastries and baked goods for the local women’s shelter my auntie supported, they arrived.
Teresa carried the bouquet of pink floral splendor into the kitchen: carnations, stock, and roses burst out of the vase, “These are for you, and there’s a card.” Her eyes squinted with mischief.
I plucked the small white envelope from the flowers, opened it and read:
“Flowers are fine, but nothing smells as good as the scent of you on my clothes.
Dante”
I backed away from the flowers my hands raised.
It was too familiar, the unexpected grandiose gesture. “From Dante.” My whisper was tissue-paper thin and my hand floated up to cover my mouth.
Teresa came over and held me tight. “That guy, Mathew, really did a number on you, didn’t he?” She stroked my hair back from my forehead, “If it makes a difference to you, I would trust Dante with my own daughter if I had one. He’s a good boy.”
She released me to look at the bouquet and fondled a rose petal with the pad of her finger. “Romantic. He’s Italian; his blood runs hot.”
“I’m just scared to enter into something that might not work out. A break-up I can handle. A man going full blown psycho because I refuse him is more than I can take right now.”
Mathew would send flowers constantly, believing we were meant to be together even though we’d never gone out. It was like he thought if he just kept trying, I would change my mind. He tracked down my apartment address and would greet me at my doorstep after work with take-out and a movie or two. Until I got scared and filed a restraining order.
