A wicked smile pulled at his lips. He leaned in to whisper in my ear, “I know I said you could have your way with me, but right now I need to be inside you.”
I sighed, and he turned me to face the wall. His belt clinked playfully, cold and hard against my bare skin as he unbuckled it with urgency to free his erection. The soft grooves on the silky wallpaper brushed against my nipples and face, but I didn’t dare move. I stayed right where he wanted me. I’d do anything to get him to finish what he’d started. He cupped and kneaded my butt cheeks while he rubbed his cock on the lace of my underwear. The only thing separating me from him.
I couldn’t take any more of that. “Now, Dom.”
His touch fell away. I couldn’t move. Instead, I waited with a patience I didn’t feel as he ripped open the condom wrapper. “You’re so fucking gorgeous.” He slid his forearm up my back and moved my hair out of the way, letting it cascade on my right side. His cool mouth brushed up my spine and over my scars. He removed my panties, and then he entered me with a force that made me gasp his name. A couple thrusts was all it took for me. I clenched around him, feeling how hard he was for me. I let out a breath and waited for my release.
“Not yet.” He panted, his breath hot and heavy on my shoulder. After a long second, he gripped my hip with one hand to still me while the other slid from my lower back up to the center where he drew small circles along the puckered skin etched across my back. He followed his fingers with wet kisses, nibbling and sucking as he went along. “Our skin shows where we’ve been, but it can’t tell us who we choose to be.”
“I think I understand that now.” I licked the sweat off my upper lip and moaned when he rocked his hips into me. The heat lingering inside me almost hurt. I shuddered against his warm skin and surrendered to him.
The tenderness of his touch, the heat of his skin, the slick of his tongue on my scars…it all screamed a single word in my head. Forgive. Once again, the idea of forgiving, forgetting the past, and moving on with my life felt easy. It felt like the only answer.
“I love you,” he said, and my body tensed. My own muscle memory. He snaked an arm around my waist while he caged me against the wall with the other. “Don’t run off again. Please.”
“I’m not. Just not what I was expecting you to say right about now.” I took a deep breath, taking in his scent, feeling his strength around me and his hard cock inside me. The urge to take flight slowly dissolved, and I relaxed in his arms again.
He buried his face in the nook between my neck and shoulder and thrust into me again. This time he didn’t hold anything back. With my palms pressed against the wall, I rested my forehead on my wrists and allowed myself to imagine a life, a future with this incredibly beautiful man, who not two hours ago had risked his life to rescue me because he loved me.
“Dom,” I sighed, repeating his name.
“I’m right here.” He brushed his sweaty cheek against mine and kissed the corner of my lip. His hips continued their synchronized dance. With every pump, he reached deeper inside me, past the spot that made me want to scream his name. He placed a large hand over my heart, and I leaned into it, giving in, turning into a puddle of want in his arms.
The pressure at my core built and I gave in to that too, letting Dom take over. I didn’t want to run anymore. I wanted this. I wanted him. My heartbeat spiked, hard and fast. It drowned Dom’s string of curses and mine as we both found our release. The heat from his body, or maybe it was my own, spread from my ears all the way down to my toes. After a few more beats, the A/C unit took pity on us and finally cranked on, blowing cold air in our faces. Dom released me. I spun to face him, but instead, I slowly slid down the wall, all the way to the floor.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
With a husky chuckle, he bent over and gathered me into his arms. “Come on, the bed is more comfortable.”
“Maybe next time we start there?”
“I can work on that.” He maneuvered through the living area and laid me on my side of the bed. Shaking his head with a wide grin on his face, he reached down to take off my high heels. I hadn’t even thought of taking them off before. Yeah, my head got cloudy whenever he kissed me like I was the last person on earth. “If you don’t take these shoes off, we may not get to have that talk you promised.”
“Right.” I scooted up the bed and got under the covers. Now that the afterglow of sex had subsided, the A/C air was too much for me. Or maybe the shivers had more to do with nerves than low body temperature. “I’m going to need a minute to gather my thoughts here.”
“Take your time.” He sauntered around the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight as he sat to take off his shoes and socks. When he stood, he unzipped his pants, let them drop to the floor, and climbed in bed with me. It didn’t matter that it was still daylight out. Just like him, I didn’t want to leave this room or this bed.
“We should get something to eat.” He picked up the receiver. “What are you in the mood for? Sushi?”
“Sounds good.” I rolled on my side and ran my hand up his stomach as he placed an order with the concierge. “You can’t expect them to drop everything to bring you food.” I laughed.
“They have people for that.” He dropped the phone on its base and shifted his body to face me. “Are you okay? I mean, do you want to talk about what happened?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “He apologized.”
“Really?” His mouth fell open. “What did he say?”
“Just that he was sorry he hurt me.” Hearing myself say the words aloud released yet another part that’d been dormant inside me. “I want to forgive him.”
“That’s a good start.” He cupped my face and flashed me an amused smile. “But if he apologized, why were you giving him hell when Vic and I showed?”
“I lost my temper.”
“Yeah, I got that. But why?” He sat up on the bed, brows furrowed.
Heat rose to my cheeks. For ten years, I’d spent my life doing the right thing, letting Mom tell me what to do because that was the only way to stay alive. Just when I thought I was getting my life back, Levi informed me I needed to disappear again.
“I can’t keep running. I won’t.”
“I know. I promise you, you don’t have to hide anymore.”
“That’s exactly what Levi wants me to do. If I want him out of my life for good, I have to return to New York.”
“I see.” He rubbed the sexy stubble on his cheek. “It’s bad for business when the people you were asked to kill turn up at your doorstep alive.”
“That’s exactly what he said.”
“It’s not a bad idea. New York can be home for you.”
I bit my lip and stared at him. Did he really not get it? This was my home. Levi was the one who should be hiding and running from the cartel, not me. I’d been back only a few months, but somehow I feel like I never left. I had a house, a job. And Dom was here.
“So you’d be okay if I skipped town?”
“Of course not. I meant what I said before. I love you. I don’t expect you to feel the same way. All I’m asking is that you don’t run away from me. As crazy as it sounds, I’d like to maybe…I don’t know.”
“Make plans?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “I’d like to make plans with you if that’s what you want.”
“I want that very much.”
He leaned in and kissed me. Desire unfurled in my belly and down to my core. I pushed him away. We needed to do some thinking now. This thing with Levi had left me feeling lost. I needed a plan to ground myself again.
“New York is not an option.”
“Same here.” He sat back and leaned against the headboard, his gaze on the bedroom ceiling. “I can’t go back there. Too many memories. Too many…temptations.” He pressed the palm of his hand to his eye. “Not like you. The bad kind.”
“The situation in the parking garage brought back memories for you, didn’t it?”
He shook his head.
“It was more than that. Once I was able to put aside the fact that it was you, your life on the line, the job was easy. I could see what I had to do. And how.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, his gaze intense and focused on mine as if trying to read my thoughts or to see if my next words were the truth. The look in his eyes when he almost shot Levi’s bodyguard was a shock to me but not really a surprise. I understood well what went through his mind because I’d seen Dad do the same many times. If Mickey raised him and trained him to be his right hand, it was normal for him to revert to what he knew when faced with a similar scenario.
I wasn’t an idiot. Dom’s trained-assassin reaction was exactly what got us out of that mess today. Some things were hard to unlearn. Should I be afraid of him? Absolutely. Every fiber in me said I should. But was I?
Not one bit.
“I know. You came for me.” I placed a hand on his cheek. I smiled, and the pressure in my chest let up.
“Always. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for you. I hope you know that.”
“I know that.”
“I would never do anything to hurt you.”
“I know that too.” And that was the truth. I exhaled, and he did too. “So we’re both already here and we want to stay. Why do we have to be the ones that leave? Just because Levi doesn’t have the balls to tell his boss what he did. Or didn’t do ten years ago?” My logic was, at best, childish but Levi owed me this.
“I know. It’s not fair that after all this time, you should be the one to leave again. I’ll think of something. You deserve to go home.”
Home.
“Hmmm…home…I like the sound of that.” I removed the covers off me and flushed my body against his.
“If we’re done talking…” he licked his lips and scooted down to capture my mouth, “I think we should give that sex-on-a-bed idea of yours a try.”
I let out a laugh. “I don’t know what I was thinking before. Anywhere is fine with me. As long as it’s with you.” I kissed him, pushing my tongue past his lips, tasting him. He rubbed his erection on the outside of my thigh, and a shiver coursed through me.
With a chuckle, he twisted his body to reach his pants on the floor and grabbed a condom out of his wallet. Every muscle in his torso flexed and cut under his skin as he fumbled with his clothes. When he returned to me, our mouths connected again, our kiss urgent and desperate.
Love.
His lips on mine whispered the word over and over, though Dom never uttered a single word.
22
The Meeting We’re Crashing. That’s Tonight?
Dom
I toweled dried my hair, admiring Emilia’s long legs sticking out from under the sheets and her hair sprawled on my pillow. These were the details I always wondered about when we were in college. When I thought she hated my guts. I lay awake too many nights trying to picture this very scene. Did she sleep naked? On her side or on her belly? What was her favorite drink? And why the hell was she so distrusting? I knew all that about her now…and so much more. I traced the outline of her hip under the sheets, and she hugged her pillow tighter.
A knock on the door broke my focus on her. Dammit. I’d like to go a few minutes without interruptions or ghosts from our previous lives rearing their ugly heads, where we could just spend the entire day in bed. I tossed the towel on the chair and grabbed a pair of sweatpants from the drawer. Last night, they’d delivered our sushi dinner to the grand suite, so we decided to move back in. Vic stayed in the room across the hall and had security tight. For now, we were safe here. One day soon, this sense of security would become permanent.
“Room service,” a male voice called from the other side of the door.
I sauntered out into the living room, past the sofa where Emilia and I had watched a movie and made out before we found our way back into my bedroom. With a smile, I peeked through the peephole. A man stood there in the hotel uniform guarding our breakfast. I swung the door open and let him in.
While he set up the buffet in the kitchen, I sat at the head of the table and fired up my laptop. I had cases that couldn’t wait any longer, but old habits died hard. I fished my burner mobile out of my computer bag, ran the scramble app, and plugged it into my laptop. The last time I checked the ads on the deep web was the day I figured out Emilia was in trouble with the local cartel. Out of habit, I’d placed a sniffer on the ads that had to do with her.
“Would that be it, Mr. Moretti?” The attendant handed me the check. “I hope the flowers are to your liking. Peonies are hard to find this time of year.”
“You’re a good man.” I added an extra amount to the tip for his trouble and handed him the check. “Thank you.”
The second he closed the front door, Emilia came out of the bedroom. “I heard voices.”
“Breakfast is ready.”
“Oh, good. I’m starving.” She padded out of the room, wrapped in a terry bathroom robe, bare feet, wet hair.
She was a vision.
She went straight for the coffee carafe and poured two mugs, adding cream to mine and sugar to hers.
“You remembered,” I said when she set the coffee on the table. She went to sit on the chair adjacent to mine, but I pulled her toward me to sit on my lap. “You smell good.”
“So do you.” She wrapped her arm around my back, her gaze dropping to my chest. She was good for my ego. I squeezed her thigh and kissed her lips.
My phone beeped with a new message. I looked around to make sure I’d heard right. And there it was, a new message from Nikki.
“There’s no escaping the real world is there?” She stood. “Are those for me?”
My face and ears turned hot. Getting her flowers had felt like the thing to do. Now I wasn’t so sure. Was I trying too hard? “Yeah. I know peonies are your favorite.”
Her eyes softened. “Thank you. They’re amazing. How did you know that?”
“I sat behind you in ethics class, remember? I could always tell when you were bored with the material. You’d sit there and draw peonies. You even had a pink pen to color them in.”
“That’s right.” She brushed her fingers over one of the flowers and brought it to her nose. “I didn’t think you had noticed.”
“I noticed everything about you. Mostly the way your shapely ass would turn into a perfect inverted heart every time you leaned forward on your seat.” That earned me a laugh. A sweet sound I didn’t mind being hooked on.
“You’re impossible.” She inspected every dish the server had laid out for us. “Wow, how many people are coming over for breakfast.”
“I didn’t know what you liked. You didn’t eat anything last time.”
“I mostly stick to protein, but this French toast is making eyes at me.” She picked the sticky toast with her fingers and dropped it on a plate. On her way back to the table, she licked her fingers and my cock twitched.
My phone beeped again. Jeez. I glanced away from Emilia and opened the messages app to read Nikki’s message. She needed to talk to me.
“Do you mind if I return this call?” I asked Emilia, who regarded me with anticipation. No doubt she thought this was about her. One day, she wouldn’t have to have her guard up all the time. That was a promise. “It’s work.”
“Sure. I need to get caffeinated before I can function.” With her usual grace, she placed a napkin on her lap and sipped on her coffee.
I tore my gaze away from her and dialed Nikki’s number. She picked up on the first ring.
“Dom. Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything yet, doll.” I chuckled. “How’s the new beau doing?”
“I can’t even.” Air rustled on the speaker. “I’m sorry to keep calling, but I really need your help.”
“No worries. What do you need?” I glanced at Emilia, who, for whatever reason, had a hard time cutting her French toast. Was she jealous? Oh yeah, this woman was good for my ego.
Nikki spoke fast, the way she always did, giving every detail of what was
going on with her. Apparently, she’d found a witness that could get her sister out of jail. She just sort of misplaced her, and she needed my help finding her. An easy job. If only Emilia’s situation were this easy.
“I’ll see what I can find on my end. I’ll keep in touch.” I pressed the end button and dropped the phone on the table before I turned my attention to Emilia. “She did my friend Cole a solid. We owe her. Plus, she’s a friend.”
“This Nikki girl sounds like she’s a magnet for trouble.” She took a bite of her eggs.
“Remind you of anyone?” I rose to my feet and went to fix myself a plate. After last night’s workout, I needed a big meal.
“You mean me?”
“Yeah. You.” I set my plate down and turned my laptop screen toward her.
“What’s this?”
“Trouble.”
She dabbed her lips with her napkin and brought my laptop closer to her. Of course, she knew her way around the websites I had tagged. The news was bad. Her eyes showed a good dose of fear, but she kept her composure as usual.
“A handful of bounty hunters answered the ad.”
“Yes but only one received a ping back.” I pointed at the link. “Now we can find out who’s after you.”
“How?”
“I’m going to crash their meeting.” I plugged the details in my phone and texted them to Vic. “The first time I saw this, I assumed right away Levi had put a price on your head.”
“Yeah, me too. But now we know who did, don’t we?”
I nodded. “I’m certain it was Mickey. And I can’t keep lying to myself or you. He’s doing all this to send me a message.”
“Yesterday, Levi was in a rush to send me back to New York. Now Mickey has hired a bounty hunter. Sounds like he’s done playing games with you.”
Ignite You: A Second Chance Mafia Romance (Cole Brothers Series Book 0) Page 17
