by Zoey Parker
Before she knew what she was doing, Carla threw her working arm around Gio and kissed him. The journals fell to the lawn as Gio embraced her, returning her kiss.
Carla heard Don's voice call out warningly. “Carla...”
Yes, I know this looks weird, Don, she thought, continuing to kiss Gio. I've got a lot of explaining to do, I realize that, and I know we're standing too close to the fire, but please, just let me have this one moment first and then I'll...
She heard a hoarse cry of pain and rage a split-second before she felt strong arms wrap around both of their legs, tackling them to the ground. She smelled sweat and cigars and heavy cologne as Mario's large body crawled on top of them both, his fists pounding at them. The blood from the hole in his face—and the much larger hole at the back of his head—sprinkled down on them both as he punched at them wildly.
“Took my son you took him you took everything I'll kill you I'll fucking kill you both you rat bitch Fed...” Mario jabbered madly, spittle flying from his lips. His meaty hands wrapped around Carla's throat.
As she struggled with Mario, Carla saw Gio reach over, his fingertips clawing for Mario's dropped gun. Don and the other agents were moving toward them, but before they could pull Mario off of Carla, Gio's hand wrapped around the handle of the gun. He raised it, emptying the entire clip into Mario's head.
Mario slumped forward, dead.
Don looked from Carla to Gio to Mario, then back to Carla again, astonished.
“Well, this sure has been some kinda day, hasn't it?” Don observed, tucking his gun away. “I dunno 'bout you two, but I could sure use a drink.”
Chapter 30
Carla
Six Months Later
Carla tucked the last few personal items from her desk into the cardboard box, then taped it up.
Since Mario's death, she'd been very busy. Even while in the hospital recovering from her injury, she'd meticulously gone through every page of every journal. Gio translated the code the notes were written in, then worked her way backward through hundreds of open case files—local, state, and federal—to connect the notes to the crimes they referenced. She used this information to build staggering cases against the remaining members of the Mancini family, as well as two other major crime organizations in Chicago and one in Indianapolis.
Dozens of murder charges. Hundreds of charges of bribery and judicial tampering. Thousands of charges of theft and racketeering, all accompanied by airtight evidence and a star witness.
It was the largest, most successful organized crime crack-down the Bureau had undertaken in almost thirty years. Almost three hundred hardened criminals had been arrested and were awaiting trial, half of whom were willing to roll over on the other half in return for reduced sentences.
And she'd received the FBI Medal of Valor. The same medal they'd awarded Patty Kurtz.
“You know, you don't have to do this,” Don said, sidling up to the cleared-out desk. “No one knows what you did while you were undercover 'cept us, an' I certainly ain't blabbin' anytime soon.”
Carla smiled. “I know.”
“An' you kissin' Gio like that,” Don continued, “well, heck, it was damn strange, no doubt about it. But most folks'll just chalk it up to the heat of the moment.”
“Uh-huh,” Carla agreed.
Redness started to creep into Don's face as he kept going. “An' I mean, what with your medal an' all, everyone's sayin' the sky's the limit for you now. Shoot, the ways things're goin', I'll probably be workin' for you in less than a year.”
“Probably,” she said.
Don's voice softened. “An' he'll be fine without you, y'know. Them Witness Protection boys'll take good care of 'im an' make sure he stays outta trouble, so you can get on with your life.”
Carla put her hand on Don's shoulder and looked into his eyes tenderly. “I'll miss you too, Don. But this is what I want. If private consulting for law enforcement was good enough for Patty, it'll be good enough for me, too. Especially when I'm working with someone like Gio, who grew up inside a mob family. Who better to help me keep taking them down?”
Don smiled gently, leaned over, and kissed Carla on the forehead. “That Patty, she was a real hero, y'know? 'Cept she wasn't one-tenth the hero you are, darlin'. Never forget that.”
“I won't,” Carla promised. “Take care of yourself, Don.”
“You too, Carla,” Don answered.
Carla hefted her cardboard box and carried it to the parking garage of the FBI field office, where a silver 1978 Corvette and a lifetime of passion and adventure awaited her.
THE END
***
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[FREE BONUS BOOK #1] HARDCORE: Storm MC
By Zoey Parker
I’m a hardcore man in a hardcore world.
She’s a diamond in the rough.
But if she’s not careful, she’ll fall into the wrong hands…
Mine.
SIENNA
Working at the strip club wasn’t my first choice, but it paid, and I was good at it.
Things were going as well as they could, all things considered.
Until my sister made a fatal mistake.
Now, her bad choice haunts me, and all I want is revenge.
The only reason I’m still dancing is to get close to our sleazy boss, the bastard who sent my sister to her death.
The problem is, he’s surrounded himself with an army of muscle – a motorcycle club for hire. They’re all brawny, tattooed, and wouldn’t blink twice before ending my life.
But consequences be damned.
I’ve got a man to kill, and a plan to get my hands around his throat.
It would have worked, too.
If it weren’t for Dom.
***
DOM
“No one leaves the club.”
It was always just a saying, a slogan, a reminder that loyalty is everything.
Then our president accepted a deal with the devil.
Now, our whole club is at the beck and call of some slimy porn kingpin, and anyone who tries to break the contract gets killed.
I hate what I’ve become, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
I didn’t have a way out, either.
Until Sienna.
The fiery dancer tries to kill our mark, and I’m the one who stops her.
Now, her life is mine to do with as I please.
And I’ve got an important decision to make.
What do I do with her?
She’s got a body worth taming, worth claiming as my own.
Or even better – worth selling to the highest bidder.
Once I’ve gotten a fair price for her, I’ll be able to buy my own freedom and get the hell out of this nightmare.
She’s my golden ticket, my way out.
But nothing is ever as easy as it seems.
Sienna isn’t worth anything dead, but keeping her alive might cost me my life.
Chapter One
Sienna
The club was pulsing with the heavy beat, and my body moved to the music like it was born to it. The beat was perfect for sex. Heavy, steady, driving, hard.
The man beneath me was passive for the moment, allowing my body to control the contact between us, but it felt wrong. Dom was holding himself back, restraining himself, and I didn’t like it. I wanted his touch, I wanted his rough hands on me. Fuck, I wanted his mouth on me. I sat on his lap, my clit pressed against his monster hard-on, my wetness soaking my black G-string. I put my hands on my own breasts, kneading and squeezing them together, rolling my nipples, trying to duplicate my memory sense of his rougher touch. It didn’t work. I didn’t have much time left to get what I wanted, so I put my hands on his shoulders, digging in w
ith my fingers, and said, “Touch me. I want your fucking hands. Fuck! Touch me.”
“Such a mouth, you nasty girl,” he chuckled. “You know hands are off. Don’t want you to lose your job, bossy.”
“Put. Your. Fucking. Hands. On. Me.”
“That mouth.” He shook his head. “I should put them on you. And not in the way you mean. But you want it, you do it. Show me what you want.”
I drifted my hands down his fabulously muscled arms, his bulging deltoids and biceps, and lower down past his elbows and heavily boned wrists to finally grab his rough hands, which were nearly twice the size of my own. I drew them to my chest, pressing them to me, using his hands to squeeze my aching, heavy breasts—god, it felt so good—then guiding them down, scraping my sides to my waist and hips and finally around to my ass, while I continued the dance, my eyes locked on his the whole time. This had recently become our pattern—though I hadn’t ever screwed the rules like this with anybody else—so it didn’t come as any surprise to him. But it was our little secret, and I knew it turned him on, too. The corner of his mouth tilted up.
The music kept up its beat, and I continued to gyrate on top of him, our faces so close, sharing breath. I reveled in the hard definitions of his body. He was like a hot work of art: all big, tall, powerful male, beautifully muscled, dark mussed hair and tanned skin, strong bones and gorgeous planes in face and body. And those beautiful green-silver eyes.
He should have been intimidating—and he was—but he also drew me to him like a freaking magnet. It was like my body turned on as soon as he entered the space, and I was powerless to keep myself away.
That in itself should have been a warning to me. Of course, I was never great with heeding warnings.
I wanted to see him, to see all of him, to see that six-pack and the V at his hips that I could feel between my thighs. I wanted to taste him, but that crossed a line, and I didn’t dare.
The heavy beat of the music drove on deep and hard, and he nuzzled my breasts and growled. Then he did taste me. He opened his mouth and let his tongue drift over the skin over my clavicles, dipping down to the tops of my breasts, rolling over and sucking on the soft curves, and then bit the underside of one of them, hard and quick. I gasped, basically dry-humping his cock through his jeans, desperate for more but knowing I wouldn’t get it. His hands were gripping my ass, pulling the cheeks apart, like he wanted to open me and drill in. If only he would.
He smirked. And then the fucking song ended.
I panted, working to get myself back under control. I was drenched, so turned on. He was hard as a rock, too, but he grabbed my hips and lifted me off him, setting me back on my feet and holding my gaze with his own. The energy between us was insane; I’d never known another man I responded to this powerfully, this uncontrollably.
And that was dangerous. I needed to get my bearings, to step away from him, from his draw, from his scent, from his hotness. I needed to keep to the plan. It was time to walk away and get back to work. To figure out how I was going to get my revenge, and get out.
Patience, and having to bide my time, sucked ass.
Generally speaking, I preferred to be in control. To be in a man’s power was not only dangerous, but stupid. Men fucked everything up. I’d spent my life fixing what men ruined since I was eight years old, taking care of my little sister, Tan, making sure we were okay even when everything around us was shit. Mostly, it worked. We did okay. That is, until Club Hardcore, and Mr. Sleaze-bag Asshole Evil Murdering Bossman “Joey” Ronn.
Now there was no Tania, and it was up to me to make fucking Mr. Ronn pay for what he did to her. That was all I could afford to focus on, the only thing that mattered. Everything else was of little to no consequence. I went through the daily motions, but my reality had zeroed in to that single focus: make him pay. A life for a life.
So there was no room for my attraction to Dom, no matter how my body insisted differently. He was just a distraction. A useful distraction on occasion, and an enjoyable one. But still, nothing more than that. Now it was time to get back and keep my focus.
I turned away from him, checked my G-string, straightened my shoulders, opened the door to the darkened hallway, and walked away with renewed purpose. I parted the curtain at its front and stepped back into the open room of the club. A couple of girls were on the main stage, each on a pole, and another was working her way around the room, just as I had been and would continue to do, stopping at tables to give personal attention to the various clientele that tended to be less than diverse in its variety: mostly just guys in cheap business suits, with balding heads and pot bellies, and a few hard-ass bikers littered around the bar as not-so-secret security.
“You want a private dance, baby?” I asked the first guy I came close to, sitting alone at a rounded banquette against the wall and nursing a highball. He looked like an average joe, just what I needed after the overheated exchange with Dom. Who passed right behind me as I stood there, passing his palm over both cheeks of my ass, giving one side a good squeeze before moving along. I turned my head to watch his back as he walked on. He didn’t bother looking back at me.
Unfortunately, I noticed that several others were looking at me; they’d seen the exchange, and they were watching us. A couple of the girls looked at me accusingly: my best friend, Asia, with alarm in her eyes; two of the big bad biker dudes; and Mr. Sleazy-Ass Bossman himself, Joey Ronn, who narrowed his eyes with suspicion and pursed his fat lips in distaste.
Uh oh. I guessed the jig was up. They’d caught on that there was something going on between me and Hot Dom. And nobody seemed to like it.
Working girls are not supposed to enjoy the work. But seriously? With a man as smokin’ as Dom, how is a woman supposed to pretend not to like it? If only all the clientele were as hot as he was, this would be every woman’s dream job.
The job really wasn’t that bad most of the time. I got to dance to good music and take the joes to the cleaners for their cash. I didn’t have to whore myself; no happy endings were required by management, and there was a strict hands-off policy for the back rooms. If a guy crossed the line, we only had to hit a button for security to come and enforce the rules.
Plus, I made great money—way more than I could earn doing some lame-ass gig at minimum wage. That’s why I brought Tania into the club, too, so we could double our intake and get ourselves stockpiled with a solid cushion for opening our dream shop and living the life: two sisters making good and doing well, no man necessary, thank you very much. But that was before Tan got in over her head, before Joey the fucking sister-killer took advantage of her.
The way I figured it, Dom was my reward for time served. I should consider myself lucky that Joey Ronn let his biker-brute security force partake in the offerings of us dancers once per shift, and they had to pay or no-go; but if they wanted it, they could get it. It was good for business, all around. Dom got me through a shift better than any cocktail slipped my way from one of the bartenders. If not for him, my patience would have worn too thin, and I’d probably be either in jail or dead. I needed to play my cards right so I could get to Joey without his goon bikers hovering all about, ready to kill or be killed to save his sorry ass.
The irony was that Dom was one of them. FML, right? That the one man who made my day better was one of the brutes who was protecting the bane of my existence.
But that didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that I was figuring out my plan, and I was getting close to having enough put away to live that dream—minus my goddamned stupid sister. I missed her like crazy, but she should have known better than to get messed up in Joey Ronn’s porno scheme. She wasn’t known for her great decision-making skills. But even if she wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, she was still my little sis, and she did not deserve what he did to her. And there was no way I was going to let him just get away with it.
As it was, I still needed more time and more money. So, I needed distraction, and Dom fit the bill perfectly. He was the regu
lar that I was always looking for. The one that brightened the shift, when and if he’d show up. And I was pretty sure he knew it. But now it looked like everyone else knew it, too. This was not a good thing. Fuckity fuck.
“Yo, Sienna, come over here.” Shit. Mr. Ronn called to me, his voice grating with nasal resonance.
He was sitting in a booth in his shiny suit with his hair slicked back, pompadour-style, as if he were the king of some bad ’70s porno palace. Which, I guessed, he kinda was.
Across the table sat another regular who always got the VIP treatment, so he must have been someone important, but I had no idea really who or what he was. Well, I knew a few things: his name was apparently Jonathan Fielding (though I’d bet good money that was made up), and he insisted on us always calling him “Mr. F.” He got some kind of sick kick out of it, but he was the only one in on the joke. He was tall, slim, attractive in that eastern Mediterranean American way, like Turkish or Greek or something, who knew? He had deep-set brown eyes, a shaved head, closely cropped goatee, and wore glasses for that very cool, intelligent, successful air. He definitely had style, and he radiated power and money. A lot of the girls acted like stupid butterflies around him, and he always seemed to bask in his own glory, accepting their attentions like he was a born prince. I could see their attraction to him, but I never felt it myself. There was something off, a shadiness that always made me uncomfortable. Not to mention the cold sneer that he threw around most of the time. My alarm bells rang off the hook every time he came around.
