by B. B. Hamel
I gasped, shocked. “What is this?”
“Come here.” He led me into the middle of the balcony. It was cold outside, and I couldn’t help but shiver. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Bull, what’s happening?” My heart was racing, and I was so nervous. I didn’t know how he had possibly set this up, since I’d been home all day. I suddenly forgot all about the cold.
“Charlotte, I love you. I love you more than I thought I could. I love you and that baby you’re carrying.” He dropped down to one knee, and I thought I might pass out. He took a ring from his jacket pocket. “Marry me.”
I stared at him, shocked beyond shocked. The ring was huge, gorgeous, and perfect. “Yes,” I managed to say. “Yes. Of course I’ll marry you.”
“Good.” He took my finger and slid the ring on. It fit perfectly.
He stood up and threw his arms around me, kissing me hard. I laughed and probably cried a little bit, but it didn’t matter.
I was going to marry Bull Dixon. I was going to be his wife, and that couldn’t have been more perfect.
“Are you sure you want to marry a big old pregnant lady like me?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I can’t wait to get you pregnant again. That’s how much I love you pregnant.”
“You’re crazy.” I couldn’t stop smiling, and he couldn’t stop kissing me.
We stood on the balcony together, surrounded by candles, on the eve of the biggest game of his career. We had come so far together, so incredibly far. Bull had overcome so much, and he had saved my life. He made me realize what was important, and I couldn’t thank him enough for that.
And now I was going to be his wife. I was going to have his little baby girl, and I couldn’t wait. I wanted to scream with joy and cry, but instead I just kissed him on the balcony overlooking the city.
It was perfect. He was perfect. I felt like this moment could last forever.
It would last forever, because I’d live that moment with Bull over and over again as we built our life together. We could do anything together.
I knew we could do anything together. We had already proved that. We had already beaten back so much pain and created a tiny bubble of joy and happiness together. We inhabited our own world where nobody else could touch us, no matter who they were, no matter what happened. We sheltered and protected each other, because that was what love did. It built up houses and homes that kept the outside world at bay and only let the good things through. We’d built that together and so much more.
I couldn’t wait to see what else we could do together.
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Want more sexy alphas and hot sports romances? Try Long: A Secret Baby Sports Romance!
I’m having that cocky jock’s baby, but he won’t have me.
Gibson Evans is the best college football quarterback in the country. He’s tall, broad, tattooed, and so incredibly handsome.
And he got me pregnant. It was supposed to be just one night, but a broken condom changed all of our plans forever.
People treat him like a hero, but I think he’s a total prick. Gibson gets whatever he wants, and now suddenly he wants me.
But I have enough to deal with. I have to stop daydreaming about his hands between my thighs and concentrate on having this baby while still managing to graduate on time.
He wants to make a deal. If I promise to spend time with him, he’ll help me with my final biology research. That means an entire semester of studying Gibson’s body.
I’m not sure I can do this. One second I can’t stand to be around him, and the next I’m touching his ripped muscles and trying to suppress my excitement.
I’m terrified he’ll ruin everything if I let this become more than just work.
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Love alpha SEALs? Try One Night SEAL, my latest steamy bad boy!
He took me from the mob, and now he’s going to keep me.
Travis Rock is rough, ripped, and so deadly. He’s a bad boy Navy SEAL, and he wants to save me.
When the economy went bad, my father took a loan from the mafia to keep our farm running. Now they want their money back, and they expect me to sell my body to the highest bidder.
That’s how I first met Travis. He took me from the mob and offered me his protection.
It was supposed to last just one night. I’d let him have his way and then we’d be done.
But now the mafia wants us both dead, and he’s playing a dangerous game. I don’t want to be owned by another man, but Travis isn’t letting me get away.
I need him to keep me safe, but he might destroy me in the process. I’m afraid that if I give in to his intense body, I’ll be completely lost forever.
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Love badass alpha mobsters? Try Bastard’s Baby, another exciting installment in the Barone Crime Family series!
I had that bastard’s baby and now I need his help.
Vince Mori is my enemy. He’s an infamous Italian mobster, all ripped muscles and dangerous tattoos. He’s a cocky a**hole, and for just one night that was exactly what I was looking for. He was a wild ride, a way to rebel against my strict family.
And he doesn’t know that he’s the father of my baby.
I’m the daughter of one of the most feared Russian mob bosses in the city. When I give birth to my baby boy Alexei, my father wants to tear my child away from me.
I won’t let that happen. They may be my family, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my baby.
The Russians are at war with the Italians, but I know Vince is my only chance. When I run away from home and ask him for help, I’m risking my life to save my son.
Vince is everything I’m supposed to hate, but secretly can’t get enough of. He’s only interested in teasing me mercilessly with his dirty mouth and frustrating grin.
Now I’m trapped in the Italian mob’s mansion, living next door to my baby’s father. I need their protection, but the war is escalating faster every day.
If the cocky jerk Vince Mori can’t learn what it means to be a father, I might be totally screwed.
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Kissing the Killer: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance
Prologue: Emma
They say killers can’t love.
They say killers don’t feel a thing as they move through a room like an angel of death, their guns blazing, bodies dropping all around them. The hit men that work for the Russians and for the Italians don’t care about life or death, only cold hard cash.
He was one of those angels. Instead of wings, he had thick, roped muscles and black tattoos all along his perfect skin. His cocky smile said I owed him my life, and maybe a little bit more.
I never wanted to be owned, not by anyone, not for any reason. My father thought he owned me, and all I got from that was a roof over my head and a black eye every other week.
My father was a stupid man. He was a member of the mob, but not an important one. The only thing he loved more than drinking was gambling, and he owed thousands of dollars that he couldn’t pay to bookies all over C
hicago.
It didn’t surprise me when the angels of death came for him with lead and steel. They killed my father and were going to kill me until he changed his mind.
“Look what we have here,” he said to me later, after he’d dragged me from my home and locked me in a closet. Fear and something else lanced through my chest. “You’ve got lips that make my fucking dick hard.”
He was crude and so cocky. He was good with his hands and with a gun, and he thought that made him unstoppable.
But I could see through him.
“I’m taking you with me,” he’d said earlier, his voice deep and soft in my ear. “Unless you want to die here.”
I hadn’t had a choice, of course. I either let him take me or his partner put a bullet in my head.
I knew what he wanted from me. He wasn’t pretending it was anything but my body.
“I’m going to make you glad I took you,” he whispered to me days later, after so much had happened, his hands moving down my skin. “You’ll be begging me to sink my thick cock between your legs before this is done with.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I could barely speak, my body rolling with desire and anger.
I wasn’t going to be owned by anyone, not ever again. I didn’t care if people wanted the both of us dead.
I didn’t care that he was the only one who wanted to see me alive.
My angel of death. He sent chills down my spine. “I’m going to taste you,” he said. “I’m going to slide my tongue along that clit until you can’t breathe.”
I wanted to feel him, his muscles, his dangerous smile. I wanted everything he promised.
But I wasn’t his. I wasn’t giving in, no matter how much I wanted to.
I was going to escape from my angel of death if it was the last thing I did.
1
Brooks
It was supposed to be an easy fucking job. We go in, kill the old, drunk, Russian asshole, and then we get the fuck out of there.
Nothing I hadn’t done a hundred times before, maybe a thousand.
I parked the car at the end of the block. It was a quiet neighborhood, especially at three in the morning. Nobody was moving around and the houses were all dark.
“Nice spot,” Abram commented.
“Not bad,” I grunted. “Which house does the old man live in?”
Abram nodded toward the end of the block. “Last on the left.”
I killed the engine. “We got a plan?”
He shrugged. “We’ll break in the back, kill the guy, and then get back home.”
“Works for me.”
I pushed open the car door and then checked the gun tucked into my jeans. I cocked back the slide and chambered a round and made sure the silencer was on tight. Abram was behind me, checking his own weapon.
He nodded at me and then headed down the block. I followed behind him, keeping my head on a swivel.
I’d done this hundreds of times before. We were hit men for the Italian mob, angels of death working for the Barone family. I had more blood on my hands than I could ever hope to wash off, and mercy wasn’t something I had ever thought about before.
I was young when I joined the Barone family. When I was five, my father ran off with some cheap stripper he’d met downtown, and that only pushed my mother deeper into the bottom of a bottle.
Mom died by the time I was thirteen, drank herself to death in less than ten years, though she’d been warming up for that drinking marathon for years before that. After Dad left, Mom lost her will to live completely, and she did nothing but drink and drink vast amounts of cheap fucking liquor.
One day I came home and found her tipped over in the bathroom, vomit leaking from her mouth. I’d never forget that image, not for as long as I lived. It didn’t matter how much death and violence I saw; I’d never outrun the image of my mother dead in the bathroom.
The state took me in after that. I entered the foster system, but that shit didn’t sit right with me. I was in and out of care homes, the good people at the adoption services trying hard to find me a permanent place to live, but I was a troubled kid. I got into fights, I stole shit, I pushed back against my guardians. I did everything in my power to raise fucking hell, because I didn’t know any better.
Until one day, I met Gian. He was just a young, mid-level asshole in the mafia back then, but he gave me my first job. I was working in the back of a deli, slicing meats, cleaning up, and after hours I would serve drinks to the wise guys and empty their ashtrays.
Slowly they took me in. The mafia taught me everything I knew about being a man and then some. Gian rose up through the ranks and brought me with him, eventually promoting me to full-time hit man. I didn’t see much of Gian anymore, since he was one of the big bosses, but I owed him and the mafia everything.
They saved my life. I was on a dark path, one strike away from going into the juvenile detention system. From there, I could just imagine what my life would have been like: petty crime, drugs, senseless violence, and ceaseless poverty.
But the mafia gave me purpose. And money, lots of fucking money, so long as I was good at my job and followed orders.
I did what I was told, and I was rewarded for it. I killed who they needed killed and I never asked questions. I trusted them, trusted my superiors, and it never occurred to me that they might not know what they were talking about.
We stopped outside the rundown row home and Abram gestured for me to go around back. I nodded and slipped past the building, silent as a shadow, keeping low and close to the building. I jumped the back fence and landed on my feet, light and easy.
There was no light, which suited me just fine. For whatever reason, I could see great in the dark and had no trouble navigating around where other people were just blindly stumbling.
The yard was a shithole. It was full of trash, literal bags of garbage, and it stank to all fucking hell. I couldn’t believe a man lived with this, but apparently he did. I moved along the concrete back porch and stood next to the back door.
I checked the windows but couldn’t see past the blinds. I listened for a moment before getting out my lock pick tools. I made quick work of that lock and gently turned the knob.
The door fell open. Inside was a grungy kitchen, plates piled up in the sink, table covered in half-full ashtrays and newspapers. The smell outside followed me in as I softly shut the door behind me.
I didn’t hear a fucking peep. I stayed silent in the kitchen for a minute, listening, but there was nothing. I moved down the hall toward the front door, passing photographs hanging on the walls. I unlocked the front door and pulled it open. Abram slipped inside, shutting the door behind him.
“Well?” he whispered.
I shook my head and gestured at the stairs. He nodded.
I climbed the steps, Abram at my back. There were magazines piled up against the wall, a sure sign of a hoarder. I got to the top of the steps and looked down the hall.
Nothing. Total silence. The doors were all shut, but I knew these row homes like the back of my hand. They were all the same in Chicago, more or less. The master bedroom would be the first door on the right, and that Russian scumbag would be in there.
I pressed my ear up against the door and listened. Inside I could faintly make out the rumbling sound of a drunk-as-fuck man snoring like a chainsaw.
Abram nudged me and pulled out his gun. I nodded, taking mine out, and then kicked open the door.
We rushed into the bedroom. The place was dingy and small, or at least it seemed small because of all the boxes stacked all over. I wasn’t looking too closely at them, but they were all full of junk as far as I could tell. In the center of the room was a single bed, a bare mattress suspended on four metal legs and plywood. A fat man was lying there, snoring like a beached whale.
Abram walked over to the man and kicked him. He grumbled and rolled over but didn’t wake up. Abram grinned at me and then kicked the guy again, much harder. He jolted awake, confused and disoriented.
We held our guns out to him.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit. Please, no. You don’t have to do this.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” I asked him.
“I can get you the money. Look, under this mattress. I can get you more later. Please, you don’t have to kill me. I’m not worth anything dead.”
“Fucking asshole,” Abram muttered.
“Listen to me, Karsov,” I said to him. “We’re not your fucking bookies. We’re here from the Barone family.”
Comprehension slowly dawned on his face, followed by an even deeper fear. He was realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to talk or buy himself out of this.
We were angels of death, hit men for the mob. You didn’t meet us and live to talk about it.
“I have more,” he said softly. “I can give you more.”
“And what, turn around and give some secrets back to the Russians?” I asked him. “Gian knows you’ve been playing both sides, and he is very, very fucking pissed.”
“I haven’t,” he said. “I swear it. Please.”
“Gian says this is the price of your own greed. Good night, Mister Karsov.”
Abram and I pulled our triggers at the same time, putting bullets through Karsov’s skull.
