by Noelle Mack
Praise for Noelle Mack
THREE
“A truly sensual story that will titillate and captivate readers.”
—Romantic Times (four-star review)
“Smoldering hot, naughty adventure…a deliciously kinky read.”
—Joyfully Reviewed
“The queen of seduction meets the king of rakes. Sensual, sexual, stupendous. THREE is a fabulous erotica romance.”
—Harriet Klausner Reviews
SEXY BEAST (with Kate Douglas, Noelle Mack, and Vivi Anna)
“Quite entertaining…and the heat rating is off-the-chart hot!”
—Romantic Times
“Noelle Mack’s Tiger, Tiger is a sexy romp…charming and funny…and steamy.”
—Romance Reviews Today on SEXY BEAST
Red Velvet
NOELLE MACK
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
for JWR, with a wink
Contents
The Knockout
Unzipped
Double Dee
The Knockout
1
Sofia picked up the remote and turned off the baseball game with one press of her press-on fingernail. The screen went black. “They lost, Ruthie. Pay up,” she said with a smirk.
“How could they do this to me?” Ruth wailed. “I love the Mets.”
“Then you’re a fool for love. You owe me.”
“Guess so.” Ruth grabbed her beat-up purse off the coffee table. She took her wallet out, parted the leather folds, held it upside down and shook out a bus ticket. “But I’m broke.” She shook the wallet again. A small blue feather drifted down.
“Is that all you have?” Her cousin raised a perfectly tweezed eyebrow. “A parakeet feather and a bus ticket? I shoulda known.”
“That’s right. Until next Friday.” Ruth mentally calculated the budgetary impact of losing a $50 bet to her cousin. “You know this means no new birdcage for Bambino. No new raincoat for Tuff.” Her little mutt looked up at Ruth with a sad expression, and jumped on the couch beside her.
“You’re breaking my heart.” Sofia tapped a cigarette out of the pack in her other hand and sucked it between her lips.
“No smoking.”
Sofia gave her an insulted look and spoke around the unlit cigarette. “I’m not smoking it, I’m sucking it. Do you see a lighter in my hand?”
“No. Just wanted to make sure.”
“I don’t smoke unless I see an ashtray, and this is your place, so no ashtrays. Okay, tell you what. I’ll give you the cash.”
“Huh?”
“The Pet Palace on Fordham Road is having a sale on birdcages,” Sofia said in a coaxing tone. “Beeyootiful white wire birdcages with bonus plastic bell. The Bambino would love one. But if you take the fifty, you must do my bidding. You said you would.”
Ruth groaned. “Oh yeah. That contingency clause I supposedly agreed to—you mentioned it at a critical point in the last inning. I don’t remember anything except the outfielder dropping a fly ball.”
“I do.”
“So tell me. What do I have to do?”
Her cousin looked her up and down. “Get dressed up and get out in public.”
“No.”
“You can’t say no. You want that fifty, I know you do. All you hafta do is strut your stuff and that ugly dog in front of Mrs. Agnelli and all the neighbors and God himself.” Sofia took the cigarette out of her mouth and crossed herself with it in her hand. “Who will not believe that you actually own nice clothes.”
“I don’t. You gotta lend me some.”
“Not a problem.” Sofia cast a disparaging glance at Ruth’s sweatpants, grubby T-shirt and scuffed sneakers.
Tuff made a yarping noise. Ruth pulled the dog closer to her. “He’s upset. You didn’t have to say he was ugly.”
“I was being polite,” Sofia pointed out. “And it won’t kill you to get dressed up and get out. All you do is sit in this rent-controlled apartment and write those freaky little poems. You haven’t worked in, what, a year?”
Ruth shrugged and stroked Tuff’s coarse fur. “I’m on hiatus.”
“Yeah, from life.”
“My dad told me to find myself before he died. You know he left me money. Not much, but enough.”
Sofia took the cigarette out of her mouth and eyed her narrowly. “At least that whore he left your mother for five years ago didn’t get it all.”
“No, because Mom had a good lawyer. And she’s been living it up ever since at Lake Como,” Ruth pointed out.
Her cousin shook her head sadly. “Which means you have no one to look after you but me. I’m tellin’ ya, Ruthie, their divorce gave you a complex. You think being happy is wrong. You didn’t even have a good time in college. No, you hadda go and major in English, so you could be unsuccessful. You don’t go out, you don’t date. And you need a makeover anyway.”
“Thanks a lot.” Ruth glared at Sofia, who set down the cigarette and took out a compact. Parting her lips, Sofia examined her long, sweeping eyelashes for glumps of mascara. Not a glump in sight. Ruth wondered how Sofia managed to look so good just to watch a ball game. “For your information,” she began, “I have been thinking of writing experimental short fiction instead.”
“Oh, please.”
“I have a few chapters of a novel on my hard drive. Does that impress you?”
Sofia shot her a hopeful look. “Is it a romance novel?”
“No. But the screenplay I started has romantic elements.”
“You could write for the soaps!” Sofia’s expression was awestruck. She even looked at Ruth instead of the little mirror in her hand.
Ruth only shrugged. Her cousin was a lifelong fan of The Young and the Restless, a show that Ruth privately thought of as The Hung and the Reckless. All the characters did was sleep around with everyone in the little town of…what was it called…Glandview?
She snapped out of it when Sofia clicked the mirror shut and gave her a worried look.
Ruth sighed. Her cousin meant well. “Okay, okay. When it gets dark, I will put on borrowed finery and go for a walk.” Tuff wriggled with enthusiasm and yarped loudly. “Uh-oh. He heard the W word.”
Sofia stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and frowned, making it hang down. “Why dontcha get a normal dog? He can’t even bark.”
“Later, Tuff. Not now. When my evil cousin goes home. She’s making this up anyway. I never agreed to this.”
Sofia shook her head. “Where’s my handbag?”
“What does it look like?” Ruth said innocently.
“Black patent leather mock croc. As if you didn’t know. You’re stalling for time.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re afraid I kept the proof.” Sofia lifted her coat and found the handbag. She scrabbled through it, then thrust out a crumpled piece of paper.
“That’s your handwriting,” Ruth said indignantly. “And your words.”
“You signed it.”
“Five months ago.”
“A bet is a bet.” Sofia smoothed out the piece of paper and read aloud. “I, Ruth Caterina Pirelli, biggest idiot in the five boroughs, swear to pay my beloved cousin Sofia $50 next time the stupid Mets lose, because I think they can’t lose. And I have to do whatever she says if I can’t pay.”
Ruth hugged her dog. “Kill her, Tuff Stuff. Eat the bet. Save me.”
Sofia got up and put on her coat, still talking around the unlit cigarette. “I’m gonna drive home so I can smoke this thing and see what’s in my closet. Then I’m coming back. Before the sun goes down.”
Unaccustomed as she was to pantyhose and cold to the bone, Ruth flipped the finger at Sofia, watching from inside her car. “You planning to driv
e around after me?” Ruth asked.
Sofia rolled down the window. “Nah. I gotta get back in a few minutes. Lou’s making carbonara sauce. He always screws it up unless I hover.”
“So you trust me not to skitter right back through my door, huh? Tuff, quit yanking me around!” The dog stopped pulling and gave her a who-me look, then lifted a leg and did his business on a hydrant. At least he was happy. And Bambino would be happy in a new, bigger cage. Ruth was not happy but she could always write a poem about it. She tugged down the black leather micromini her cousin had picked out and turned up the collar of the matching, tightly fitted black leather jacket. The top underneath was buttoned all the way up but it wasn’t going to keep her warm.
“Did I say I trusted you? Walk.” Sofia pointed a fingernail. “To the end of the next block. While I watch.”
Ruth walked. The red velvet high heels Sofia had insisted she wear had half-inch platform soles, which made her sway, then stumble, with every step. The dog, pulling hard on his leash, didn’t help.
She swallowed a mouthful of hair, then dragged it out of her mouth. The spring breeze was whipping her long, dark hair around. Between it and the wraparound sunglasses she’d insisted on to conceal her identity, Ruth felt like a blind person. With the world’s smallest Seeing Eye dog. Who was doing his best to drag her in front of the bus coming down the center of Hughes Street. The red velvet high heels were killing her.
But her humiliation was not complete. In the brick house next door, Mrs. Agnelli came to the picture window under the two-tone metal awning, clutching a dustcloth for the figurines she kept on the sill. Her eyes widened when she saw Ruth.
Ruth turned around just long enough to see Sofia wave good-bye from the car at the corner. She heard her cousin take off and held her head high, shortening Tuff’s leash so she could walk quickly by the house. She wasn’t fast enough to escape the notice of Mr. Agnelli, who rustled up out of the camellia bush he was pruning in the small front yard and stared too.
She picked up the pace, dragging Tuff for a change. This was a walk. He had peed. The sparse grass of early spring that edged the sidewalks couldn’t be that thrilling, not even to a sniffing fanatic like him. But once she got around the corner, he planted his paws and refused to budge. Oh, yeah—one of the natural wonders of her Bronx neighborhood, the World’s Most Fascinating Hedge, was just ahead. She’d meant to go the other way but the Agnellis had distracted her.
Tuff loved that hedge, had to sniff every leaf and then lick it, the little perv. And then he had to sniff the World’s Second Most Fascinating Hedge down the next block.
The hell with that. Sofia had driven away, and Ruth was going to get around the corner and through the alley to the back of her apartment building. Just why her cousin thought this experience would be good for her, Ruth didn’t know.
She looked down at Tuff, then up, and did a doubletake. A white stretch limo with tinted black windows was careening toward her. On the sidewalk. She grabbed her dog, pressed herself into the scratchy hedge, and prayed. The stretch limo came to a stop about a foot away. She let out her breath.
The guy at the wheel rolled down the back window and then popped the trunk, stabbing at unseen buttons until he got the passenger side window down. He leaned over to it and yelled at her. “Hey, Gina! Hop in!”
“That’s not my name,” she snapped.
He seemed taken aback. “Ain’t you Gina? They said she’d be on this street, maybe walking her dog.”
Friggin’ idiot. All the same, she softened her tone. “What a coincidence.” She didn’t want to argue with someone who was so stupid or so drunk that he drove a limo on the sidewalk. Ruth wasn’t even sure she wanted to step out of the hedge. The dry twigs prickled her but she stayed where she was, clutching Tuff. “Lots of people have dogs,” she added, hoping he would go away.
He didn’t. The limo door swung open and the driver got out. “Ya sure ya ain’t her? I’m s’posed to bring Gina to Brooklyn. You know, for dinner with la famiglia.” He leered at her.
Tuff growled. Ruth wasn’t sure if her dog had ever seen a real, live goombah but he was seeing one now. The man wore a sagging, badly made black suit that pulled across his beefy shoulders and a black sweater underneath it. Ruth glanced down. Yeah, his pants were creased to kill, but too short for his thick legs. And he had on narrow, custom-made loafers that pouched out around his bunions.
“Why’re ya in the hedge?” he asked curiously.
“I didn’t want to get run over and I was afraid you didn’t see me.”
The goombah laughed loudly. “No, no, I saw ya. All of ya. That itsy-bitsy skirt don’t leave nothin’ to the imagination. I was drivin’ on the sidewalk for laughs because I thought ya were Gina. Ya live around here?”
Ruth emerged from the hedge and set Tuff down. “No. Gotta go. Nice talking to you.”
“Hey, wait a min—” He shut up when an unmarked police car pulled up next to the limo. The car was a gleaming navy blue and it looked brand new. Maybe a hybrid. Neither of them had heard it driving down the street.
She looked behind the wheel, hoping it was a cop she knew. Actually, it was driven by a detective she knew, although the tinted windows made it a little hard to see him. At least she thought Nicky Del Bianco had made detective. He was supersmart, a John Jay graduate with a master’s in criminal justice who’d started out as a beat cop just because he wanted to, in the Bronx neighborhood they’d all grown up in.
And he was a total sex god. Always had been—some of the younger nuns even used to check him out on the sly in high school. Nick was unbelievably hot-looking, with dark-gold hair and tawny skin and olive green eyes with thick black lashes. From northern Italy—well, his father was. Maybe a little Swiss in the genetic mix, maybe Austrian? Ruth would have to ask Sofia, who prided herself on knowing things like that. His mother was from the south, Calabria, like practically everybody else in this neighborhood, Ruth was pretty sure.
Her cousin still got stars in her eyes when she talked about Nick now and then, even though she’d been married forfriggin-ever to Joey Castiglia, who was almost as hot. But no one was as hot as Nicky.
Ruth looked through the windshield at him. He was resting his large, strong, tawny hands over the steering wheel like they were lion paws. Able to break the neck of a goombah with a single blow.
Stop thinking like Sofia, she told herself sternly. Ahead of her by a few years, her cousin had gone through Catholic school with Nicky, writing SOFIA + NICKY4EVER and Sofia Del Bianco (Mrs.) and the names she wanted for their children—Nicky Jr., Anthony Marco, and Brianna—on the inside covers of her notebooks. Hoping to get somewhere, somehow, with him, Sofia had even attended mass when his mother did, Nicky being conspicuously absent from Our Lady of Mount Carmel on most Sundays because he stayed out so late on Saturday nights. But as far as Ruth knew, Nicky had never even kissed her cousin.
The other man looked at him uneasily as Nicky got out and kept the car between himself and the two of them, leaning on its roof. He took a small ID folder out of his jacket pocket and flashed his shield in a bored way. The high-gloss paint reflected his killer smile upside down as a killer frown. Ruth had a feeling he knew the goombah and didn’t like him. “Ignazio. Long time no see. Who’s your friend?”
Huh. Nicky didn’t recognize her. Ruth was about to open her mouth and enlighten him when she realized she would be enlightening the goombah at the same time. She clammed up.
Ignazio gave a theatrical shrug. “We just met.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked directly at Ruth. “Is he bothering you? Need a ride somewhere?”
“Okay.” She picked up Tuff again and edged past the limo driver, who was sweating.
“Get this boat off the sidewalk, Ig. Don’t make me run the plates. I don’t even wanna know where you stole it from.”
“I didn’t steal it,” the limo driver said, looking outraged.
Nicky shook his head as if he didn’t want to hear another word. The sun
light hit his dark-gold hair just right, Ruth noticed, and the breeze ruffled it. Even though he was standing on the other side of his car, he was tall enough for her to see through the window that he was in plainclothes. As in faded jeans. And a nice shirt that the breeze kept pushing against his body. Chest to die for, biceps ditto. He’d been a golden boy in high school and he was a golden man now.
It crossed her mind that maybe Sofia had set this up—but no, that couldn’t be. Ruth had gotten incredibly lucky, that was all.
She wobbled to the unmarked car on those goddamned red velvet platforms. Safe in her arms, Tuff indulged in a few parting growls at the goombah.
“Go back to Brooklyn, Ig,” Nick said quietly. “Don’t let me catch you around this neighborhood again.”
The other man opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. He got behind the wheel of the limo, puffing a little, and slammed the door. Then the same fandango with the windows started again—up, down, up—until he figured it out and drove very carefully off the sidewalk, maneuvering the white limo with a little more skill than he’d shown before.
Nicky watched him go around the corner and turned to her. “Where to? I’m Nick Del Bianco, by the way. Detective NYPD.”
“Um, that way,” Ruth began, gesturing vaguely. He really didn’t know who she was. Interesting. Very interesting. She decided to change her destination and go someplace else besides home. “But could you drop me on 187th Street instead, near Arthur Avenue? At De Lillo’s? I want to get a cannoli.” She did want one—the crunchy sweet tubes of pastry filled with flavored whipped cream were her favorite treat.
He looked at her like she was a cannoli, grinning like a hungry wolf. “Sure.”
Like mirror images, they opened their respective doors, got in and closed them at the same time.
“How about that. Simultaneous…never mind.” He grinned at her and started the car. Tuff wriggled so he could look out the window and then he yarped. “Is that how he barks?”
