by Jaye Peaches
“Patience. Such impatience,” he said, easing away further.
“Please don’t tease,” she said breathlessly.
It was a futile request. His fingers came back to play with her. He rolled her nipples about between his tips, then his tongue and teeth nibbled at each one in turn. She writhed, kicking and shrieking with delight at his little tormenting sucks.
“Keep still. There is more rope in the corner. I could tie you to the ladder.”
Leah wanted it, but didn’t. The strange dichotomy burnt inside her unresolved. It was like the flogging: desired and feared at the same time. His head lowered, his tongue licking down into her navel towards the apex of her thighs. Crouching down, Rick began to stroke with his tongue. Pressing it between her swollen labia, dragging his tongue over her clitoris. Her little engorged bud, exposed and protruding from its covering, had become supersensitive. A bolt of pleasure shot upwards into her belly.
“Don’t. Wait,” he said firmly.
“I can’t!” she howled. She came at the second stroke of his tongue and as she exploded, he sucked her clitoris into her mouth.
“Fuck! Too much,” she cried out.
Rick released her swiftly; rising up, he penetrated her again. This time he seemed intent on finding his own pleasure. Leah didn’t mind. She wanted to feel him burst inside her. She perched her bottom on a rung, shoed feet on tiptoes and held on to him tightly as he pounded her.
His hand hoicked a leg up, palm supporting her upper thigh and the ladder complained about the extra weight.
Rick had a feverish appearance, beads of sweat on his forehead, his chocolate mop dancing about on his head as he pummelled her core. He seemed to grow bigger, filling all of her, putting her natural elasticity to the test. The friction was intense and it worked some kind of magic. She was about to come again.
Clenching and squeezing, she massaged his cock with frantic pulses of her vaginal muscles. Rick hollered, juddered violently, and the heat inside her signalled his orgasm. It lingered on, spurting hard at first, then subtler, slower until he stopped moving and sighed. His head rested on her shoulder and she folded her arms about him, stroking his broad shoulder blades.
Her back hurt. Now she could feel the lashes of the flogger, the burning heat in her bottom, and the chafing of the ladder.
“I can’t…” she muttered.
Rick shifted, stood up, letting his semi-erect cock flop against his thigh. Taking his hand, she eased her sore body upright, checked her balance, and tentatively moved away from the ladder.
“Wow,” said Rick. “That was amazing. You were amazing. This ladder is amazing.” He gave the ladder a hard shake against the wall. There was a loud crack, a splintering of wood, and one of the side struts came away, toppling to the floor with a loud clatter.
Leah and Rick stared at it, at each other, lips pursed, and then they burst out laughing.
“That was close,” said Rick. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Ten
Leah had been gone twenty minutes. They had arrived home from their trip via lunch in Ormskirk and discovered the lack of milk in the refrigerator. Leah had offered to walk down to the small village store and buy a pint. Rick suspected she would come back with a small bag of bon-bons too. The sweet jars behind the counter were irresistible to her.
Rick relaxed in an armchair, Sunday newspaper in hand, and he perused the football results. It was a half-hearted attempt at reading; his mind drifted back to the morning, the hangar, and the incredible sex. He wished he could repeat it soon. In two weeks, his contract would be finished. The agency would probably offer him alternative work, possibly on Merseyside, though they provided services across the north. He might end up in Manchester or Sheffield, driving steel magnates and their wives.
He didn’t want to go, but he wasn’t going to be supported by a young woman and have no job. It went against the ethics his father had drummed into him. Picking up the Liverpool Echo—he had rescued it from the rubbish pile—he began to wonder if he should find a local job, maybe a security guard at the docks. The pay would be abysmal, but it would keep him in Liverpool, allow him to stay with Leah. Assuming she wanted him to stay.
As he pondered his options, the front door banged loudly, the glass rattling in the frame. Leah burst into the room, clutching a pint of milk to her chest, tears streaming down her face.
Rick grabbed the bottle out of her hands before she dropped it and she immediately buried herself in his arms, sobbing and shaking. He managed to put the pint down on a nearby table before embracing her trembling body in his arms.
“What is it?” he said, alarmed.
She hiccupped, unable to string two words together and he drew her down on to his lap in a chair. There she curled up while he stroked her hair and whispered soothing words into her ears. Her panicked state sent waves of adrenaline through his body and he feared what she might tell to him.
Leah began to recover her poise and she brushed away the tears, sitting up on his lap, looking quite young and childlike.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m a little overwrought and it will probably be for no reason.”
“You tell me, and I’ll decide.” He tilted her chin up, looking into her puffy eyes. He offered her his hankie, and she blew into it and took a deep breath.
“I went to the shop. Got my pint and came out,” she began speaking in short bursts. “There were two men sitting on a wall nearby, smoking cigarettes, and as I walked by, they got up and began to walk behind me.”
“Go on,” said Rick, unnerved by what she was telling him.
“Didn’t think anything of it at first. Except they didn’t move past me. You know, men walk quicker, I expected them to overtake me. So I glanced behind and they were matching my pace. I sped up, so did they. I slowed, they did. Shit, I was spooked.”
“What did they look like?”
“I’m not so sure of the details. They were dressed in dark clothes. Not suits, but smart stuff. Leather jackets. Which is weird, because it isn’t cold out, but they looked like it was the middle of winter. Shades. Moustaches too.”
Rick swallowed hard. “What happened next?”
“All those conversations with my daddy came rushing back. How he told me always watch my back. He didn’t want to scare me, but I knew he worried about me, what with the money and the threat of kidnappers and ransoms. It all flooded back, these little chats of his and I turned round again and demanded to know what they were doing.”
“Leah, you shouldn’t have spoken to them!”
“Then I see this car, big black thing, pulling up behind me. A door opens.” Her voice faded and Leah began to tremble in his arms again, lips quivering. “I just ran. I didn’t wait to find out, but I’m sure one of them was reaching out for me!”
“They didn’t give chase?” he queried.
She shook her head. “I can run fast, even in these shoes. If they had come at me, I was going to throw the bottle at them. I think somebody was cleaning their car on the driveway, he might have seen it all, scared them off chasing.”
He cradled her again, let her feel his hands about her body, holding her tight. Rick screwed his eyes up tight and cursed to himself. It was his worst nightmare come true. She might think the unwelcome attention was due to her wealth, but he thought differently.
He no longer could hide the truth from her. She deserved to know why she was vulnerable. He couldn’t protect her if she didn’t understand the risks to them both.
“I lied,” said Rick. “I didn’t go to Italy. I passed through it and went to Sicily.”
* * *
“Sicily!” Leah sat bolt upright in on his lap. The expression on his face had changed—darker with a layer of sadness descending hard onto his features. She levered herself off him and onto a nearby chair. He didn’t stop her.
“My full name isn’t Richard, it is Riccardu. A Maltese name, my mother insisted. I use it when I’m abroad because it is on my passport
. It is a familiar name to the Italians; they would understand its origins. Why else would they employ an Englishman?”
“To do what?”
“I thought it was the usual. Rich man with land, somebody with connections. I drove him, along with others on the roster. It is the lowest position in the hierarchy of his henchmen.”
“Henchmen?” said Leah, creeping forward on the edge of her chair, her tears forgotten as she listened enthralled.
“It was the best I could get. I really wanted to experience life on the Med, except I couldn’t face going to Malta. Bumping into my mother… Sicily, golden landscape, warm weather, and a slow idyllic pace, especially after the hectic one in Switzerland.” Rick buried his face in his hands for a few seconds. “How wrong. So bloody stupid.”
Leah waited, trying hard to keep her impatience at bay. Rick had to explain in his own time.
“All went well for the first couple of months. There was the legitimate side of his business and I saw only that at first: trips to Naples, other cities. The boss, he seemed friendly enough, most of the time. His wife, charming. What was there not to like? I lived in a bunker with others, my Italian improved, and they took me in without questioning my upbringing. Then one day I drove him, the boss, with another and they spoke at length about issues, problems with shifting money about. My Italian had reached the point when I could follow such complex conversations. I don’t think they realised how quick I am with languages, even dialects. I’m supposed to be the deaf foreign mute. What they said, it clicked into place. They were laundering money.”
“Laundering?”
“Washing dirty money through businesses and making it clean.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Drugs, racketeering, you name it.”
Leah understood; Rick’s boss was part of the criminal underclass, the mob, the mafia. “Shit.”
“Yes, my thoughts too. Naively, I thought I could just simply ignore it all. Drive, open doors, keep my eye on his wife while she went shopping. It became apparent why he was so protective of her. It is like a war out there, all of these so-called families, waiting to stab each other in the back. Nobody trusts anyone. I think they took me on because I was fresh, untainted.”
“So you left,” said Leah.
“How I wished I had done that straightaway. I was enjoying myself. Good food, sunshine, camaraderie. It was like being in the army, the career I missed out on. My asthma rarely troubled me. So I stayed. Then I found out what it really meant to be sucked into that life. One Sunday, I picked the boss up and drove him to this deserted farmhouse surrounded by lemon trees, and there was this other car.”
Leah had a growing sense of dread. Rick had gone strangely pale, his fingers rifling through his hair.
“They pulled him out of the boot,” he continued in a strained voice. “Just another, like me, a nobody, who had been foolish enough to take backhanders, pocketing money collected from the protection racket they ran. Caught, red-handed.”
“Oh, no,” said Leah horrified. “They killed him?”
“Not quite. Nearly. It is what I dream about, my nightmares come from that day and what I witnessed. I came so close to panicking, running off. I knew I couldn’t, I had to wait. I held out, drove the boss home, and then I threw up.”
“Thank goodness you left then.”
Rick sighed, a despondent noise. “Oh, I left, ran for it. It wasn’t that easy to do. They had my passport. At some point, they searched my belongings and took it. I asked for it back; they told me I couldn’t have it and that I was part of their family now. I couldn’t just leave, I knew too much. I had one friend out there, a true mate. He knew I was an outsider, and he understood I had not appreciated the nature of the people I worked for until it was too late. Sympathetic, he was able to get my passport back. He took me to the port and put me on a ferry to Naples. Giuseppe then fed some story that I had run off with a visiting tourist, had eloped. I came back to Liverpool believing it would be safe here; I didn’t think they would bother with me.”
“And now?”
“I was wrong. They don’t forget. This trust, this silence you must honour, I have broken it. I stayed in contact with Giuseppe, those telephone conversations in Italian, and he tried to cover my tracks. Then some big drug operation went wrong, busted, and they want to blame somebody. My name came up. I haven’t heard from Giuseppe for three weeks—he lives with his mother, and she doesn’t know where he is. I fear for him. Now I suspect they have found my whereabouts from him.”
“You could be wrong about all this, Rick. What if nobody followed us? The men today, perhaps they were just local hoodlums. Or maybe I’m the target and it is nothing to do with you. I don’t make a deal about it, but I’m worth a lot of money.”
“From your description, they don’t sound local. The clothing, their appearance…”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I have to keep you safe,” said Rick, reaching out his hand.
Leah took it, returning to the comfort of his embrace.
“Perhaps I should go again,” he said carefully.
Her response was to thump him hard in the chest with her hands. “No!” said Leah. “You’re not leaving me again!”
“I can’t make promises, Leah,” He took her wrists, curling his fingers around their slender circumference, feeling her slightness.
Tears returned to her eyes. “Don’t leave me, Rick,” she said.
Rick kissed the palm of a hand, inhaling her scent. “I’m sorry. I have brought this on you. We’ll have to be extra careful. You will have to do everything I tell you. No messing about.”
“I will. I promise,” she said with sincerity.
At bedtime, Rick checked and rechecked the doors and windows. The gate to the driveway was shut and bolted, something they had never bothered to do in the friendly neighbourhood.
During the commute to work the next day, his eyes darted about, always looking behind to see if anyone was following. He now believed they had been tailed, probably to locate her house, maybe not the exact location, but sufficiently close to catch her at the shops. He told her to sit in the back of the car, not the front, and she obeyed him without question.
While she was at work, trying to distract herself from the worries, he returned home and added extra security measures to the house: extra bolts on the downstairs windows and a brighter porch light overlooking the driveway. When she finished work, instead of Leah walking to the car, Rick came into the foyer and escorted her to the vehicle.
In the evening, they both picked at their food, made small talk, and then Rick would pace about the house, peering out of windows into the dusk. She told him to stop, that it unnerved her to see him so agitated.
Taking her to bed, Rick made intense passionate love to her, making her feel every inch of him inside her and driving out her fears, replacing them with his kisses and tender touches. No spanking or teasing her, he bound his body to hers with nothing more than his limbs and lips.
The heat of his body kept her awake into the night. He refused to let go of her even in his sleep. What distressed her the most were his dreams. The mutterings, the calling out, and the way his lungs wheezed through the night.
Rick was a troubled man.
Chapter Eleven
Could he leave her? Should he? Round and round he batted the idea. He could run, but would they leave her alone if he left her behind? He doubted it. She was a weapon to use against him and without round-the-clock protection, she was vulnerable. The other option was to take him with her. To where?
Leah had suggested going to Malta, to find his mother.
Rick had struggled to hold back his emotions as he finally confessed he hadn’t seen his mother in ten years, and given the infrequency of his visits over the years, he doubted he would recognise her.
“Your dad?”
Again, he had stumbled over his words. “He’s well respected, in a top ministry job. If I turn up,
trying to hide from the mob, it would damage his career terribly.”
“But you’re his son!”
“He brought me up, Leah, but we’re not close. He doesn’t owe me anything, nor I him. It’s just the way it is.”
It hadn’t stopped raining since Sunday. Unseasonable weather and it only added to his woes. Their relationship was starting to show the strain. At the end of next week, her driving ban would be lifted. She had no need of him, yet he felt responsible for her continuing safety. The best solution crept into his mind one evening. She would have to go to her mother in Northern Italy until Rick could decide his own fate. Gregor would protect her. He had wealth and influence in his own region.
Leah’s promise to Rick would be put to the test; he was determined that she should do as he would ask. His own promise would be to come back and find her. One day.
Tomorrow, Friday, he would tell her after work. Then on Saturday, he would take her to the airport, put her on a plane to Milan and then run, as far away from her as he could.
* * *
Leah waited in the foyer of Littlewoods. A commercial cathedral, encased in white stone, rivalling the cathedrals erected in the heart of the city—during the war the vast interior spaces had been used to construct barrage balloons, such was its imposing scale. She felt safe at work, protected behind walls and barriers. She watched Rick approach the doors, beckoning her to join him, and together they walked back to the parked car.
Rick said nothing, uncommunicative and tetchy in his manners; he didn’t offer his hand to her and she could see pensive lines drawn on his face. Over the months, she had learnt to read his features and begun to interpret their meaning: he had something on his mind, something new, she suspected.
Once in the car, he deflected any potential questions she might have by immediately asking about her day at work. She was tempted to ask directly what troubled him, but she took his offered bait of a neutral topic and chatted quietly about inconsequential matters. As they ran out of things to say, an uncomfortable silence filled the car. She wondered if they should escape for the weekend. A couple of days in a country hotel, somewhere to talk and plan their future.
