“Come on. Let’s go.”
I’m sitting in the car beside Leo a few minutes later, thoughts racing. I’ve never seen violence like that in real life. It terrified me. My thoughts go to Roman. If anything had happened to me here… Tears well in my eyes when I imagine him waiting up for me to come pick him up from Lauren’s, waiting and waiting and eventually passing out on the couch, his little dreams filled with whatever innocent things three-year-olds dream of.
I marvel at how fucked up I am for not running right now, for not telling Leo to let me out of the car and never talking to him again. I try to tell myself it’s because I want to give Roman’s real father a chance to be in the life of his son, and that I want to give Roman a chance to have a male role model, but I would be lying if I said that was all. As much as I’m ashamed to admit it, I’m both repulsed and attracted to Leo’s power. Seeing him hurt men like that, dominating them effortlessly has an appeal I can’t deny. I try to psychoanalyze myself, digging into why that would be. All I can think of is that it makes some sense for a woman like myself whose life is so far out of control to be drawn to a man who is so in control. At the same time, the violence and power that draws me to him can’t be in the life of my son. I can’t let it.
I think the therapist in me also wants to help Leo. I can see he wants to be different on some level, but he thinks he can’t. He thinks he needs to be as hard as he is to protect the things he cares about. I can’t quite bring myself to leave because I want to help him heal, as much as I can.
Leo looks to me, eyes fiery. “You shouldn’t have stopped me. Those guys will come back.”
I shrug. “I won’t apologize for stopping you from killing two men on a fucking putt putt course.”
“Yeah,” he says, smirking, “Because you know you were going to lose if I didn’t bend my putter on that guys’ face.”
My stomach suddenly feels sick as I recall the image and I feel the blood drain from my face.
Leo makes a sour face. “Bad joke. You’re right.” He reaches to touch my cheek, turning my face toward him. “You have to let me protect you, no matter what it takes. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”
His words carry so much weight. So much power. I feel myself being drawn toward him, like a sailor walking toward the edge of the shore, taking step after step into the frigid, dark waters toward the siren’s call, knowing somewhere distantly that I’m walking toward doom, but unable to resist.
He kisses me. His mouth is warm against mine. His touch is like a vortex, consuming all my senses and drowning out my thoughts with the roar of its power. Worries of my mom are temporarily pushed down. For a single knee-weakening minute, I’m absorbed in the moment. It’s only after he pulls back from the kiss, leaving me breathless, that reality crashes back into me with such jarring force that I have to press my feet into the floorboards to keep from slipping down in my seat.
Leo licks his lips, running his hand up my thigh and then slipping it inside my pants. His hand is warm against my flesh as he finds the inside of my panties. I press my hand to his, intending to stop him but only pressing him into me harder. What are you doing, Julia? My eyes squeeze shut and I bite my lip as a moan slips from my mouth. He leans across the seat, kissing my neck and cupping my face with his left hand while his right works between my legs.
“Wait. Wait,” I say.
He pauses, pulling back to smirk at me, hand still down my panties. I feel myself throbbing against him as my body practically begs for more.
“I’ll wait, but can you?” he asks, taking my breath away with a warm, hard kiss.
“It’s common,” I say between kisses, breathlessly. “For subjects of—mmm—shock to make…impulsive decisions…excess endorphins can…cause…”
He pulls back, smirking at me. “You’re saying the only reason we’re about to fuck is because someone tried to kill us?”
I nod. “So maybe we should think about—”
He’s kissing me again, and I can’t bring myself to care anymore. My world gradually fades away as my senses are consumed by him. His fingers circle again over my clit, sliding down my valley, and plunging inside me, pumping rhythmically. I bite his lip, my hand moving up his thigh and finding his cock through the jeans he wears. My eyebrows flick upwards.
“Jesus. I thought I had exaggerated the memory of how big you were.”
I unzip his jeans, freeing his length and feeling a sudden and uncontrollable urge to please him. I want to see this man of power and strength at my mercy for a change, hanging on my every movement, gasping in pleasure as I take control. I have to pull his jeans down to the middle of his thighs to get his cock free because it’s too big to pull through the zipper while erect.
I grip him, still gasping in pleasure as his hand sends electric pleasure through my body with every movement. I wrap my lips around the head of his length, struggling not to scrape my teeth against him. I steal a glance upward and love the way his head is thrown back as he groans with pleasure. I cup his cock, kissing and licking along its length and finding my way back to the tip, taking him in my mouth and swirling my tongue around it. I know I’m doing a good job when he hand freezes inside me, his two fingers held motionless in my core, forgotten as I find my rhythm, loving the way his face is contorted with pleasure.
His breathing grows more rapid, and I know I’m close to making him cum when my phone buzzes. I’m snapped out of the moment immediately as guilt replaces lust. I don’t need to look to know the text is probably from Lauren, wondering when I’ll be by to pick up Roman. I move my mouth off him, finishing the job with my hand, when moments before I was planning to straddle him and let him do whatever he wanted to me, now I just want to go get my son.
Leo doesn’t notice my change of heart, and he sucks in a breath, groaning as his hot cum sprays over my hand. He moves to resume fingering me, but I shift, pulling his hand from my pants.check his center console and find some tissue, wiping the cum from myself as he does the same.
He narrows his eyes at me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. Can you just take me home please?”
I sigh. What’s wrong? Just that I worked all day and left my son with Lauren so that I could come play putt putt and give an ex-con a blowjob in the parking lot. I could try to justify what I’m doing. I could say that I’m a person, too, and that I need to take care of myself. Or that I need to find out if Leo is the right guy to be in my son’s life, but it doesn’t feel right. No matter how I put it, my little guy has been waiting all day to see me, and he needs his mommy. I feel the anger in me rising, and even though my training tells me I’m projecting anger at myself onto Leo, I can’t stop myself.
“You would have killed those guys back there if I hadn’t stopped you,” I say, less a question and more a statement. Whether he admits it or not, I know it’s true.
He starts the car, backing out of the parking spot and heading to the main road. “Yes. I would have.”
“Just like that? No questions, no ‘who sent you’ or ‘who do you work for’? You’d just kill them because you were pretty sure they were the bad guys?”
“This isn’t like the movies. Guys who hesitate don’t last long. Whether it makes you happy or not, I’m never going to let anything happen to you, whatever it takes.”
I look out the window, watching the yellow streetlights streak by. And guys who don’t hesitate probably don’t make very good fathers. Maybe I’m so upset because I’m seeing how much our worlds clash. He comes from a world of black and white, of kill or be killed, and I don’t know how someone like that could ever fit in and function in my world full of grays.
I rub my temples, leaning forward in my desk and sighing. Six patients today and every single one was a parolee. Ted has started exclusively sending the parolees to me, just to save himself the headache of hearing the other therapists complain. Everyone sees what’s going on and has offered to take some on, but Ted won’t budge. His bigger
concern is making my life miserable. I think somewhere in his twisted, hair-product encrusted head, he thinks I’ll eventually come to the conclusion that dating him is the only way out of this living hell he has created for me at work.
I open the envelope and frown. Three hundred dollars? My normal check is for a little over two thousand every two weeks. I stand, storming to Ted’s office. I find him leaning back in his chair, tossing a paperweight up idly. Of course he’s not actually working. He just overworks everyone else.
“What is this?” I ask, shaking the check in his face.
“That’s your paycheck. Don’t I pay for vision insurance?”
“Actually no. You make us go through a private insurer for vision.”
He purses his lips, disinterested.
“Where is the rest of my money?” I ask.
“Didn’t you see the renovations I did to the waiting area?”
“You mean the two broken chairs you replaced?”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t pay for themselves. If our waiting room looks like shit, we’re going to lose clients. If we lose clients, then there won’t be any money to pay you.”
I clench my teeth, feeling my nostrils flaring. “My check is almost two grand short. Did you import those fucking chairs from Italy?”
He sighs. “Look, Julia. I really don’t have time for this. I’m waiting on a call, so maybe we can talk about this next week.”
I slam the check down on his table. “We’re talking about this now.”
He turns his chair slowly to face me. “Don’t make me remind you. One call, and you won’t even be getting a three hundred dollar paycheck from me.”
“I could get three hundred dollars working at McDonalds.”
“Go ahead,” he says. “You could probably find more tattooed neanderthals to fuck at McDonalds than you will here.”
I grab the glass paperweight he was playing with from his hand and throw it as hard as I can at his window. “Maybe you can use some of the fucking money you stole from me to pay for that, too.”
45
Leo
Marco Bianchi sits at the end of a table occupied by the top guys in the Bianchi family. Smoke clouds the room, making everything smell acrid and sweet. Marco taps his ashes directly on the table and leans back to squint at me through the smoke. “What can I do for you, Leo?”
“I want your blessing to go after the Morettis.”
“It’s my understanding that you have been doing exactly that for the last four years, despite my express instructions to let sleeping dogs lie.”
I clench my jaw. “You expected the Morettis to kill us a long time ago. You would’ve preferred it, even. It would let you smooth things over with the Morettis so you can keep greasing your pockets.”
A few of the guys around the table get twitchy, shifting in their chairs or subtly moving their hands closer to their guns. Marco leans forward slowly, taking a long drag on his cigar and puffing the smoke out. “You know I’ve had men shot for less disrespect than that?”
“If you were going to have me killed you wouldn’t be wasting your time with threats.”
Marco sits back, smiling faintly. He makes a calming gesture to the men around the table. “Easy boys. This Citrione dog still has a little bite left, and it would be a shame to let his talent go to waste.”
“I’m going after the Morettis.”
Marco considers for a moment. “You do so without our formal blessing. I will not devote any manpower to this. I will not make any movement to protect you when they retaliate. But privately, I wish you success.”
Spineless prick. “Great. Thanks,” I say, leaving without a backward glance.
“They are going to make me,” says Angelo. He sits across from me in the cafe booth.
I nearly drop the cup of coffee in my hand. “They what?”
He grins like an idiot. “Yeah. Your little brother is going to be a made man. Shit man, can you believe it? I’m going to be a fucking capo. I’ll have soldiers assigned to me, and I’ll be running my own jobs, pulling in bigger cuts.”
“You have to say no,” I say.
The hurt on his face is clear as day. “Why the fuck would I say no?”
“Think about it. Why would they make you? Why now?”
He shakes his head, frowning. “Wow. I thought you would be proud, but you’re just jealous. Even Carlito was happy for me.”
I suck in a breath, pushing down annoyance. “Listen to me. They have no reason to make you right now. You’re on their shit list. Something is wrong here, Angelo. Just tell them no, or get the fuck out of town.”
He sets down his fork and wipes his mouth. “I’ll call you when it’s done. I don’t need to sit here and listen to this.”
I’ve known him long enough to know there’s nothing else I can say without pushing him even harder toward what he’s already going to do. Fuck.
Later that night, I’m cleaning my gun when I hear a loud pop and hissing sound through the wall in my apartment. It’s coming from Julia’s room. She shouts something loud that sounds a lot like “shit”. I rush out to the hallway and bang on her door. If anything happened to her.
The door swings open and she’s standing there, soaked to the waist. Her white blouse sticks to her tits, completely see-through. I can even see the dark circles of her nipples through the bra she wears. My cock hardens and I lick my lips, smirking when I see Roman behind her, frolicking in the water that’s spraying from beneath the sink.
“Do you have a wrench?” I ask.
“There was a box of tools in the closet when I got the place,” she says, showing me where to look.
I grab the tools and move to the sink, lying on my side to get beneath the counter and find the shutoff valve. A quick twist turns off the torrent of water. It’s a simple enough problem. The pipes came loose and need to be tightened.
“Want to learn how to fix this, bud?” I ask Roman.
His eyes light up and he crams himself under the sink with me, waiting for orders. I smirk, fighting an urge to hug him. I don’t know what it is about this little kid, but he makes me soft. I just don’t want to push the limits of what Julia is comfortable with, so I hold back. “Take this,” I say, handing him the wrench.
He grabs it with two hands, mouth opening slightly in awe, as if he’s never held something so cool.
“Now put it here,” I say, guiding his hands toward the loose valve. “Now if we want to make this tighter, what should we do?”
He looks at me in confusion. “I dunno,” he says.
“Righty tighty, lefty loosie. Do you know your rights and lefts?”
He nods proudly.
“Good. So if we want it tighter, we push this way,” I say, moving his hand that holds the wrench and tightening.
Roman smiles when we’re done, rushing out from under the sink and moving to jump in front of Julia. “Mommy. I fixed it!”
She smiles reluctantly, hugging the soaked little boy to her leg and looking at me. “Thank you.”
I turn her water back on and stand, realizing I’m soaked too. The white T-shirt I wear is probably just as see-through as hers, and if the way her eyes are struggling to stay on mine is any indication, it definitely is. “You know I could fix that crooked cabinet door in a few minutes.”
She looks where I’m pointing. “Oh, it doesn’t really bother me.”
“You sure? I could fix it now. It’d only take a minute.”
She crosses her arms, covering her wet tits from my view. “Let me just go get changed real quick. You can start though. Come on, Roman, let’s go to mommy’s room.”
Roman plants his feet. “I want to help Mr. Leo.”
I shrug at her. “I could use the help,” I say.
“Okay, but you make sure Mr. Leo doesn’t break anything.”
I help Roman up to stand on the countertop, holding his back protectively while I explain why the cabinet is crooked. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand half of what I’
m saying, but he keeps nodding his little head and smiling.
“See this?” I ask, pointing to the joint that holds the cabinet in place. “This is the most important part. When you start learning to fix thing, you’ll see that everything isn’t as complicated as it looks. Break it down and it usually comes down to one piece. Just one thing that’s out of whack. It’s kind of like what your mommy does. She fixes people. That’s what makes her so special.”
“Mommy fixes people?” asks Roman.
“Sure,” I say, tightening a screw in the hinge. “She’s fixing me, whether she knows it or not.”
“You broken?” asks Roman. His little face screws up in confusion.
I nod solemnly. “A little less broken than when I moved in and met you though.”
He smiles, probably still not understanding most of what I mean.
I hand him a rubber mallet and let him whack at the bottom of the cabinet, which he loves.
It’s only then I notice Julia in the hallway, dressed in a simple black t-shirt. She leans against the wall, watching us with a small smile, but there’s something else in her eyes, something distant and pained. She’s trying to hide it, but I can still see it. What is she hiding? It still surprises me how fiercely I want to protect her, even if it’s not from a physical threat. It would be easy to write off and assume I only fell so hard for her because she’s one of the few women who have tried to tell me no before, but that’s not it.
I’ve been with women before who tried to change me, and I’ve been with women who didn’t care about changing me. Julia doesn’t fall neatly into either group. I know she’s not happy with the violence in my life, but I get the sense that if I step too far out of line, she won’t stick around to try to steer me back to the straight and narrow. She’ll just walk.
The most wild part is that I’ve actually been thinking of ways to get out of this life, or at least ease back on it so I can be more of the man she needs for herself and Roman. I want that. I just don’t know what else I’d do if I wasn’t doing this. I’ll figure it out for her though, if she lets me.
Savage: A Bad Boy Next Door Romance Page 25
