Bandit: A Bonnie and Clyde Romance (A Shot of Scott Book 1)

by Ada Scott

  Leaning back in my chair, I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the scotch thawing the iceberg in my stomach. It was a bad idea to go there today, there was too much other shit going on.

  Not just that shitstorm at the biker bar, either. Word was that some of my guys were turning up dead here and there. Not many, just higher than the average level for people in their demographic, the active criminal demographic.

  Things were ramping up, and I had an entire fucking country to search so I could find where the Picollis’ new base of operations was. So far we had one lead. My contacts in the police said that one of my cadaver mugshots was almost certainly a known thug from Chicago.

  That’s where I had to focus my… I got the feeling I was being watched. When I opened my eyes, the mystery was solved. Kendall was looking at me with such obvious pity that I felt a flare of anger.

  I was Jace Motherfucking Barlow. I owned this city. Pity me? I felt my skin prickling as my blood rushed. Kendall stood and walked around the table until she was standing beside my chair. She hitched her skirt up a bit before she lifted a leg over and straddled my lap.

  Good girl… that’s just what I need. Fuck my problems away…

  I reached between her legs, cupping that sweet pussy of hers through her panties, and felt my middle finger nestled in along the length of her slit. My God, I wanted to touch her every second of every day.

  “Wait…” she said.

  Kendall held my wrists and pulled my hand away from her, placing both of my palms around her upper thighs just below the hem of her high-riding skirt. If any other girl had ever told me to wait, I’d have thrown her out of the room and had the next one sent in. I clenched my jaw and looked up at her.

  Once she was reasonably confident that my hands weren’t going to wander when she let go, she reached up and cradled my head, with her palms along my jawline, her fingers near my ears and her thumbs gently stroking my cheeks. Her touch was so tender, so soft, that it was almost as if she was handling me like a Ming Vase, something precious and breakable.

  I looked at her with the most incredulous expression I could muster, and she just looked straight back at me. Straight through me, almost, into my soul.

  “Jace? Listen to me, because I… I don’t think anybody ever told you this. I am so sorry for what happened to you-”

  “It doesn’t m-”

  “No. Listen. I am sorry for what you went through, Jace. Look at me. You were just a little boy. You didn’t deserve to have your home and family ripped away. It wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t have been thrown into that hellhole. Somebody should have been there to tell you that everything was going to be OK.”

  Kendall’s face was streaming with tears by now, but she didn’t let go of my head to wipe them away. With a jolt of shock I realized that she was, in fact, using her thumbs to wipe tears off my face.

  What in the fucking hell was this? I thought I knew what power was… but this girl had me mesmerized, enthralled. She was the powerful one, and she had more to say.

  “I wish I could, I don’t know, travel back in time so I could tell you. I’d tell you that all this… all this shit, isn’t forever. I’d tell you that there’s nobody in the whole world like you and everything is going to be OK and I’ll be waiting for you.” Kendall pulled my head against her chest and I shut my eyes, shut out the world.

  This penthouse was supposed to be my bomb shelter, my safe place, and my home. Being in Kendall’s arms felt more like those things than the expensive surroundings ever had.

  How was that possible? I had billions of dollars that the IRS had no fucking clue about, more weapons than my two and a half armies could wield, and I could probably throw Kendall thirty feet one-handed. But I needed her as much as I needed oxygen.

  After some unknown quantity of time, Kendall pulled my head away. I opened my eyes to see a wet spot on her shirt, where it stuck to her perfect body, before I looked up to her face again. She held my gaze for what seemed like forever before she spoke again.

  “Jace… I love you.”

  Panic and fear froze me like the first time somebody held a gun to my head when I was sixteen. My heart was probably hitting three hundred beats per minute and in my mind I reached for any weapon I could find. The usual one. Anger.

  Put this bitch in her place, Jace. You tell her love doesn’t fucking exist and she better get used to the idea that she’s just a tight-pussied little cum dumpster and you can get a thousand more just like her before the end of the day.

  I was just about to stand up, send Kendall tumbling to the ground and tell her exactly that when another part of my brain spoke up with a ‘hold on, what about this?’ and an image flashed through my mind of what Kendall would look like if I said that.

  That spark in her eyes would be snuffed out. That glow. Gone. She wouldn’t look at me like a hero anymore.

  Oh for fuck sake. Well say something, you stupid cunt.

  “Kendall… I...”

  Don’t just sit there like a fucking moron. Fuck it, tell her the truth if you have to.

  My stampeding heart made my voice waver with every beat. “I love you too.”

  I hadn’t said those words in over two decades. But if I was telling Kendall the truth… how could I tell her the whole truth?

  Kendall

  For the first time in my life, I was in love. I didn’t simply have a crush on somebody, I wasn’t on the outside, I was in love. Jace loved me right back.

  There’d been times when I’d lay by myself in bed wondering what it felt like to be in love, to be in one of those exclusive two-person clubs. It was hard to remember exactly what I’d thought, but it probably involved running through a field of flowers in slow motion and soft-focus, before Prince Charming lifted me up and we twirled around.

  The reality was so much better, yet so much more difficult. Most of the time I was so excited that I could have burst. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, stay in bed with him every moment of every day, have silly little talks in hushed whispers in the dark that nobody else would ever hear, and bask in his love forever.

  All that and more was beyond my wildest dreams, but the fantasies didn’t prepare me for everything. They didn’t tell me that Prince Charming might not have grown up in a castle with loving parents. They didn’t tell me that he might have had to fight for his life before, maybe more than once.

  I’d felt helpless and alone for so long that I felt almost ashamed of myself when I managed to put enough pieces of Jace’s early life together. Somewhere along the line I’d become so scared and wrapped up in my own issues that I’d forgotten that other people were hurting too.

  So I told him some things that I wished somebody had told me. I couldn’t do anything about where he came from, but I hoped the words combined with all the love I had for him would be something at least.

  I was pretty sure it wasn’t too late to help heal some of those old wounds, because I knew in myself just how different I felt about everything now that we were together. He seemed so relieved that day after we visited Wellfort too, like a piece of broken glass had been pulled out after hurting him for years.

  If life was even a little bit fair, that should have been the only issue Jace had to deal with, but there were other things blatantly weighing heavily on his mind. The resurgence of Mafia violence that had started with the biker bar had escalated. The Picolli Crime Family seemed to take extra special interest in hitting locations that were, via various holding companies and other complicated corporate structures, ultimately owned by Jace.

  It was really terrible luck. At work, Lucile was scrambling to follow up with her flop of an article by covering the new crime wave, and the police were saying that the Picollis were probably targeting businesses that refused to pay for protection.

  Several times I asked him about it. I could see he was down and all I wanted to do was make him happy again. My own happiness depended on it. That was a cliché I’d heard but, again, I couldn’t have been p
repared for the reality.

  More than once he looked like he was going to answer, as if he’d come up with this big speech to explain to me what was going through his head. Every time, he seemed to think better of it, told me not to worry. It was just boring business stuff.

  Today was no different. This afternoon, officially, we were celebrating the impending publication of my article, which had been written, re-written and polished to perfection by myself and Mr. Kinsley, and appropriately fact-checked by the research department.

  Jace didn’t look to be in the celebrating mood though. He sat there, looking out at the city as it went by the tinted windows of the town car, alternately looking sad, pissed off and frustrated. Hopefully our evening at AquaVell would relax him a bit.

  A blowjob in their Zen Garden would probably cheer us both up. I stifled a laugh and was just about to reach out and touch his knee to tell him my great idea when we stopped at an intersection and he looked in my direction with fierce concentration.

  At first I could have sworn he was about to accuse me of something, but then I realized he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking out the window on my side. I turned just in time to see the windows rolling down on a black SUV that had pulled up alongside us.

  “FUCK! Floor it!”

  The driver, behind the privacy barrier, couldn’t hear him and was probably looking ahead at traffic rather than the horrific sight of men with big guns leaning out of the SUV. Panic so intense that it transcended any ability to react gripped me, and I sat there with wide open mouth and eyes as they swung their weapons around to point right at me, though I was probably invisible behind the window.

  Jace dived across the car and pulled me towards him as a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before almost deafened me. If somebody had told me that this was what it sounded like when the earth ripped open and all the demons of hell were unleashed, I wouldn’t have argued.

  “Go! Go! Go! Fuck!”

  My eyes were shut so tight that I thought my face was going to cramp up. I could barely hear Jace above the cacophony, as a thousand bullets hammered into the side of the car.

  It might have been a few seconds or it might have been an hour, but although the assault continued, I was still breathing. Our car leaped forward and crashed straight into the back of the lead car in the convoy, coming to an abrupt halt again.

  “Get outta the fuckin’ way!”

  If I could barely hear him, the people in the front car had no hope. I cracked my eyes open and peered out in terror through the narrow slits. Jace was holding me against the far side of the car from where the men in the SUV were attacking, covering me as much as he could with his back to them.

  Under his armpit I could see that the windows on that side were all rendered impossible to see through because they were shattered with a fine network of cracks. Somehow, aside from the occasional tiny chip that launched off as a bullet hit the outside, they were still intact.

  The driver floored it again, and the lead car must have moved out of the way because we didn’t crash into anything this time. Suddenly a bright orange flash coming from behind us lit up the inside of the car, and a split second later I heard the rumble of an explosion. Even in our car, accelerating at top speed, I felt the explosion too.

  I was breathing so fast, and my chest hurt with the ferocity of my pounding heart. That was one of the only things that led me to believe I was probably still alive.

  Jace pushed himself up and looked back as the car weaved through traffic that I couldn’t see. I tried to get up, but Jace held me down, never taking his eyes off the scene behind us.

  I didn’t have the strength, coordination or coherent plan to struggle against him. I was delirious and might have just opened the door and stepped out while we were going full speed.

  Through back streets and over sidewalks, Jace’s driver managed to get us back to Jace’s building in record time, driving down the ramp into the underground parking lot so fast that the car bottomed out and I screamed.

  We came to a screeching halt and Jace pulled the door handle, forcing it open with his shoulder and stepping out with the same motion. He slipped his arm around me and lifted me out before mostly carrying me towards the door.

  A small army of people was swarming around us and Jace was barking instructions that I couldn’t really make out. Under flailing jackets, I saw flashes of holstered handguns as the men hurriedly reported whatever information Jace asked for.

  Once inside, we were surrounded all the way to the elevator, where only three of them joined us. Jace leaned me against the wall in the corner and grabbed one of them.

  “You and you join the other two upstairs in the choke point. You, head back down and tell them that nobody, nobody, else comes upstairs until I give the OK. Fucking nobody, you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the ragged chorus.

  “Triple the guard downstairs, get our sharp-shooters in their rooms in the surrounding buildings. Anything could happen tonight. Be ready for it.”

  “Yes, sir,” they repeated.

  Kendall

  Jace guided me to one of the chairs around the table and I sank into it. Every muscle in my body was quivering as he walked away a few steps and put a gun down on the counter. When he’d picked that up, I had no idea.

  He disappeared behind the bar for a second, and I listened to the clicking of a safe being opened as well as my own breathing. I was alive! I was really alive.

  I sucked in air, filling my lungs to capacity, feeling it all inside me. What a good feeling that was, I never bothered to appreciate it before, but I promised myself I would from now on.

  My cheeks puffed out as I let my breath go and a shiver ran down my spine, branching out to my limbs and extremities as it went down. Every touch of my fingers on my skin as I wrung my hands, or brush of my clothes against my body, sent a symphony of pins and needles rippling around.

  Jace stood up and set another gun down beside the first one, then a clip of bullets, before kicking the door of the safe shut. He didn’t look terrified, he didn’t look confused. He looked like a man with a plan. And a truly royal shade of angry.

  I had no idea how he could look more in control now, when unknown assailants had just unloaded heavy machine gun fire in our direction, than he had when he was in his element growing his corporate empire. He was like a solid rock in the middle of the perfect storm, and I did my best to latch on to his strength, his indomitable power.

  Jace stalked over to me and reached down, pulling me to my feet with both hands on the sides of my head. I froze under the intensity of his gaze, quivering muscles or not.

  “You hurt? Is there even a scratch on you?” he asked.

  “I… I don’t think so-”

  Jace pulled even harder and I went up on the tips of my toes as he leaned down and kissed me as forcefully as he ever had. I curled my hands around his bulging biceps and kissed him back, my exhilaration at being alive only magnified by his touch, his closeness.

  I reached out with both hands and stroked his thick cock along his inner thigh, feeling it slowly hardening under my fingers inside his pants. He was taking my breath away with his kiss, and every beat of my heart made me feel the need to have him inside me even more.

  Jace’s blood might be pumping for a different reason than mine, but it seemed like we ended up needing the same thing. I needed the affirmation of life, to feel those heights of ecstasy that only he could give me, Jace needed to unleash his raw energy, all that alpha male power, and I was the best thing he’d ever found to do that.

  His hands moved from the sides of my head, down my back, and gripped my ass tight as he crushed me against him and that hardening evidence of his arousal pressed along the side of my stomach and hip. I let my hands roam over him, feeling those muscles bunch and release under his shirt, letting their strength assure me of my safety.

  Grinding his hips against me, making that cock of his drive me wild in the process, he broke off our kiss t
o growl a wordless vocalization of his need. He was aching to get inside me as much as I was desperate to let him.

  He looked at the dining table and leaned over in that direction, backhanding a vase of flowers the housekeeper must have left and sending it at least seven feet before it smashed on the ground. Turning back to me, he regained his grip on my ass and lifted me in the air before spinning a quarter-turn on his heel and putting me on the edge of the table.

  One hand curled around the back of my neck, under my hair, holding me firm as the other went up my skirt. Forcing my panties aside, Jace stroked my bare pussy until his finger was slick with my juices and he slid it inside me.

  I moaned and my tightness squeezed him as he thrust that finger in and out of me, coating himself even more with my slippery nectar until it was moving freely no matter how tight I gripped at it. Jace kissed me again, still holding me by the neck, and began to move his finger in a “come here” gesture, rubbing against the front wall of my pussy, making me whimper and buck my hips.

  Trembling, I fumbled at his zip before managing to pull it down and reaching inside. The warmth of his body enveloped my hand as I worked my way into his boxers and grabbed that throbbing shaft.

  As soon as I touched it, a jolt of pleasure from inside me where Jace was rubbing made me close my eyes and moan. Matters of life and death seemed to melt away and I gladly let the terror seep out of my body. Now Jace’s cock was life and death. It, him, me and pleasure were all that mattered.

  There was no way his manhood was fitting out though the zip, long thick and hard as it was, so I reluctantly let it go after only a few strokes to undo his button. Jace was thrusting his finger in and out of my pussy with a steady rhythm, stroking some sensitive spot in my tight wetness with purpose.

  The hard-fucking businessman made my whole body twitch and my abdominal muscles sporadically clench with his expert touch. I, in turn, was almost screaming in frustration at how long it was taking me to get back in contact with that mind-bending cock of his.