Gisela might not have broken the law the way he did on a constant basis; instead she played with it and used laws to her advantage to get clients who were both guilty and innocent off on all crimes with which they were involved. It kept her in designer shoes and handbags, but it also kept her at a distance from his world, and for that, he was mildly content and relieved. It would kill a small part of him to know that he’d trapped her into a life she’d been trying to escape.
He stood and put on his cut. He knew what he had to do and the night before he had to kill someone, he had a ritual, which he never deviated. He needed to get fucked up and then fucked by a professional. Brianna’s subpar skills wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good.
“Off to Reno?” His father didn’t look up from a stack of papers he’d pulled out and were slowly going through.
“Yep. You know me.”
“Well, be careful, son, and try not to get into any trouble.”
Cillian smiled and it was one that would have dropped panties all over the world had there been any lucky women to see it. “You know me, Da. Trouble is me middle name.”
Chapter Two
Gisela
“Are you going out tonight?”
I looked up from the stack of files on my desk before I met Kyra’s blue eyes. “I don’t think so. I need to get some work done and I’m not really up to hanging out and getting hit on, know what I mean?”
Kyra shook her head. She had the most gorgeous auburn hair with burnished gold highlights, light freckles on her face, which she used cover-up to conceal, a patrician nose, slightly full lips and a tall, slender athletic build.
We were complete opposites in every way except we were both considered beautiful women.
I was barely 5’4” although I wore heels to make up for my short stature. I knew my olive skin with a hint of caramel was perfect and without a blemish. My long, naturally curly yet silky dark hair took quite the beating between flat irons and wearing it in a chignon or a French Roll when I was in professional mode.
I had my father’s amber eyes but the rest of my face belonged to my exquisite mother and her strong, Teutonic genes. A face that was feminine but precisely perfect in proportion in terms of my features. I didn’t inherit any of her height but I did have her figure with the exception of 32-C breasts, which were the result of an overly zealous boyfriend during my high school years who did nothing but caress and feel on them every chance he received.
Ugh, don’t think about Cillian now…that’s a road you don’t wanna go down, I chastised myself before I looked up to see Kyra staring at me quizzically.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
I sipped from a glass San Pellegrino and smiled. “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“We have a couple of paralegals to sort through all that shit, you know. Why did you ask for all those old case files anyway?”
I shrugged nonchalantly. “It keeps me on my toes. Besides, I haven’t had one case go to court that I haven’t plead out before it went to trial.”
“And that is a bad thing why?” Kyra sat in front of my desk in one of the two outrageously expensive office chairs we had for clients.
Jackson and Hughes was a classy law firm worthy of L.A. or New York yet we worked in Lake Tahoe, which was considered upscale and neutral territory for all the criminal elements of Northern Nevada. The whole office was decked out in classic law chic with a beautiful reception area and our offices, side by side, were understated yet elegant. Designed by my mother who’d studied to be an architect, she settled for interior design after she married my father because it was far less taxing and she could do it with her eyes closed.
She’d designed our home before she worked closely with her sister, who actually studied interior design, to outfit the place. Although my parents spent a great deal of their time in Reno and Las Vegas, they also had homes in Pine Bluff, Southampton, Lake Tahoe when they were entertaining elite friends, Los Angeles and a gorgeous penthouse on the upper Eastside of Manhattan.
“It’s not a bad thing but…would it be wrong to say I wish I had gone to court? I mean I would like to prove my skills as an attorney and let my parents know they didn’t waste over two hundred grand on my education at Stanford and law school at Harvard.” I touched a few wisps of hair, which had managed to escape my perfect chignon.
“Of course they didn’t waste their money. You have kept some of the most influential people—and the wayward youth they call their children—out of jail.” Kyra searched through her black leather Birkin, her pride and joy she’d spent three years on the waiting list to purchase, and opened her cigarette case.
She knew how much I hated the smell of cigarette smoke—even if I did indulge in that and marijuana—from time to time. However, so many of our clients smoked, we allowed them to due to the industrial strength air conditioning unit we had installed. It was the same manufacturer most of the casinos used and actually sucked the cigarette smoke into the vents before supplying clean, filtered air.
The law firm always smelled fresh and clean but that still didn’t mean I wanted her smoking in my office. I always smoked outside, whether it was a cigarette or a joint.
Kyra lit up and I supplied her with a clean ashtray I kept in one of my many desk drawers.
“Don’t you think it’s time to have fun and live a little? Our fathers, being who they are, they don’t define us. Isn’t that what we’ve always said?”
“Yes, you’re right of course.” I smiled and pretended for the sake of conversation that was true.
If my father, Raymond Jackson, was the original gangster with his expensive Italian and French suits, not a hair out of place and youth personified then her father was the opposite. Tom “Jonesy” Hughes was the head of an MC with a beautiful, cultured daughter who’d attended and graduated the same schools I did. The fact that we’d grown up in Northern Nevada and went to the same elite private school cemented our friendship. We’d known each other since we were five. Our fathers’ were business partners after all and we were well aware they skirted the rules of the law, but in most cases, outright broke them.
I knew my father had murdered associates, friends and even some of our own family members. His beginnings were humble, the son of a sharecropper and his half-Choctaw wife, who were both from some shithole, redneck town in Mississippi.
They’d come to Nevada hoping for a better life. All the move really earned my grandparents was an early death for my grandfather due to cardiomyopathy. My grandmother lost her eyesight and half her right leg due to diabetes before succumbing to death several years after my grandfather.
My father learned early that he wouldn’t be able to play by the rules and get ahead. He was from the original school of hard knocks but he’d still polished himself and became an elite, though not so legitimate, businessman. He was an avid reader who’d educated himself about the finer things in life, and knew more about art, culture and history than most blue-bloods usually received at a prestigious university.
He soon became good friends with Angelo Abandonato, and their friendship blossomed more into a quasi-family than mere business associates. Mr. Abandonato was still a family friend to my father and since he belonged to one of the most powerful mafia families in Nevada, they formed a partnership that was unbelievable, at least to most of the outside world.
My father built casinos with the Abandonato family and he also branched out into the lucrative brothel trade. My father owned five brothels and supplied women to all the top hotels in Reno. His new mission was expansion and he had his eye on Vegas. Of course he had the perfect way in: my mother.
Ingrid Krieger-Jackson was a force to be reckoned with but she also came from an elite German family, and she had three very wealthy and powerful cousins. She was first cousin to Rory and Severin Krieger. She also had helped her sister design Vogue Hotel, Casino and Spa, Rory’s multi-billion dollar hotel that reaped him rewards year after year.
He wanted to start
providing women to big spenders and he’d come to his cousin—my mother—first. My father, Rory, Severin and Karl Schmidt had already met numerous times, and the deal was already set into motion. By the beginning of 2014, there would be high class escorts working under both the umbrella of my father and the Krieger family at Vogue Hotel and Casino.
“Earth to Gisela…goddamn, I hate when you go off on your own little private trips. Are you listening to me at all?” Kyra stood and continued to drag from her cigarette before a trail of smoke was left in her wake.
“Yeah, I’m listening…what did you say?”
She stopped pacing and glared at me. “I knew you weren’t listening!” She pointed her two fingers that clasped her cigarette in my direction. “Ugh! Anyway, I said, Evan wanted me to pass a message on to you. He really enjoyed the date you two had and wants to see you again.”
Against my better judgment—my hot-shit Stanford and Harvard education be damned—I was laying down with dogs because I couldn’t help loving the flea bites. It was either that or some Mafioso my father tried to set me up with because I would never get a classy man; my parents needed me to stay grounded into this life if I was to survive.
My brother Drake, regardless of his indiscretion of stringing Maeve “Misty” Cox along and knocking her up, was now engaged to a beautiful German socialite. Meanwhile, I was stuck with the criminal element because it’s all I truly knew from the inside out.
My dad liked Evan, he was available, though a consummate ladies’ man, and VP of the Demon’s Bastards. The fact that I’d already had a forbidden, hot and heavy relationship with Cillian from the Lucifer’s Saints when we were teenagers didn’t seem to bother anyone but me.
Fuck, I could play it cool all I wanted but I was still in love with the fucking guy.
I knew how much he hurt me, and I also knew he was married—though that was on the rocks—and had two kids. However, none of that meant a damn thing to me because I would always be the mother of his first child. A child neither of us knew except that he was being raised as a Cox and bore no resemblance to me but plenty to all the European blood flowing through his veins. All he had was my dark hair but he possessed his father’s arresting crystal blue eyes. Eyes I had gotten lost in more times than I could count.
Evan was a great guy, sexy as hell with his ginger brown hair and trademark blue eyes all the Hughes children had thanks to their stellar parentage, but he wasn’t Cillian.
Cillian, who looked like he walked off the set of a Calvin Klein underwear photo shoot. He was model perfect, tall, lean and a body built for sin.
So far, his tats were limited to arm sleeves and the Lucifer’s Saints symbol on his back. His chest was still perfect and free of the ink I so despised but it didn’t stop me from getting branded by him when I was only fifteen. A tramp stamp that merely said “Cillian’s Property” in fancy cursive. I’d always meant to get it removed or maybe even turned into something else but the fact was I didn’t want to change anything about it. It reminded me of the good times we had together and no one could take them away.
Much to my dismay, I ended up at Kyra’s place. Neither of us wanted to be near Pine Bluff, Birch Tree or Black Oak therefore we both owned condos in a high tech building in Lake Tahoe. The views were brilliant and we were on the same floor one below the penthouse condos, of which there were only four.
At least if I drank too much, I only had to wander down to my own condo and despite our ages and professions, we both could put away a serious amount of booze.
I stuck to an outrageously expensive bottle of Pinot Noir while she opted for Macallan 30, a very strong and gracefully aged scotch that would have you on your ass before you could say “hello.”
“So, is it on for this Friday night?” Kyra rattled her crystal glass, which only contained ice and the remnants of a scotch and soda. “Evan can have any woman he likes, you know. You should be flattered he’s paying this much attention to you.”
“I don’t know what would be worse.” I sipped from my red wine and clutched the stem with both hands. “I don’t want to be anyone’s old lady, Kyra. I don’t want to be part of some mafia family either. I’m not ready to move on. Not yet.”
She sat up and lit her tenth cigarette for the day. “Then when will you be ready? Christ, Gisela, get over it! Relationships end and you made an awful mistake when you were a teenager but what is your great plan? Will you punish yourself forever and never allow yourself to feel a shred of happiness? Do you honestly think a selfish, sociopathic prick like Cillian thinks about you? Do you think he has any sleepless nights with that fuckin’ skank he chose over you?”
I didn’t know what to say to that comment because it cut too deep and I felt like I’d been wounded by a knife. “I honestly don’t know.” I could barely get the words out and there I was, tears streaming down my face like that lost sixteen year old girl again.
I was twenty-nine fucking years old. When did I plan to move on from my turbulent past? I hated how much that man could affect me, even now.
And yes, I wondered whether he thought about me at all or was I nothing but a memory? Someone he thought about occasionally or maybe not at all. That hurt if it was the truth because I could never stop thinking about him and I hated him with a burning passion. I hated how he took my girlhood away from me and I despised how he left me.
There was one thing to be said about Cillian Cox: he didn’t arouse feelings of apathy in anyone he met. They either loved or hated him. There was absolutely no middle ground with him and once I’d loved him so much, I would have given the very air from my body to allow him to breathe. Now, he wasn’t worth the effort of pissing on if he was set on fire.
“Well,” Kyra exclaimed in an elated voice as she stood, walked over to her private bar and made herself another drink, “I’m going to set up that date for you with my brother. You’re going to go out and be free and happy. You’re gonna live a little and stop concentrating on work for at least five minutes.”
“Jesus, you’re incorrigible and a younger carbon copy of my mother. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a twenty-nine-year-old single woman. I’m not interested in a man right now and I certainly don’t want one I have to constantly look over my shoulder while we’re together.” I finished my Pinot Noir and set the empty wine glass on her coffee table.
“I don’t understand you at all. You’ve lived around crime your whole life and now, no one in our circle is good enough for you? If you feel that strongly about how we live, and why our way of life is so wrong, why didn’t you become a prosecutor?”
“Because life isn’t black and white but various shades of gray and I didn’t want to prosecute criminals when the really big ones are all in Washington, D.C.” I stood and the wine hit me immediately.
I’d drank way too much and would have a hangover from hell come tomorrow morning. Fortunately, my bed was calling me in the worst way and I was beyond exhausted.
Thank God tomorrow was Friday, I thought casually. At least I would have a whole weekend of working out followed by take-out and the latest releases on DVD waiting for me to devour.
That, to me, was my idea of a good time. Not going out on a date with a biker when I knew what the culture was like and I would never make a good old lady. I was too mouthy and much too bossy. I liked to be in control and that lifestyle didn’t fit the image I’d worked so hard to cultivate in the various social circles of Northern Nevada.
I was never meant to ride on the back of a Harley with the wind whipping through my hair and my arms wrapped around a man as I held on for dear life. The feeling of excitement mixed with the danger of all that power between our legs a pure rush of adrenaline straight to the brain.
I’d been there, done that and owned the motherfuckin’ tee shirt.
Never again.
Those days were behind me and as dead as the relationship I’d had with Cillian Cox. Like him, they were a flash of a long-ago buried memory. A time so innocent and pure when n
either of us knew anything about life. We were blissfully and ignorantly unaware that our actions would have consequences.
I couldn’t go back—ever.
Unfortunately for Kyra, she would have to find another woman for Evan because I’d taken myself off the market permanently. I had absolutely no intention of ever turning back.
Regret wasn’t in my vocabulary and I constantly strived to look forward in life because there was no rewind or re-set button. Thinking about the past was a waste of time, and didn’t do a damn a bit of good for anyone.
I was Raymond Jackson’s daughter, and if he’d taught me anything, he’d instilled a steel-spine and strength in me most women didn’t have. I was strong enough and had enough gumption to withstand the worst life offered me, come back for seconds, and still, I’d weathered the storm.
“Are you heading home?” Kyra sipped from her scotch and soda before she glanced at me with face filled worry and concern.
“Yes…and please stop looking at me like that. I’m not a total nun. I have a regular bootie call when I need to get off and really, I prefer it that way. No love, no complications—just sex.”
“Yeah, Cillian is a regular fuckin’ Romeo. He’s ruined my best friend for life and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m mad enough to stalk him down and cut his dick off.”
We both laughed out loud at this statement. “Listen, I told you I would be fine so stop worrying about me. See you tomorrow at work.”
“See ya,” Kyra sing-songed as I reached her door, opened it and closed it behind me. I didn’t leave until I heard her slide the bolt lock and walked through the carpeted hallway. I lived just down the hall, cater-corner to Chiara Bassi, one of the only other people besides Kyra I would consider a friend. She was three years younger than me and worked for my father.
It was my bad luck I dropped my keys after I fumbled them out of my designer hobo bag and knelt down to pick them up. Chiara’s door opened and she wore a black silk robe that clearly outlined her naked body beneath it. She pressed her lips against a man’s lips and I knew exactly who he was from the way his silky brown hair fell and the tattoos on both his arms.
A Ride or Die Kind of Love Page 21
