Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto

by Contemporary Romance

  She tugged hard, gripped tight, loving how her body’s lubrication clung to his hot flesh, giving her what she needed to pump him up to his previous rock-hard state.

  He leaned his head back, his dark eyes rolling back as she plied her attention, kissing the sweet path across his chin, marked by a scar he’d had since his return from prison. She smoothed her tongue over his thin moustache, writhing at the thought of that line of hair prickling her skin.

  When she finally had him gasping, she slid her body onto his. He grabbed her ass, squeezing sweet bruises into her flesh that she’d cherish until they faded. He injected her with more than just heat and passion and come—he made her feel powerful. In control. As if screaming his name in ecstasy gave her the strength to take over the whole world. Or at least, her little piece of it.

  He lifted his hips, timing his thrusts to her measured drops, her fingers digging into leather of the backseat, the glass on the rear window steamed with the fog of their panting breaths. He plied his teeth and tongue to her breasts until her nipples were raw and electric, sending searing beams of fire down to her clit, which vibrated with the fullness of Frankie’s sex in hers. When she thought she could take no more, he slipped his hand between their slick bodies and touched off a series of spasmodic orgasms that piggy-backed on top of each other until she could no longer pull breath into her lungs.

  But it didn’t matter because he kissed her, giving her the only air she needed—his.

  The momentary absence of oxygen caused a pounding in her head. Or else, it was someone knocking on the clouded windshield.

  “Get a room!” the faceless person yelled before dashing away.

  Frankie moved as if to retrieve his weapon, but Marisela stopped him, laughing.

  “The maricón’s just jealous,” she said.

  “Or has a death wish.”

  She moved off him, fumbling in the dark and steam for her clothes. Needing fresh air, she cracked open a window. As it rushed in, a field of gooseflesh rippled over her hot, naked skin.

  “Crap!” she said, rushing to maneuver her twisted bra around her unbound breasts so she could pull on her shirt.

  Frankie chuckled. “I guess while it was getting hot in here, it was getting cold outside.”

  “Damn front,” she said, shivering as she worked her legs into her panties and then stomped her feet into her jeans.

  “It’ll feel more like Christmas,” Frankie argued.

  “When Belinda’s back, it’ll feel like Christmas.”

  “Bet you never thought you’d say that,” he pointed out.

  She didn’t respond, but he was right. Belinda had been a part of so few family holidays, even when she did live with the family. She wasn’t a fan of crowds, particularly loud, Cuban crowds of people who drank a little too much sangria and who raised their voices while speaking nonsense in two languages.

  “Think he’s got the phone by now?” she wondered, pulling out the burn phone where she’d stored Rick’s number.

  “I think I kept you distracted long enough.”

  He was going to be interminably proud of himself for a while, but Marisela couldn’t blame him. He’d rocked her world, yet again, at a time when she’d desperately needed the distraction.

  But now, she was re-energized. She dialed the number while Frankie finished suiting up in the backseat.

  She had to call three times before someone finally answered.

  “‘ello?”

  Groggy and weak. Had to be him.

  “Rick Suzuki?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m going to hurt your baby,” she lied.

  “What?”

  She could practically hear the adrenaline pumping through his blood from the other end of the line.

  “Your baby. You’re never going to see the brat again unless you do everything I say.”

  “You don’t have her,” he said, but his voice shook. He was afraid, meaning more than Marisela wanted to contemplate.

  “How do you know?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Someone who can get into your hospital room and hold a pillow down over your face without anyone catching me.”

  “Then why aren’t you?”

  Marisela’s heart accelerated. She didn’t like the sounds of fear and defeat lingering around his words. Had his part in the kidnapping been his choice or had he been coerced himself?

  “Because you’re worth more to me alive than dead. Look, I don’t give a damn about your bastard kid,” she said, forcing herself not to stumble over the cruel words. She needed him to believe she was capable of anything if she was going to convince him to do what she said. “But I do care about Belinda. I will find her at some point. You know I will. But if you want to ever see your child, I suggest you find a way to get out of that hospital room and to the south parking lot without anyone following you, understand?”

  He ended the call. Marisela had no idea how he was going to pull off an escape, but she had faith that he would. He had, after all, taken her sister out from under her—an act he would pay for as soon as he took her where she needed to go.

  Fourteen

  They didn’t have to wait long. Less than ten minutes later, they caught sight of a shoeless man in dark pants and a hospital gown slide out of a low-lit employee exit. Marisela watched for any added police activity, but seeing none, she slapped the seat and said, “Go!”

  Frankie hit the accelerator of his idling car and shot across the parking lot. Marisela threw open the back door and shouted, “Get in!”

  Rick complied the best he could, hobbling weakly and tumbling into the back seat. He was sweaty and breathless. “Drive,” he said.

  They took off just as a pair of policemen darted out of the same door he’d come from.

  Frankie took a sharp and sped away.

  Marisela grabbed Rick beneath his arms and pulled him into a sitting position. Then she pressed her fist hard into the precise part of his shoulder muscle where she’d shot him only hours before.

  His scream filled the car and she didn’t care. He needed to know she meant business.

  “Why’d you take my sister?”

  “She wouldn’t talk to me,” he said, panting as she released the pressure.

  “Did you rape her?”

  “Rape? What? No! Is that what she told you?”

  She pushed on his wound again, cruelly enjoying the sight of tears springing from his eyes. “She didn’t have a chance to tell me anything. You took her and nearly killed my best friend. Not to mention blowing up my car.”

  He screamed until Frankie’s bark of, “Marisela,” forced her to end her torture. She supposed it wasn’t easy driving with a grown man begging for his life in the back seat.

  “Where is she?”

  “A warehouse. Downtown. Owned by cousins.”

  “Where?”

  In between sobs and gasps, he gave Frankie the address. He turned the car around and headed in the right direction.

  She had the information they needed. She should order Frankie to slow down and toss the son of a bitch out of the moving car. But she couldn’t. Hate him as she did, he was still the father of her niece or nephew. And he had stopped the assault long enough to retrieve Belinda’s vitamins. The fact that he’d complied with her demands that he leave the hospital instead of reporting her to the police won him the right to live—for now.

  “How’d you get out of your room?”

  “I ran,” he said.

  “You just ran?” she questioned, wide-eyed.

  “I took a chance. I’ve always been fast. The cops were caught off guard.”

  She found this impossible to believe, but the end result was undeniable.

  “How did you know where to go?”

  “I studied the fire escape routes posted in every room. I never meant for things to go the way they did. I just wanted to talk to her, convince her that we should keep the baby. I left it to Hiro, my cousin. He said he’d take care of everyt
hing.”

  “Why Hiro? What’s his business?”

  Rick hesitated. Marisela saw a flash of something in his midnight pupils—something that was a combination of fear and regret. He was afraid of Hiro and sorry he’d dragged him into his life. Into Belinda’s life.

  She moved to grind her fist into his shoulder again, but he grabbed her wrist.

  “Hiro is Yakuza.”

  Before Marisela could ask what the fuck a “yakuza” was, Frankie had veered off the side of the road, slammed on the brakes and spun around, his weapon drawn and pointed at Rick’s sweaty forehead.

  “From where?” he demanded.

  Rick’s eyes widened, but his answer was calm. “He was yakuzu in Kyoto, but he was born in San Francisco. I was visiting my family there for the holidays. I tried to get in touch with Belinda and found out she’d left England. She wouldn’t come with me to California. Said she was too pregnant to travel, but it was my great-uncle’s one-hundredth birthday. I had to go. She promised that we’d make a decision about the baby when I got back, but then I found out she left for Florida and I knew that she was going through with her plan.”

  Frankie hadn’t moved the gun, but his brain was elsewhere, weighing some important information he hadn’t yet shared. Marisela, however, cared more about what was so important about Rick’s cousin’s affiliation.

  “What’s a yakuza?” she asked Frankie.

  “Japanese mob,” he replied. “Make the cosa nostra look like choir boys.”

  Marisela frowned. According to Lia, whose family had no Italian mob ties except for a brief brush with legendary Tampa mobster Santo Trafficante, who once loaned money to Lia’s great-grandmother so that she could bail her no-good brother out of a New York jail, most of the cosa nostra were choir boys. When they weren’t running drugs, propping up prostitution rings or plotting assassinations of their enemies. But by corporate dictate, Titan did not get involved in cases that skirted anywhere near organized crime. Her knowledge of it started and stopped with watching The Godfather, and she’d fallen asleep about half-way through.

  “So this is bad,” Marisela said.

  Frankie groaned. “Sí, vidita, this is very bad.”

  “No,” Rick insisted. “Hiro is family. His ties with the yakuza are strained. He was sent home for messing up, I don’t know, some operation. He was young and foolish, but he said he could help me get to Belinda, after I told him about you.”

  Marisela tried not to enjoy the thrill that came with learning that her sister had talked about her to Rick, even if she’d described her as a thug who needed to be confronted by someone with insider knowledge of Japanese bad-asses.

  Up until now, she’d figured that Belinda never thought about her at all. She never expected her sister to feel any particular emotions, not embarrassment or love or even pride. And maybe she didn’t, but it was nice to imagine that she’d described Marisela as a formidable protector so that Rick had reached out to a low-life cousin in order to pull off a successful kidnapping.

  “So Hiro planned the whole operation?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Rick replied. “I thought it was too much, but he was, I don’t know, excited. I didn’t care as long as I could convince Belinda not to give the baby away. She was adamant about it. She wouldn’t listen. It’s my baby, too, and…”

  At this, Marisela gave him one parting shot in the shoulder, leaving him to writhe and moan in pain while she leaned forward to talk to Frankie.

  “What did you do that for?” he asked.

  “If my sister says his opinion doesn’t count in what she does with her baby, then it doesn’t count. Stupid pendejo gets his rocks off without using protection and then whines like the baby he made if he doesn’t get to tell her what she can or cannot do with her body? Fuck that. Let him bleed.”

  Frankie swallowed deeply. “We didn’t use protection a half hour ago,” he pointed out.

  She patted his cheek. “I’m on the pill, maricon. Think I’m going to leave that shit up to you?”

  Frankie wisely let the topic drop. He and Marisela had had this conversation before—a hell of a long time ago. He clearly knew better than to touch the topic again.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked. “If this guy’s yakuza, he has powerful friends.”

  “He’s disgraced Yakuzu, kicked out for fucking up. He wasn’t even important enough to kill for whatever he did wrong. He’s an amateur.”

  “An amateur who got the best of you,” he reminded her.

  She narrowed her gaze and without encountering a moment’s resistance, disarmed him and had the gun, for a split-second, shoved under his chin.

  “That’s only because he caught me by surprise,” she said, flipping the gun to return it to him, handle first. “That won’t happen again.”

  Marisela didn’t need Frankie’s weapon to compel Rick to stop groaning long enough to give them directions to the warehouse where they’d stashed Belinda just on the edge of downtown. He confessed that the plan had been to drive her back to his family in San Francisco, but roadblocks and his gunshot wound kept them from moving her out of the city. Instead, they’d tried to find a doctor who would treat the injury on the down-low, but they couldn’t find anyone they could trust. Belinda had agreed to be cooperative if his cousins took him to the hospital.

  Interestingly, she’d insisted on St. Joseph’s, rather that Tampa General, which was closer to their hide-out.

  Marisela grinned, impressed with her sister’s ingenuity. Despite Marisela’s aversions to the place since her injury, it was the neighborhood’s go-to medical facility and the most likely place that Marisela would look for the man she’d injured. Belinda had either acted on her strong connection to familiar things or she’d been sending her one-time lover straight into her sister’s hands.

  Either way, she had to give Belinda credit. The girl might be a stone-cold ice-queen most of the time, but she was damned smart.

  She turned to Rick. “You had to know the cops were going to question you about the gunshot and the explosion.”

  “I was supposed to get treated, then wait for Hiro and his brother, Makoto, to break me out. That’s why I made sure to stash my cell somewhere the police wouldn’t find it once I got to a room. Then you called. Now, I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  Marisela pulled out her phone. “Call them. Tell them you saw an opportunity to get out and you took it. Tell them to do nothing but to wait until you get back.”

  He nodded, but after struggling with the arm Marisela had rendered useless through her coercion, he rattled the number off and she dialed and pressed the button for the speakerphone. The call rang through, but no one picked up.

  “That was Hiro’s number,” he said. “Let’s try Makoto.”

  The second attempt was no more successful. This time, they got a message that the number was no longer in service.

  Marisela grabbed him by the throat, the heat of his sweat against her palm icing at the chill racing through her. “If you’re lying—”

  “No!” he gasped. “I’m not. Just wanted. To talk. To her. This is a mistake. A mistake.”

  Luckily for Rick, they arrived at the warehouse before Marisela had a chance to work up more rage. She already had too much. Any more would make her sloppy. Dawn was breaking. The city was waking one storefront at a time, though lazily in this industrial part of town, thanks to the holiday.

  The warehouse parking lot remained deserted, though a supply house catty-corner to the building had a few trucks backing into dimly lit bays. Frankie chose a spot around the corner, then left Marisela in the car with Rick while he mined his trunk for weaponry. He handed her a heavy 9mm Glock and then a strip of black cloth, which she used to wrap around Rick’s mouth.

  “Can’t have you calling out a warning,” she explained as he moaned his protests. She took the extra precaution of binding his wrists with plastic ties, just in case. He was their only leverage in case his cousins, Hiro and Makoto, decided to put up a fig
ht. Marisela wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake, but Frankie advised that they try to keep this operation clean since neither one of them wanted to spend Christmas Eve in jail.

  “How are you going to explain to the cops about why your gun matches the bullet in his shoulder?” Frankie asked as they moved toward a back entrance, keeping tight to the building.

  “It was self-defense,” she said. “I’m sure Mr. Suzuki here will back me up, won’t you, Ricky?”

  He nodded, the sounds of his agreement lost in the material stuffed and tied around his mouth. He led them to a door hidden behind a Dumpster. Frankie worked the padlock like the pro he was and seconds later, they were swallowed by the darkness.

  They listened, but heard nothing at first except the scamper of rats and the flutter of wings that could belong to either bats or pigeons who had roosted in the rafters. But no one spoke. No one breathed. Even Rick stopped whimpering long enough for them to maneuver through the dusty crates and mildewed boxes piled high against grimy walls and blocked-out windows.

  Then they spotted a light shining from an office in the back. She shoved Ricky between a pair of old oil drums and with hand gestures and the kind of psychic connection she shared with no other man, proceeded to the room in total coordination and silence.

  But when they burst inside, the room was empty, if you didn’t count the dead guy on the floor.

  Fifteen

  Marisela checked the man’s pulse, not at all surprised to find the skin cold and the carotid artery motionless. From the gash on the back of the head and the bloody hammer a couple of feet away, she could figure out the how he died.

  The question was, why? And where the hell was her sister?

  She turned to ask Frankie to retrieve Rick, but he was already tossing the injured man into the room. He caught his fall with his good hand, which Frankie had released from the ties.

  “Hiro,” he said, sliding across the floor, missing the blood by inches. “Is he—”

  “Dead?” Marisela supplied. “Yeah, and my sister isn’t where you promised she would be.” She pointed her weapon at Rick’s other shoulder. “Tell me again why I shouldn’t pump another hole in you?”