Every year like clockwork, she’d check in with their parents before she went to midnight mass. With the six-hour time difference, Marisela had until five-thirty this afternoon to recover her sister without causing a family panic.
Max drove them to a home in Town and Country, a neighborhood west of the airport, where Marisela had established a safe house. She hadn’t known that Max knew where it was—but then again, it was his job to know everything. While he showered and changed into spare clothes, Marisela cleaned Rick’s wound and left him to sleep on the couch, gravitating to the kitchen, where Frankie was boiling pasta and warming up sauce from a jar.
“Look at you, Chef Boyardee,” she quipped, watching her manly ex-boyfriend stir the bottom of a pot bubbling with red, garlicky deliciousness. Her stomach growled. Since she knew the pantry held nothing but protein bars and various boxed and canned foods that she’d stocked there over two months ago, she snagged a piece of al dente spaghetti from the pot, wanting something warm and comforting and familiar.
“Hey!” Frankie objected, grabbing for the tongs, but she managed to keep them away, even after he pinned her against the grimy kitchen counter.
“This place is a dump,” she said, trying to ignore the scent of Frankie’s skin, which was infinitely more delicious than that of the pasta and sauce, despite the fact that she was starving.
“You picked it out, vidita,” he reminded her.
“I never thought I’d have to use it,” she countered.
“Didn’t you?”
She pushed out of his hold, unable to concentrate while his tight body was pressed so intimately against hers. “No. I mean, I was glad when Titan gave me the office, but I never expected any dangerous cases. The way I figured it, when something exciting came along, I’d be jetting off to New York or Miami or LA. Tampa was supposed to be a layover with just enough busywork for me to earn my keep.”
He shook his head and chuckled. “You’re never going to get it, are you? Titan will never be what you expect, good or bad.”
Unable to find a colander in the scant supplies under the cupboards, she used the tongs to pull the strands of spaghetti from the boiling water and add them directly to the sauce as she’d been taught by Lia’s mother. A pound of pasta and store bought sauce wasn’t a feast, but for four hungry adults, one of whom was recovering from a serious medical injury, it would do.
“I didn’t expect Max to show up,” she said, popping open a pack of paper plates and plastic forks.
“Then why did you call him?”
Frankie’s voice snapped with more than just a question. He was challenging her and berating her all in the same breath. She understood that his contradictory feelings about Titan stemmed from how the organization had both saved him and nearly sacrificed him at various times through his history with them, but he’d never said a single bad thing about Max before. Frankie’s mistrust focused primarily on Ian Blake, the owner—for valid reasons Marisela would never contradict.
“Why wouldn’t I call Max? He’s good at his job.”
Frankie tugged her away from twirling the sauce-coated noodles onto the plates and stabbing forks into the center. With his hands tight on her hips, he forced her close. The heat from his skin and the fire in his eyes held her in thrall.
“You didn’t need him, vidita.”
“You mean I didn’t need anyone but you,” she said.
His frown deepened both his dimple and his scar. She’d hit her target. God, she loved him. She had since she was fourteen. If their spectacular teenage break-up hadn’t severed the hold he had on her heart, nothing ever would. But that didn’t mean she could see a future with him. She was only now spying a glimpse of a future for herself.
“We were doing fine on our own,” he said.
“We always do,” she conceded. “You and me, as a team, we’re hard to beat. But this is bigger than just us. This is about Belinda and a baby and now the damned Japanese mob. I would have loved to have busted this up on my own, too, but—”
Frankie kissed her on the forehead and pushed her away. “I got it.”
“No—” she said, but he pressed his fingers over her lips to stop her from speaking, which was a good thing because she had no idea what to say. He wanted her to be independent from Titan. She wanted to be independent from everyone, including him. But her quest for self-reliance didn’t give her the right to put her sister at risk.
“Am I interrupting an intimate moment?” Max asked.
Marisela curled out from beneath Frankie’s arms, snagged a plate of food and handed it to him. “With us? Always.”
His raised eyebrow neither approved nor disapproved. Marisela was certain he had an opinion; he simply chose not to share it, just like he wouldn’t tell them where he’d been when she’d gotten his call or why he’d been impersonating a panhandler.
“Did you find out anything useful from your FAA contact or were you just taking your time making yourself gorgeous?”
Max rubbed his face, trimmed neatly, but still furred with an overgrowth that didn’t quite fit on his face. “A private plane with a flight origin of Tokyo recently landed at a private airstrip not far from here.”
“Who owns the plane?” Frankie asked.
Max twirled the plastic fork in the pasta without splattering a single drop of tomato sauce onto his shirt. “A conglomerate of business interests that we’d waste time trying to untangle. Suffice it to say, this is the first flight of a private jet from Japan into Tampa in over six weeks. The last was an executive from Nippon Steel who came to take his children to Busch Gardens and Disney World. This one is cloaked in a bit too much mystery to be a vacationing family. It could be our guy.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” Frankie challenged.
“I can find out.”
Using the hallway wall for leverage, Rick had dragged himself into the room. As much as it pained her, Marisela swung a chair toward him and grabbed him some food, which he looked at queasily.
“How?” Frankie challenged.
He pushed the food away and balanced his head in the hand that wasn’t trussed up in a sling. “I’ll call him. I’ll make a deal. Trade myself for Belinda and the baby.”
“What if he doesn’t want you?” Marisela challenged.
“He will,” Rick promised. “I’ll make him want me. Or else, I’ll help you take him down.”
Seventeen
Rick’s suggestion that he contact his father bought them a couple of hours. Though the conversation had happened entirely in Japanese, Max verified that Rick offered his father an exchange—Belinda and the baby’s freedom for his loyalty to the family business. Rick had, after all, obtained highly sought-after skills as a student at Oxford, not to mention what he’d learned working at Pro-Tech.
And bottom line: he was his son. In the yakuza, family was everything.
According to Max, Rick played his father like a shamisen, some sort of stringed instrument that took a lot of skill. A baby was a nice consolation prize, but dad wasn’t getting any younger. Wouldn’t he be better off with full-grown son with crack hacker skills?
As Max had translated the conversation and commentary into Marisela’s ear, she measured the man who had fathered her niece or nephew. He wasn’t exactly Daniel Dae Kim or anything cool like that, but he wasn’t the wimp she’d first thought him to be. Though it had been a selfish, stupid, desperate idea, he had put together a relatively good kidnapping plan in a short period of time, using the resources he’d had available. He’d survived a bullet, escaped the police and endured her interrogation and the subsequent murder of his cousin. And yet, he’d stepped up to the plate, confronting the father he’d avoided his whole life and offering himself in return for a woman who didn’t want him and a baby he’d never know.
She hated to admit it, but Rick Suzuki was the kind of guy who she might not have minded having for a brother-in-law.
In another time. Or another place. With another sister, if she’d had one, s
ince Marisela was one-hundred percent certain that Belinda was through with him. Belinda wasn’t simply stubborn like Marisela; she was incapable of compromise. If she’d gone to the trouble of getting herself out of England in a bid to put the baby up for adoption before Rick could interfere, then she was finished. For good.
“What do we do next?” Marisela asked once Rick handed her back the untraceable cell phone and collapsed onto the couch, his good arm flung over his eyes.
“I sent Frankie to the back bedroom to get a couple hours of sleep,” Max said. “You should join him. And sleep. I’ll make a few calls…make sure that the kumicho has no choice but to leave Tampa on our time schedule, not his.”
Though she considered diverting to the room with the twin bed for her power nap, she wasn’t one to run from Frankie, so she quietly opened the door to the master. Max’s appearance had cut into their groove, but nothing as insignificant as Titan would ever really come between them. She entered without a sound, noting that while he’d engaged the computer monitors that kept tabs on the house’s front and back entrances before he’d climbed into bed, he’d pulled down the black-out shades and seemed to be sleeping like a rock.
She stripped off her clothes, leaving her weapon for last, which she put on the scuffed nightstand that had been left behind by the previous tenants. Lia had insisted on stocking the cupboard with clean sheets and though Frankie had done a piss-poor job of making the bed, the mattress felt like heaven under her bare skin and tired muscles. And despite Max’s directive, she slid in close to Frankie, folding one hand across the back of his shoulders. She maneuvered the other under his arm so that her hand rested over his heart.
“Max ordered us to sleep,” Frankie murmured.
“I thought you don’t take orders from Max anymore,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to his naked back. Unlike her, he’d only stripped down to the waist, but the feel of his chest hair beneath her palm was warm and inviting and irresistible.
He shifted, turning so that she was pinned underneath him. “I didn’t say I was following his order. I was just reminding you. In case you wanted to follow his orders.”
She twisted her hands between them, unsnapped his jeans and shoved them down, freeing the pulsing erection she knew she’d find there. She wrapped her hand around it, loving the feel of him in her palm, so hot and hard and thick.
“Since when do I ever want to follow orders?”
He covered her mouth with his, but that didn’t stop him from saying, “Never.”
Ordinarily, Marisela loved foreplay. She loved the way Frankie could spend hours sucking on her breasts or how he’d spread her legs over the sides of her mattress and take his time licking her pussy until she was wetter than a waterfall. But now, she only wanted him inside her. She moved the tip of his erection to her slick opening, then grabbed his hips and pushed him inside.
The tension was excruciating and yet, amazing. His flesh inside hers created a haven she’d never found anywhere else—and probably never would. She shifted and moved, coaxing her body to cream as her pleasure increased, stroke by stroke.
“Hold on, vidita,” he said, readjusting his arms and then thrusting into her deep and hard. “You don’t have to do all the work.”
She bit her lip as the sensations of his raw power overtook her. He was rough and perfect, withholding kisses and caresses, concentrating on nothing more than banging his cock into her concha and destroying the final wall between her barely-checked anxiety and delirious escape. Only when she was seconds from an orgasm did he fall forward, his mouth on hers, to swallow her intimate scream.
But he didn’t stop moving. He shoved and withdrew, shoved and withdrew, until her muffled orgasm spiked and ebbed and his body stiffened, shook and spilled.
Then, they slept.
* * *
Max woke them two hours before the appointed rendezvous time.
“Change in plans,” he barked, throwing open the door to the bedroom. “Air traffic control reported a call from our Japanese plane. They’ve requested a medical intervention.”
“A what?” Frankie asked.
“An ambulance,” Max clarified. “Or a doctor. They didn’t say which.”
“¡No me jodas!” Marisela jumped out of the bed, not giving a damn that she was naked. She scooped up her clothes and dashed into the bathroom. “Is it Belinda? Is she okay? The baby?”
Max had the good manners to look away as she passed. “No details. Just a request for a doctor.”
Frankie was shoving his feet into his boots when she flew back into the room, trying to remember where she’d kicked her own footwear.
Max handed them to her. “We don’t know that it’s Belinda, but on the off chance that it is, I advise we make some adjustments to our plan.”
“Rick still on board?” she asked.
Max rolled his eyes. “If I can get him to stop…fretting. He’s going to last two days in the yakuza. Three, but only because he’s the kumicho’s son.”
“He’s not my problem,” Marisela said, grabbing her weapon, “my sister is. And if something’s wrong with her or the baby, I swear to God, I’ll—”
She didn’t fill in the rest of the sentence. She didn’t have to, which was good, because she had no idea what she’d do.
But she knew what she was capable of—and for now, that was enough.
* * *
Turned out, stealing an ambulance wasn’t that hard. One roadblock, a couple of ski masks and a gun did the trick in less than five minutes once the medical vehicle had arrived at the private airport’s back entrance, as directed by the dispatcher Max had generously compensated to ensure her cooperation.
“Marisela only got this satellite office because I convinced Ian it would be cheap,” Max groused, tugging off the knit face covering as he came around the other side of the outbuilding where they’d secured the EMTs.
Frank finished buttoning up the shirt he’d appropriated from the real paramedic. “Nothing with Marisela is ever cheap other than her furniture and her taste in underwear.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Max advised.
Frankie laughed. “You think she’d deny it?”
Max didn’t reply. They concentrated on adapting the ambulance to their needs, in a sketchily thrown-together plan that Frank doubted was going to work. So many things could go wrong—things Marisela would regret for the rest of her life.
The yakuza were an unknown entity. From what Max had said, they were better armed, better prepared and likely more merciless than any of them would ever choose to be.
And yet, they were taking them on, just the three of them and Rick.
It was suicide.
But it was also family, so Frank figured they had no other choice.
He checked the time. Max’s cell phone must have vibrated because he pulled it out and answered.
“ETA, five minutes,” he replied, then hung up and said to Frank, “The dispatcher again. Marisela’d better hurry.”
“She’ll be here,” he said.
Marisela didn’t let them down. Driving Max’s car, she sped to a stop behind the ambulance and tumbled out of the driver’s seat, again wearing scrubs she’d pilfered from the hospital, along with the surgical hair net and a mask dangling around her neck. After she banged on the hood, the passenger door opened and a man dressed in nearly identical clothing got out, carrying a black, leather bag.
Marisela threw the keys to Max, opened the back door to the ambulance and ordered the guy to get in.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” the stranger objected.
“Shouldn’t you? What about that hypocritical oath?” Marisela challenged.
Frankie chuckled as the man, obviously a doctor, corrected her. “It’s Hippocratic Oath and that’s the only reason you got me to come this far.”
She arched a saucy brow. “Not because I threatened to tell your wife that you felt me up while I was on your exam table?”
He scowled, jabbing his f
inger as he said, “That never happened!”
“You know that. I know that,” Marisela assured. “But clearly, your wife won’t be so sure, will she? Look, doc, I do not want to make your life difficult. You’ve been nothing but straight up and cool with me. And I appreciate it. I promise to find a way to repay you that will not hurt your marriage. But my sister and her baby deserve to live, and not with a threat from the Japanese mob hanging over them. So get your ass in the ambulance and let’s do this.”
The guy hesitated only a split second more before letting lose a string of curses and doing as Marisela ordered. Frank got into the cab and fired up the engine, testing the earwig and microphone by counting off one-two-three.
Max replied, “Good luck.”
Frank engaged the sirens and drove purposefully into the area where the private plane had been parked. Armed only with small caliber weapons concealed carefully in their equipment and knowledge they’d gleaned from training in “battlefield” medical readiness, their plan was to go in, assess the situation and with any luck, get Belinda out before Max arrived, as scheduled, with Rick.
After parking the ambulance, Frank got out to unload the stretcher. He held up his hands and pretended surprise when a suited guy with tattoos coiling up his neck and across his bald head pulled out an AK-47 and pointed it in his direction.
“You a doctor?” he barked in Japanese-accented English.
“EMT,” Frank replied.
The man Marisela had hijacked to come along intervened, his hands similarly raised above his head as he jumped out of the back of the ambulance. “I’m the doctor. She’s a nurse. We were advised that someone here required emergency medical attention.”
The guard motioned for the doctor to come forward. Another similarly dressed and inked man scrambled down the plane’s stairs to pat the doctor down first, then Marisela. He gave a quick examination of their bags, then motioned them into the aircraft.
Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto Page 11
