by Bethany-Kris
She didn’t need to hear his voice to know what he was saying.
You want that?
You like that?
Gonna come for me?
Fuck.
“Right there,” Lucia mumbled.
That fear he might pull away when she hit the plateau was pointless, it seemed. The second that orgasm started to rush through her body—it came on fast and hard—he stayed right there. Never letting up his pace, or how hard his fingers curled against her G-spot with every thrust. His tongue came a beat faster, and then he was sucking on her clit when she let out a shout of his name.
She’d never came harder.
Never appreciated an orgasm more.
And she wanted another the second it was gone.
Renzo kissed a path up her stomach, and only slowed when his wet lips pressed against hers. There was something dangerous and addicting about tasting her own sex on his mouth. Like she could suck the taste of her right off the tip of his tongue, and still wouldn’t be able to get enough.
Did she taste better on him, or right from the source?
“My turn,” he grunted against her lips.
In a breath, he had her lifted onto the counter, and her thighs spread open wide enough to make her muscles ache. She already had her fingers wrapped around the length of his erection. He couldn’t even be bothered to wait long enough to push his boxer-briefs down a little bit more before he was letting her guide him to her pussy.
Fuck, she was wet.
So wet, he just glided right in. The clenching of her inner muscles had him tensing, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t even give her a chance to breathe or adjust to his size before he was shoving her back against the vanity mirror, his hand found her jaw, and he was pounding into her. She felt the cheap counter and thin vanity mirror shudder from the impact, but it was all secondary to the way his cock felt driving into her over and over.
“Fucking watch,” he demanded.
It was the tug of his hand against her jaw that made her look down. Jesus. It was a beautiful sight, she thought. The length of his cock splitting her open, and slipping out of her soaked in her juices. The way his heartbeat showed in the length of his cock, and the tension pulling every single one of his muscles taut as he slowed just enough to give her a better show while he fucked her.
“Wanna do it again?” he asked.
Lucia’s gaze jumped up to meet his, and she dragged in a ragged breath. Her voice felt oh, so faint as she asked, “Do what again?”
“Edge you, baby.” Renzo grinned. “Only this time, I’ll be fucking you. See how long I can take it.”
Lucia laughed, breathless and high. “Fuck yeah.”
• • •
“Do you think maybe Tuck changed his mind?” Lucia asked as a knock echoed on the hotel door.
Renzo gave a bitter chuckle as he headed for the door to answer it. “Not likely. Something else has caught his attention for the moment, that’s all. Or he’s just being an ass and making me wait because he thinks it’s funny.”
Yeah, well … Lucia was liking Tucker less and less. The more Renzo told her about the guy, the less she liked about him when it came right down to it. She didn’t tell Renzo that because she didn’t want him to having yet another thing to worry about, but she was thinking it. That was enough for her.
Before she could ask something else, Renzo pulled open the door to reveal the pizza delivery man waiting on the other side with a bright red bag in his hands. It was just their luck that at the same time Renzo was pulling out money to pay the guy, the phone on the table started to ring.
Renzo’s phone.
“Shit, maybe that’s Tuck,” Renzo said over his shoulder, offering nothing else because the delivery man was still standing right there. Diego, on the other hand, was practically trying to climb up his brother’s back because the pizza was here, and he’d been asking about it all morning leading into the afternoon. They’d finally broken down and agreed to order him one—clearly. “Answer it, Lucia. Just tell him I’ll be a second.”
Lucia plucked up the phone, and without even checking the caller ID as she didn’t know Tuck’s number, picked up the call, saying, “Hello?”
For a second, silence answered Lucia back on the other end of the call. It only lasted long enough for her to hear someone let out a heavy breath. An exhale that echoed with relief. Lucia blinked, and glanced over in Renzo’s direction, but he wasn’t paying her any mind. He was too busy handing over the cash for the pizza, and trying to keep a very active Diego out of the way while he did it.
“Just a second, now,” he said to his brother. “The pizza’s gonna taste the same in two minutes, Diego, damn.”
Lucia went back to the call, but there was still a silence on the other end. She pulled the phone away to look at the screen just to check and see if someone had hung up on her, but no. The call was still connected. The stranger part? The caller ID showed Rose Zulla. Renzo had put his sister’s contact in the night before to make it easier on himself when he called.
But he had not given his sister the private number attached to the burner phone. She was not supposed to be calling him back. He was only supposed to call her.
Putting the phone back to her ear, Lucia said, “Rose?”
“No, it’s not Rose, Lucia.”
It took her a second.
Then, two, and … three.
John.
It was her brother’s voice on the other end of that call.
She had to take those couple of seconds to fully realize the voice that was speaking back to her. She hadn’t talked to him in a month or a little more. Not since before he cornered Renzo in an alleyway, and warned him to stay away from Lucia. Oh, sure, he had tried something akin to communication with her. Hundreds of texts—at least fifty missed calls, all accompanied by him leaving her message after message on her voicemail that she simply deleted without even listening to.
John had been her best friend. Not just her brother, but the member of her family that she was most close to. He was her big brother, but he had never acted like the stereotypical big brother until Renzo.
Maybe that was why hearing his voice made her heart kickstart for a second. It caused a brief warmth to shoot out from her chest, and travel into the rest of her body. Because her first inclination when she spoke to her brother was to always fill him in on every single detail of her life that he might have missed out on since the last time they talked.
Despite her anger, all that bitterness and contempt she felt with John for taking her father’s side, she still had a habit of loving her brother simply because he was John, and she was Lucia. The two siblings so far apart in age that they never should have made friends, and yet, they had done just that. More so than the rest of her siblings.
But as quickly as that happy, warm feeling came, it was replaced by something hateful and angry. That just made Lucia so fucking mad. She didn’t want to feel that way, but she did.
He did that.
Just like her father.
“You there, Lucy?” she heard her brother ask.
God, she hated that nickname.
Lucia sucked in a sharp breath, noting the fact that Renzo was now closing the door with a pizza in his hand. “How did you get this number, and why are you calling from Rose’s phone?”
“Those are good questions. None of which I really want to give you the answers for.”
“Well, then I have nothing to say to you, John. So, good—”
“Hackers can do anything, Lucia. Anything.”
“Babe?”
Renzo’s quiet call of her name made her turn to look at him, and it was the concern written heavily on his brow that told her that he knew something was wrong. She waved a hand, not wanting to get distracted before she could end the call.
Especially not after she heard someone in the background say, “Sixty more seconds, John, and we’ll have the area code, maybe a full number, and possibly a location. Just keep her there for sixt
y more seconds.”
They were tracking her. It didn’t surprise her that they had access to a hacker with a program to get into Rose’s phone, and somehow call back a private number without having the number. But if they didn’t have her location or number yet, then that didn’t mean anything.
Right?
Not if they didn’t know an exact location.
Surely …
And if they only needed sixty more seconds …
“Where are you?” John asked.
“Happy,” Lucia answered simply.
“But are you—are you safe? Do you care how fucking worried we all are? Do you—”
“I’m happy, John. This phone won’t answer another call. Goodbye.”
Lucia hung up the phone knowing that hadn’t been sixty seconds. Renzo was already at her side, and picking up the phone. She could tell by the hardness of his gaze that he had basically gotten the gist of the conversation and what happened.
She was still going to have to explain.
And none of this felt good.
EIGHT
“Ren, open the pizza!”
His attention drifted between his little brother who had no idea the trouble that they just walked into, and Lucia who kept staring at that phone in his hands.
“Just a second,” Renzo replied absently.
The kid didn’t seem to understand that regardless, the pizza was still going to be as hot and good in five minutes as it was right now. Then again, he’d been asking for it every single hour on the hour since he woke up, too. Once Diego set his mind on something, he was going to get it and that’s all there was to it.
“Ren!”
He was not the type to lose his patience with Diego. Literally anyone else—except maybe Lucia—and he didn’t have time to listen to whining and nonsense. But right then, he was a little too close for comfort when it came to snapping at his little brother. It wasn’t even Diego’s fault, honestly.
“Here,” Lucia said, like she could read his mind or something, “let’s get this pizza opened for you, Diego.”
Renzo let her do her thing for Diego. It was easier for him to try and figure out how in the fuck her family—he was assuming it was her family only because she’d used her brother’s name—had gotten a hold of his sister’s phone.
“What did they say?” he asked Lucia as she flipped open the pizza box.
“Not a lot,” she returned. “I couldn’t stay on the phone too long or they would have been able to track me. That’s why I got off as soon as I could.”
Renzo’s brow dipped. “Track, how? I don’t understand.”
Lucia pulled out two pieces of steaming pizza, and set them on one of the paper plates they had grabbed when they went out to shop the day after arriving in Vegas. She barely even had time to slide the plate in front of Diego, and the kid was already ripping into a piece of pizza like he had never been fed a day in his life. It would have been amusing to Renzo on any other day if he wasn’t entirely fucked up over a single phone call.
Funny how something like that could ruin the peace he thought he found here. Even if it had been a short moment of peace, and only an illusion. Renzo hadn’t quite been ready to give it up just yet. Someone was determined to rip it out of his hands whether he was ready for them to or not, and now he had to decide what to do about it.
“Lucia,” he murmured when she didn’t answer him right away.
Lucia took a moment to wipe her hands on a paper towel before she turned her back to Diego. It effectively put her back to the boy so that they could talk quietly, calmly, and without making him think something was wrong. He appreciated her effort, really. He wasn’t even in the right frame of mind to consider how Diego might take all of this.
“I heard someone in the background,” she explained, shrugging. “They said something about needing another sixty seconds to grab the area code and phone number, and possibly a proper location. When I asked my brother how he had gotten ahold of a private phone number, he said hackers could do anything.”
“But they didn’t have the phone number,” Renzo said.
It wasn’t even a question because one of her statements contradicted the other, and he needed to be absolutely clear on this. They couldn’t afford to fuck around if her family knew where they were. He had no doubt the first thing they would do was come here, and take Lucia away from him. Which was fine if that’s what she wanted to do, but he knew it wasn’t. Frankly, the only way Renzo could continue to give Lucia what she wanted—to stay with him—was to keep fucking running.
Lucia sighed. “Didn’t seem like it, no. That’s what they were trying to get, I think, if I can trust what the guy in the background said. Probably the fucking hacker, right? Is …”
“What?”
She glanced away from him. “Rose’s phone … could someone grab that, or no?”
“Doubtful,” Renzo answered simply.
His sister was every fucking seventeen-year-old girl to a fucking T. Her phone was never very far from her hands. She could wake up at the sound of a social media notification, but wouldn’t blink at a damn alarm clock. She had an account for every major social media app that was popular among her age group. Hell, she had taught him how to use one or two of them more than once. Unless someone had broken into his sister’s place while she was sleeping to grab her phone, there was no fucking way they got it away from her.
Simple as that.
And he seriously doubted the Marcellos went that far.
Then, Renzo had another idea. “But her number isn’t private. It’s accessible on at least one of her social media accounts to message her, and shit.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” Lucia admitted.
“It means if they have a hacker, all they needed was her phone number and a hotspot, Lucia. A hacker with the means and the mode, so to speak. Be at a hotspot near my sister, have her phone number, hack into her device, use the right code to call the last numbers that had called her phone, and there you are.”
She blinked. “Really?”
He echoed her brother’s words, then. “Hackers can do anything.”
If they had the talent, the means, and the mode.
“But then they didn’t have the actual phone number for this phone, then,” Lucia said, glancing down at the device in his hand.
“That’s probably what the code was running which, if they couldn’t track out the exact location during the phone call, would have given them an area code for where we were, and possibly the chance to hack into this phone.”
Lucia’s gaze hardened.
Renzo didn’t know what else to say.
Well, no, he did.
“Is this still where you want to be?” he asked quietly.
Her stare darted back up to his to hold on tight. Unquestioningly, she came closer to him until she could fist the collar of his shirt, and pull him down closer to her. In a breath, her lips pressed to his. Not hungry, rough, and demanding, but soft, sure, and sweet. Everything that Lucia Marcello was, really. All the things that made her most amazing to him.
“I will always want to be with you,” she whispered.
That was all he needed to know, then.
“I think we’re okay,” he said, glancing at the phone. “They didn’t get what they needed.”
But just to be sure …
He turned on the screen of the phone, and made one of the last calls he planned on making with the device. The call rang twice before Rose picked up. Her cheery voice relaxed him almost instantly. No, he hadn’t thought the Marcellos would go as far as approaching his sister or doing something to her to get to him. Lucia’s family weren’t entirely good people, but they didn’t seem like fucking monsters, either.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Rose,” Renzo said, giving Lucia a small smile and stroking her cheek at the same time. “Just wanted to check in on you.”
There was no need to worry his sister with the details. She didn’t need to be freaked
out over the fact someone had hacked into her phone, or whatever, not when they weren’t after her.
“Hey, everything is good,” Rose returned. “But I am just heading to—”
“That’s okay. I’ll let you get back to … whatever.”
“All right.”
“Love you, Rose.”
His sister laughter. “Love you, too, Ren.”
The relief Renzo felt as he hung up the phone seemed traitorous, really. Still, he enjoyed the feeling while it lasted. Which wasn’t very fucking long before it was gone. He headed for the bathroom with that goddamn phone in his hands—Lucia was close on his heels the entire way. Diego didn’t seem to mind them leaving him behind at the small kitchenette table to eat his pizza alone. He had what he wanted, after all.
In the bathroom, Renzo turned the sink on, stuck in the small plug, and waited for it to fill up with water. Once the water level in the sink was high enough to reach the overflow, he dropped the phone in without hesitation. He watched the screen flicker, and then black out. He left the phone in the water for a good minute, all the while, he said nothing. Neither did Lucia.
Once he was satisfied that the phone was ruined, he pulled it out, dried it off with a towel, pulled off the back, ripped out the battery, SIM card, and small board, and threw it all to the floor. He crushed the items under his boot before bending down, sweeping it all up, and throwing it all in the trash can.
Wasted money.
That’s what he saw there. A fucking phone they paid for and couldn’t use—even if grabbing another one would be easy and cheap—it was still money they couldn’t afford to lose at the moment. Not that it mattered.
The phone was tainted.
It had to go.
The silence felt heavier after Renzo finished, but Lucia was there to break it as he felt her hands slide up his back overtop his shirt. Her lips touched down on the back of his neck, and instantly, he relaxed all over again.
“Everything is good,” she told him.
Yeah, he hoped so.
• • •
Renzo stuffed his hands in his pockets, and glared at the sight ahead of him. The barber shop looked old as fuck—certainly not anything modern, or whatever. It also looked, guessing by the chipped paint on the sign and the old curtain in the large front window, like it was on its last legs.
