He cocked his head to one side and snarled out, “Do you really think they would come in to rescue you?”
He didn’t believe me. I proved him wrong. I screamed for help. “Lucy. Belle. Help me. There’s an intruder in—”
He pulled my legs, making my hands slip and I went down like a sinking ship.
I wasn’t a good swimmer, but still I fought, trying to swim back up when he enveloped me, holding me captive under water. I opened my eyes, his blurry face coming closer, until those lips sealed with mine. I felt his tongue thrusting into my mouth. I drummed his chest, trying so hard to tear my lips away from his, but he kept going, molding his lips to mine, trapping my face between his palms. I was starting to lose consciousness, my lungs starving for air. My world slowly turning black when sunlight lit up my world again and we came up for air.
I sputtered and coughed, with water stinging my eyes. Before I could get my bearings, he had his hand fisted behind my head again. He greeted me with a glint fury in his eyes, and growled beside my ear. “How was that? Did I succeed in making your wish come true?”
My wish? What wish? If it was supposed to be my first kiss, then this was all wrong.
I hit him hard on the chest, as soon as I was able to breathe again.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted out, gasping for more air in my starved lungs.
He dragged my head until we were mere inches from each other. Eye to eye, he hissed in my face, “Isn’t that what you wanted, since your first attempt at killing yourself only succeeded in you losing your memory. Or did you only plan to kill yourself just so you could receive pity from my people? Did you want to receive pity from me, too?”
He breathed harshly into my ear, drowning out the sound of my heartbeat. I blinked, not understanding a single word he was saying. When I looked away, trying to calm my raging heartbeat, he jerked my chin, until I was face to face with him again. Golden eyes beat down on me like the heat of a thousand suns.
“Your Majesty, Queen of Alyria,” he continued, without so much as a fault to his posture. “I’ll give you my honest opinion. If you want to commit suicide, you should have chosen a better location to die than in the bathtub. Why don’t you jump off a cliff instead? Save us all from healing you back to health, don’t you think?”
I was breathing so hard now, I could no longer think straight. My mouth formed into the shape of an O, but no words came out. The meaning of his words finally sank into my brain.
Dear Lord. This brute wants to kill me. I was already dead once. I don’t want to die again.
And with this, my energy surged back into me and I yelled at him with renewed strength. “Let me go, you brute.”
Somehow, I managed to push him off, but he caught my arms and pinned me against the side of the pool. I was trapped. Again. “Who are you? And what do you want with me?”
“Brute, huh?” he snarled, enjoying the position I was in. “I thought you would have invented another name for me by now. But I quite like it. If I’m a brute, then you’re the queen bitch,” he spat and laughed in my face, like a raving lunatic out of the mental hospital. “I can’t believe you don’t remember me. Shall I remind you again just what we are to each other?”
And before he finished saying those words, he jerked my legs apart and wrapped them around his hips, locking my legs in place so that I couldn’t move.
My eyes opened wider than a deer caught in headlights. I could feel all of him, his body heat, his rippled muscle beneath that shirt, and most of all, that hard budge between his pants, nestled within my...
I screamed in horror. “What are you doing? Let me go. Right this instant.”
“What? You don’t like this position?” He mocked me. “Last I remember, you screamed for more when we fucked like this.”
What...? What is he talking about?
Before I could even respond, he plunged his lips into mine again and forced his tongue to invade in my cavity.
“Mmmmm.” I struggled, hitting him more. I managed to tear our lips apart, when he gripped onto my head and captured my lips again.
He was a strong man. Not only was he holding my lips captive, he was also holding my body against my will, too. With one hand, he molded my naked breast, fingers sharply kneading, pushing and pulling at my nipple that I ended up gasping and shuddering for more air. My breath hitched. My body trembled. And my mind sizzled. I heard him chuckle when he pulled his lips away from mine.
“No matter how many times we fight, our bodies always seemed to understand each other.”
I was caught in a daze. Who was this man? What was his relationship with the previous Clarissa Rose? And was he the one responsible for inflicting all of those welts and bruises on Clarissa Rose’s body?
Suddenly I was whipped out of my daze when I felt a finger probe my insides. He... the... brute... he’s fingering inside me.
I summoned all of my energy to push him back but he only applied more force as he rubbed and traced the inside of my wall.
I panted. My body was betraying me. I was letting a stranger touch me. I was a virgin. No man had ever touched me there before.
Hatching a plan through my dazed mind, I held him close and let him kiss me. When he least expected it, I bit him hard, on his shoulder.
“Ahhhh!” He roared and released me. Under three heartbeats, he caught my chin and tilted my head back, to the point where I almost felt my neck was about to break.
“You brazen woman. You bit me,” he growled.
“You brutal man. I did bite you,” I retorted back, smiling at my victory.
But my triumphant achievement was short lived as he overpowered me in the next instant, taking charge of our situation and roughly yanking my legs apart to reveal my forbidden flower to him.
I wanted to curse him again for putting me in this vulnerable position, but I could feel my strength weakening already, and before I knew it, my vision had darkened and my body had slipped away into the empty black void.
* * *
End of preview
Did you enjoy that? I sure did when I wrote it. And believe me, it’s only going to get hotter, and messier, when the other three turn up.
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Click on the link below to preorder your copy today
Her Majesty is Here
Maid to the Mafia
The Sinister Bachelor Billionaires Universe Season 2
“I’ll do anything. Cooking, cleaning, even making coffee. I’m good at making coffee.”
Upon uttering the word coffee, Jenny Stone, the smart, resilient, and sharp-tongued girl somehow finds herself paying off her father’s debt by working as a maid to the mafia boss, Giovanni Dente, the obsessive-compulsive coffee drinker with movie star good looks.
And this is just the beginning of Jenny’s new life.
Between serving the man his brew at ungodly hours and doing his dirty work, she also has to attend college, ace her exams, and find a way to contact her father and sister who have abandoned her.
But within the intricate web Giovanni binds around her, when it comes time for her to leave, she isn’t sure if she can make it out alive, especially when somewhere along the way, she realizes her heart is totally captivated.
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Turn over the page to read 4 chapters of Maid to the Mafia: Totally Captivated
Coffee for you
Prologue
14 Years Ago
“Hello? Are you hurt?”
The teenaged boy raised his eyes upon hearing a little girl’s voice. He immediately scowled when he saw her gawking at him with curiosity, with half a licorice hanging from her lips. She was a wee thing, no more than five, he estimated, with light-brown hair—a dull, boring color for sure—tied into pigtails.
“Hurt?” He found himself asking.
“Mm.” She nodded furiously. “Are you in pain? You want me to ring the doctor for you or something?”
Pain?
A foreign word for sure. A word that had never been d
irected at him in his fourteen years of life.
Oh, right. Of course she would ask such a question. He was hunched over, after all, resting himself against the tall American beech tree in this secluded part of the national park, hands clenching his stomach. Not to mention his lips were split and bleeding and his face was cut and bruised from a fight. Any idiot could tell he was in pain and suffering severely.
Oddly enough, the thought of him truly in so much pain that it seared his soul amused him. Amused him enough, in fact, that it made him laugh. He laughed so hard that he started to cry, truly cried in a mixture of anger, frustration, and sorrow. He knew he looked like shit, but what the heck!
“Why are you laughing like that?” the little girl queried in confusion. “Is it so painful that you laugh just to forget about it? The pain? I do that, too, when I’m in pain.” She even nodded, to prove her point.
Oh God! Shit! A mere child who didn’t know him cared about him, whereas his own family hadn’t given a fuck.
When he managed to calm down, he looked at her straight in the eye and said coldly, “You shouldn’t talk to a person like me.” There was sarcasm in his voice that the girl didn’t understand.
She cocked her head to one side, assessing him. “I know I shouldn’t talk to a stranger, but you’re in pain and must be very sick. I’m being a good sama—” She paused, trying to get her word right. “A good samari—”
“Samaritan?” He finished for her.
She nodded furiously. “That’s it. And you look like a good person. You wouldn’t hurt me, would you?”
Hurt her? He’d definitely hurt her if she didn’t get the hell out of his way. It was in his blood after all, to hurt people. To make money that way. That was his family’s ultimate goal, wasn’t it? That’s what his family did. So why not him?
“Look here, little girl,” he began. “I’m a bad guy. You got that? I’m not a good person. So, get out of here!” he growled, hoping to scare her so she would run off and leave him be.
He closed his eyes, fighting hard to breathe. Fuck, one of his ribs must be broken. Even breathing was taking its toll. He felt pain all over, from his split lips to the bruise on his knuckles. It was a fight that was gruesome yet so satisfying. He knew he was slowly turning into the very facade of his family, and bile rose up his throat.
No. No. He didn’t want anything to do with them. He hated that he was born in this fucked-up family. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. No mincing words; just fight and kill. That was his family motto. The Bianchi mafia clan.
Fuck. Wasn’t he trying to run away from his own heritage? So, why did he behave like them when a little provocation from his classmate caused him to unleash his inner demon?
God, he needed to flog that nightmare from his mind. He needed to be alone, wanted to be alone, so he could wallow in this misery. He didn’t need some little girl to console him. But no matter how hard he tried to shove back those memories, it still played bright in his head like that insistent lonely pain in his heart.
They were in this park just hours prior. Four against one. Him against them. The son of a mafia boss against four policemen’s sons. The unlawful verses the lawful. Fuck, what a tip of the scales. He’d used his fists to punch them. But they held him back, restraining him and punching him until what remained was a bloody pulp.
“What are you going to do?” He could hear them taunt him. “Just ’cause you’re the son of a thug, you think you can hurt me? My old man’s in the police force. He’s not going to let a thug like you run America.”
That was the last straw. He was spurred into action and punched the living daylights out of those four. Yeah, four against one. But this one won. This one made four of them unconscious. Fuck. What had he become? A monster. Just like his family.
I control my own destiny. I control my own destiny, he chanted to himself, trying to erase that image from his head.
He flinched suddenly when he felt small fingers tracing his hair, patting his head like he needed it. He looked up and met mossy green eyes. Fuck. She still didn’t leave him. And her next words almost made tears leak from his eyes.
“Is it sore? Does it hurt a lot?”
What was she referring to? His cut lips, his blue-black eyes, or the pain in his chest?
What a pathetic kid. What did she know about pain? From the look of her pink dress, she looked to be from a normal family, one he’d never experienced. But his heart burned with that insistent threading of her fingers through his hair. And now he felt something else. Warmth, like he wanted her to caress his hair for real, with the love and care that one bestowed on someone you loved.
“Please don’t look so sad.” She consoled him, crouching down to sit in front of him. And then she looked up at him with a beaming smile on her face. “Ah. I got it. Wait here. Hold my licorice. I’ll be right back.”
She shoved the half-eaten black licorice into his palm and raced across the field. He saw her disappear into one of the cafés lining the streets opposite the national park.
Alone, he closed his eyes again. Good. She was gone. Finally. Which should make him happy, but he wasn’t. He opened his eyes and looked at the licorice in his hands. He should really throw it away. She was gone, after all. She wasn’t going to come back. But she’d said she would, and something humane within him still grasped onto that licorice like it was his lifeline.
He gazed up into the sky, feeling the heat on his face. The midafternoon sun really was soothing. Such warmth. Such freedom. When would he feel this free again?
He really should head back home, though. And then tell his family what? That he’d had a fight. Trying to defend what he despised all along, only for his mother to taunt him again.
“A leaf never falls far from its branch. You’d better accept your position and embrace your fate.”
A strong coffee scent woke him from those painful memories. He lifted his head and saw the little girl was back. And she was holding a foamy drink in her hand.
“What’s this?” he asked, looking at the cup thrust in his face.
“Coffee. For you.” She beamed.
“I don’t want it.” He shifted his gaze to the sky again. Not a second later, the cup was in his face again. “I said I don’t want it. I don’t drink coffee.”
“But I made it for you.” Her little voice sounded slightly hurt.
Fuck. He hurt her feelings. “Look, I don’t drink coffee. Okay. I don’t like coffee.”
“How do you know if you’ve never drunk it?” she asked.
Because my whole fucking family drinks coffee like water. But he didn’t tell her that. And clearly, she was starting to irritate him. “Look. I just don’t like it, all right. Now leave me alone.”
“Can’t you just try it? It’ll make you happy. Try it. You’ll love it. Ma’s café is just across the road from here. I get to make coffee all I want. It’s really nice. She tells me I make good coffee, and when I grow up, she bets I’ll win a barista award. So, you can be the judge. I just know you’ll like it because I put all my love in this cup. I want to see a smile on your face. Please smile for me?”
She wanted to see him smile? What the fuck for? Why?
“Go on. Drink it,” she urged. “I didn’t put any poison in it, like that queen from Snow White with that apple thingy. Once you taste it, you’ll become addicted to it like cocaine. That’s what Ma always tells me. But I don’t know what cocaine is. I think she should compare it to chocolate. Do you like chocolate? I like chocolate. Taste it and see if my coffee tastes like chocolate.”
She held that black cup of coffee in her small fingers, not pushing him to accept it, but in turn making him feel guilty if he didn’t. He felt miserable, a thousand times worse than when he got into that fight.
“I can’t push you to like it, but you can choose to like it once you’ve tasted it. It’s your choice.”
He reached out his hand and took the coffee cup from her grasp. And he drank it. He’d never tasted anything so
bitter, so foul and disgusting. But for that one moment in his life, he felt happy, his heart singing loudly in his chest.
“What’s your name?” he asked, taking another sip, finding he did like the taste after all.
“Jennifer.” She smiled back, sitting next to him, shuffling her body until she was right beside him. Then she took out a series of bandages from her dress pocket and began to plaster it on his face where the cuts and bruises resided.
He blinked, staring at her large green eyes in front of his face as she proceeded with her work. There were two bandages on his left cheek, three on his forehead, one on his right cheek, and now she was trying to cover the side of his cracked lip as he tried to take another sip of that coffee. He wondered where the heck she got all those bandages from. They were rather bright and colorful, too. His face probably looked like a walking neon light.
“Wow, you have nice black eyes,” she said with delight. “I’ve never seen anyone with black eyes before. It’s like looking into the night sky. Have you been outside at night and looked at the sky? It’s very hard to see in the city, but my ma takes us to the country all the time, and there you can see the stars. They’re so bright against the black sky, like your eyes. I like your eyes. I like you.”
He blinked again and shook his head. Jennifer was talking a mile a minute. He couldn’t comprehend what she was saying.
“I like you,” she repeated, like he didn’t hear her declaration the first time. “Can I be your friend?”
Friend. Another foreign word. No one wanted to be your friend when you’re part of that family.
“Well, can I be your friend? Or do you like to be alone? But I mean, who wants to be alone, anyway? Not me. I want to have friends. Don’t you?”
Let Me Love You: A Novel Page 26
