Deep (The Pagano Family Book 4) (7 page)

Something was very wrong with Bev. That sentence should have scared her straight out of the club. Instead, it made her wet. She was turned on by the rumble of menace in his statement, so turned on she couldn’t resist shifting on her stool, rubbing her legs together. But she didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t want your heart, Beverly. I want your body. I won’t ask again.”

If he hadn’t punctuated that sentence by running a finger over her shoulder and down her arm, maybe she would have said no. But he had. So instead of being smart and refusing him—if in fact that would have been the smart choice; she wasn’t completely clear on that—she put her mouth to his ear and said, “I need to tell my friends.”

He put his hand on her chin and turned her face to his. “Do. Then come back to my booth. You drink vodka tonic?”

She nodded.

“I’ll have one waiting.” His thumb moved over her lips, making all the muscles between her hips clench, and then he was off the stool and heading back to his booth.

Bev’s heart was pounding so hard it hurt. Oh, hell’s bells.

“Are they ready to go?” Chris was back.

“I…I didn’t check.” She swallowed. He wasn’t going to understand this at all. “I’m…Chris, I’m staying.”

His brows drew in. “Please?”

“I’m staying. Nick asked me to stay, and he’ll take me home. I’m staying.”

Chris began shaking his head about halfway through her explanation. “Forget about it, Bev. I know you’ve got a crush, but don’t be stupid.”

“I’m staying, Chris. He’s my neighbor. Nothing bad is going to happen. I’m going over there now. Just tell Sky I’ll see her Sunday.”

He stared at her, and then he shook his head again. “I’m not going to pick you up after this one, Bev. I’m done picking you up and dusting you off. You need to be smarter.” With that, he walked to the dance floor, toward Romeo and Sky, picking his way through the dancers.

Now hurt and angry as well as anxious and massively turned on, Bev finished her drink and headed to Nick’s booth.

She was almost around the dance floor when a small hand grabbed her arm, and she turned to find Skylar, looking worried. “Are you sure about this?”

Feeling defensive, too—feeling quite full of tense emotions by now—Bev jerked her arm free. “I’m sure. He’s my neighbor. I literally know where he lives. It’s not some nameless hookup.”

“From what Chris says, I’d feel better if it was. Be careful, sweets. All I’m sayin’.”

Bev nodded and turned her back on her friend. She walked toward Nick’s booth with her head up, her shoulders squared, and her gut sucked in.

~oOo~

She really hadn’t thought any of this through at all. She’d felt the first blush of regret when she’d reached Nick’s booth, and there had been three men, including Brian, sitting with him. As they scrambled to stand and greet her, she almost turned and bolted after her friends.

But she didn’t, and they made way for her to sit next to Nick. He put a large hand on her bare thigh, and she had trouble concentrating on much else after that. He didn’t take liberties; he simply kept his hand on her, but it was a monumentally sexual touch nonetheless. He introduced her to his friends, but she’d ask again later, if she had cause to know. Between his hand and her nerves, there was no way she’d remember who these guys were.

The vodka tonics kept coming at a steady but not speedy pace, and she maintained her buzz without getting sloppy. Nick folded her into their conversation without making her feel like her participation was mandatory. They weren’t talking business. They talked sports, and they talked a little bit about their families, and they talked some smack to each other. Bev felt like she was peeking behind a curtain.

One of the many things she’d been afraid of, seeing the booth filled with men, was fielding a lot of rude, raw comments, but these guys all treated her with real respect. After an hour or so, by her probably faulty estimation, she realized that part of their excellent manners had to do with Nick’s interest in her. A couple of women, a redhead and a blonde, both dressed to the nines, came up to the table, and the men on the end, whose names she couldn’t recall, pulled them into their laps. Those girls were treated more like Bev had feared she would be. And then, after a couple of minutes, Nick moved his hand—the one not on her. He simply swept his fingers out and pulled them back in, a subtle brushing movement, and then his friends got up and took their girls away.

Bev thought Nick had just told them to shoo.

Brian, sitting on Nick’s other side, leaned in. “What do you want to do, boss?”

Everybody seemed to call him ‘boss.’ Nick turned to her and gave her that little half smile. “You ready to go?”

She smiled back fully. His smile grew in response; she liked that. “Sure.”

He turned back to Brian. “Call for a car for you and the boys. Tell Jimmy we’re ready to go.”

Brian nodded and pulled out his phone and made a couple of calls. Anticipation growing like a pressure in her chest, Bev focused on finishing her drink. A few minutes later, Brian answered his phone and nodded at Nick.

Nick’s hand left her thigh, and his arm went across her back. “Okay,
bella
. Let’s go.”

Bella
. That meant beautiful. Bev turned her head; his face, his mouth, was right there. Before she thought any more about it, she kissed him.

She’d startled him—and that gave her a rushing sense of power. The one thing she felt sure she knew about him was that he was a man of immense power and control, and that scant flinch when her lips touched his gave her a little hit of his power, like the connection had transferred some of his to her.

And then his other hand took hold of her face and his tongue was in her mouth, and she was completely in his control. Oh God, oh God. His mouth was hot and firm and tasted of scotch, and his tongue was like silk against hers. She wanted him so much. It was all lust, all physical desire and mystique, no substance that she could see, and she didn’t care at all. She moaned and kissed him back, abandoning herself to the folly of lust.

He broke away and kissed her nose. “Come on, Beverly. We have a long ride before I can do what I want to do to you.”

And that right there was easily the sexiest sentence in the English language, as far as Bev could imagine. She scooted out of the booth, smoothing her dress as she stood, and then Nick’s hand was on hers, on her ass, and he laced fingers with her and led her through the club. Brian stayed close, leading the way.

Stepping out into the late night, Bev felt a little bit like a celebrity. Though it was eleven o’clock, there was still a long line of people trying to get in. The bouncer—a different guy—stood up from his stool and nodded at Nick, and the effect was almost as if he were bowing.

She couldn’t help but smile brightly at everybody. Maybe she was acting like a nerd, but she was happy and excited and a little drunk, and she loved everybody.

Brian led them down the block a bit toward a huge, black SUV with blacked-out windows and black wheels. As they approached, the guy she’d seen at Nick’s door the night before, every bit as big as Romeo, maybe even bigger, got out of the driver’s side and walked around the front of the truck. He opened the passenger door.

And then he twitched—Bev only saw it because she had just noticed for the first time that he had gold tips on his black hair, which seemed an oddly fussy style choice for a man who looked liked he’d been hewn from rock with a dull chisel.

But he twitched, and then he spun around with surprising speed and grace and yelled “DOWN! GET DOWN!”

Nick knocked her to the sidewalk and landed on top of her, and Brian landed on top of him, and Bev was pretty sure the impacts had broken something inside her, but she didn’t have time to finish that thought before Nick’s arms were around her head and the air was full of noise and hot with fire.

The SUV had exploded.

~ 5 ~

“Fucking hell! Nick, you okay?”

Brian’s strained voice came as if it were passing through thick layers of gauze. His hands were on Nick’s shoulders, trying to pull him up and over. Nick shook him off.

“I’m okay.” He shifted off the woman under him and brushed her hair from her face. Her cheek was badly scraped, and she looked pained and terrified. “Are you hurt?”

It took her a second or two of mute staring before she answered. “My…chest. It hurts to breathe.”

Intending to have Brian call for help for her, Nick looked over his shoulder, not letting his mind take in more than the most immediate problems yet. But Brian was lying prone on the sidewalk. He seemed to have fallen as soon as Nick had said he was okay.

A piece of the Navigator was embedded in his back. “Fuck! Brian!”

“I’m okay, Nick. It’s just my shoulder. Hurts like a mother, but I’m okay.”

Now, Nick saw, too, that the back of his friend’s leather jacket was smoking. “Are you burned?”

Brian shook his head. “Singed. I’m okay, boss. I’m okay.”

He didn’t look okay, but Nick nodded. As he turned back to Beverly, he saw a big, black Italian shoe just past her head, a socked foot and ankle still inside it. Jimmy. Dammit. Ah, dammit.

He turned to the wreckage, finally hearing, still heavily muffled, the shouts and screams and weeping around him. Other small parts of Jimmy, many of them flaming, were scattered about—a hand with his diamond pinky ring twinkling in the light of the fire consuming it, another foot with more leg attached—but Nick figured most of him had been vaporized by the impact of the bomb. The blast radius looked to be controlled—only fifteen feet or so—but several people were down, probably hit by shrapnel from the Navigator. Jimmy seemed to be the only death, at least so far. Fuck. He had a wife and four kids.

Nick didn’t know how they’d managed it, with Jimmy on the Navigator all night, but he knew who. This was the sequel to his father’s funeral. He was going to peel Alvin Church’s skin off in a single sheet and turn it into a goddamn coat.

He’d had his attention off Beverly for only a couple of seconds. Now she shifted under him, and he felt her moan sharply—he felt it rather than heard it. “Easy,
bella
. Don’t move yet.”

There was a weird flashing light all around. He couldn’t make sense of it. Like a strobe without a predictable pattern.

Chi-Chi and Matty ran up then, and Chi-Chi dropped to his knees at Nick’s head. “Oh fuck, boss! Oh fuck! What the fuck!”

Chi-Chi wasn’t the brightest bulb in their box, but he was all in and followed directions well. Sirens began to overwhelm the sounds of trauma. Nick estimated that less than a minute, definitely no more than two, had passed since the explosion. “Shut up, Chi, and listen. If you’re carrying dirty, dump it now.” Though a few soldiers in the family had felony records, none of his crew did, and all had concealed carry permits. The Pagano Brothers kept a tight seal on their relationship with law enforcement. The right people were paid in the right way, always, and the Paganos kept a clean profile.

They used unregistered weapons for their wet and dirty work, however, and Chi-Chi had had some dirty work to do earlier in the day.

“Just my clean piece, boss. You need help up?” Chi-Chi reached his hand out, but Nick shook his head. He didn’t want to leave Beverly lying alone on the sidewalk.

“You and Matty—look sharp. Get a read on who’s around here, especially at the edges. And what the fuck is that—shit.” It had taken his rattled brain a minute to understand it, but now he did. The strobing light—flashes from smart phone cameras. People everywhere were taking ghoulish pictures. Probably video, too. And now the red and blue swirling lights from police and ambulance took it over. There was no point in trying to get control of all those damn cameras. Footage was probably online already.

Chi-Chi jumped up to do as he’d been bidden, and Nick looked back down at Beverly, still stunned and gasping. When his eyes met hers, though, she asked, “Are you hurt?”

For the first time, he really thought about how he felt. Sore and still half deaf, but no, not hurt. “I’m okay. You’re going to be okay, too.” From the corner of his eye, he saw dark pants and rubber-soled shoes running toward him and knew paramedics were here for her. He looked up and then, finally, reluctantly, pulled away from her, rising to his knees.

Her hand clamped onto his arm. “Don’t…” She cried out in pain and didn’t finish.

Without thinking about it, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “These men will take care of you. I won’t be far. I’m here.” Then he looked up at the paramedic who’d just knelt at his side. “She’s having trouble breathing.”

The paramedic nodded and then asked, “How about you?”

“I’m okay.”

He stood and knew for certain that he wasn’t hurt. But Brian was unconscious now, being worked on by two other EMTs. And Jimmy was dead. And they were all trapped in a ring of public spectacle.

~oOo~

Nick stood as Uncle Ben came into the E.R. waiting room, with Bobbo a few steps ahead. The cops had come and gone and would be back, but not tonight. He wasn’t worried about the local P.D. But a bombing would bring the Feds, and soon. Their reach with the Feds wasn’t quite as long. He still wasn’t overly worried. They were the victims here. The biggest legal problem was the attention now turned their way more sharply.

Now well past midnight, the hour was not one in which the don was at full strength. He was limping badly, arthritis pain obviously wracking his body, but Nick knew better than to offer help.

As he came to the empty corner in which Nick had been sitting, Ben nodded at the chairs. “Sit, nephew.”

They sat, and Bobbo stepped away, on watch. When Ben got himself as comfortable as possible, he said, “Tell me.”

Nick described the scene, choosing his words carefully. They were not in a secure location. When he was finished, Ben nodded. “Brian will pull through?”

“He’s in surgery now. First and second-degree burns, and the shrapnel did some damage. He’ll be sore and working with one arm for a while, but they say he should come back almost one-hundred percent. His mother is upstairs, waiting there.”

“Is someone on her?”

“Chi-Chi is up there. Matty’s down here, on the door.”

Ben nodded. “I saw him. I heard a woman was hurt. But not Vanessa.”

Vanessa had dumped him via text the day before. At the time, he’d considered getting angry on the grounds of disrespect, but he’d decided it wasn’t worth the energy. Frankly, a text was the least dramatic breakup he could think of. She’d written,
I don’t think we’re working out. I think it’s time to move on.
With those
thinks
, he was sure she’d meant for him to react, had probably hoped to wrest some kind of desire to reconcile from him, but he’d only replied,
Agreed
, and let it go at that. It had barely caused a ripple in his day.

“No. Not Vanessa. My neighbor. They took her for X-rays.” Ben gave him a keen look but didn’t probe further. That was good, because Nick wasn’t ready to think about the sense of responsibility he felt toward Beverly. Yes, he was attracted to her. Yes, he was fascinated by her totally open and bright personality, which was the antithesis of his own. Yes, watching her dance at Neon, the lithe, confident way she’d moved her body, dancing for herself and no one else, for the simple enjoyment of it, had made him uncomfortably hard. And yes, he was responsible for her being hurt tonight. But none of that accounted for how difficult it had been to leave her side when the paramedics took over.

He would think about all that later. He’d have time, and he’d have cause, because now he
was
responsible for her. He had to keep her safe. They were connected now, at least as long as Church was a problem. There were probably hundreds of photographs of them together, lying on the sidewalk. Matty had already shown him that an image of him leaning over her, kissing her hand, accompanied the lead story of the bombing on the local newspaper website.

Uncle Ben let it drop. “Does this change our plans for next week? Your thoughts?”

Monday was the meeting of The Council. The heads of all the families were meeting to confer on the problem of Alvin Church, and so that the Paganos could seek permission and help from the Marconi family to deal in their neighborhood with Jackie Stone.

“No, Uncle. Our plans should proceed unchanged. It’s more important than ever, now.”

“Agreed.” The old man sighed. Nick was struck again by how used up he looked on this night, pulled from his sleep too early and without the time he needed to prepare for the world. He put his hand on his heart. “Jimmy was a good man.”

“He was.” Jimmy had been driving and guarding Nick for years. He’d had no aspirations beyond that job. Being made had been the highlight of his life, above even his marriage or the births of his children, but he had wanted nothing more than to protect a man he’d admired. He had killed in the service of his job. He had maimed. But he’d told Nick that his favorite part was driving Nick around, talking. They’d gotten to know each other well over the years.

“Who told Tina?”

“I sent Nose over. I called while he was there.” It wasn’t the first time he’d had to deliver that kind of news to a wife.

“All right.” Ben struggled to his feet, and Nick stood, too. “I’m going to sit with Brian’s mother. What is her name?”

“Pauline.”

“Pauline, yes. We’ll talk more about the girl. For now, keep her safe.”

“I will, Uncle.” They embraced, and Ben went off with Bobbo toward the elevators.

~oOo~

Nick knew most of the staff at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, in Quiet Cove, and they knew him. Here in this huge medical center in Providence, though, he was much more anonymous, and most of the staff, dealing with the bombing casualties, were unimpressed. But one nurse knew who he was and knew well what side she should keep him on. He’d identified her quickly and exploited her respect so that he had free access to Beverly.

Shit. He didn’t even know her last name. He figured one of their digital intel specialists had logged it somewhere; they kept basic track of the administration’s neighbors. He’d have to find it out soon.

Paige—the smart nurse—called him back when Beverly was out of X-ray and gave him an update on her condition. She was in a lot of pain, but not badly hurt. Bruised ribs, a mild concussion, and some pretty bad scrapes, especially her cheek and elbow. Nothing was broken, though, and nothing required stitches. He thanked her and went back to Beverly’s little room.

She was propped up on the gurney, a white bandage over her right cheek and another around her right elbow. Her hair was loose over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow.

“
Bella
.” Interesting how easily an endearment came to his lips. It wasn’t a habit of his, calling people by something other than their name or title, other than a casual ‘coz’ or ‘bro.’ When he’d called her
bella
, all unthinking, at Neon, her eyes had lit up beautifully and her smiling face had nearly glowed. He’d enjoyed having that effect on her.

And then she’d kissed him. It was rarely the case that a woman made the first sexual contact with him. And now, apparently, he was beginning to think of her by that endearment.

She opened her eyes, but there was no smile for him this time. “I don’t know where my purse is. I need my phone. I need to call Chris. I need a friend.” Her voice was weak, supported only by her panting breaths.

Nick had no idea where her purse was. He’d noticed it, a little turquoise beaded thing with a strap she’d worn on her wrist. It had matched her shoes and the turquoise earrings in her ears.