Two Hitmen: A Double Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 1) (116 page)

I still kept a tingling tickle going at the base of her clit, matching a long, hard plunge of my tongue with her thrusts, slow enough each time to make her need more. Until she shouted and thrashed, until her stomach rolled and her whole body clenched and released. Then the tip of my tongue drove in far enough to beat on her soft button.

She rewarded my effort by clamping my head between her thighs and issuing a wild gush into my mouth. Her phone rang. I didn’t stop. Her back arched and her fingers clawed at my head. My phone rang. She shouted. I didn’t stop.

Alexa pushed her pelvis hard against my face. Gripping her ass, I held her back enough for her to feel me in charge and buried myself deep in her. The taste and the scent and her wild, pulsing clenches almost made me come.

I could hear what it was dong to her, and she could feel me grinning at the entrance to her erupting fountain of ecstatic thrill. Her phone rang again. I sucked her clit and she clamped her eyes shut as her luscious thighs crushed my head. Her face and neck glowed bright red as she bit her forearm.

My phone rang again. Then hers. I could feel her torn between the ebbing tides of ecstasy and the rude calls of the outside world. I tightened my hold on her. I thought her concentration was lost and the spell was broken, but as I held her she trembled again and I smiled, knowing that I could take her up to one more glorious peak.

She gushed in my mouth and her whole body thrashed as she shouted. Her nails clawed my back. Her fingers raked and pulled in my hair. She shook like the deck of a ship when the turbines kick in.

She cried out and shouted my name. “Luka. Luka, good GOD, LUKA!”

When she began to subside, I took her in my arms and held her. She nuzzled against my bicep and she sighed as her fingers trickled downwards to find my cock.
 

The sheets and covers were drenched. I was soaked with sweat as well as her nectar. I wrapped her in my arms and she shook like a little bird, letting out trembling sighs and moans. I held her, stroked her hair, and marveled at her until she began to subside. Cradling Alexa in my lap was like seeing a woman shine for the first time.

She was miraculous and beautiful. I told her so in whispers, breaths into her neck and her ear. I placed soft kisses all over her, amazed and appreciative of the wonder that she was. She stirred in recognition.

When her eyes fluttered open, we both knew that the world was calling, but I had one long, tender kiss that I had to give her first. Her phone rang. Then mine. Then hers again. Then mine again. We knew what it was. We knew the kiss was more urgent.

My cock hadn’t lost any of its sense of purpose, or gotten any less angry, but I had the strong sense that our break in the battle, our fantasy night of bliss, was about to be ripped open. Her fingers snaked around the back of my neck as she pulled her wet face closer to mine, and I felt that she knew it too.

She held my hair and looked in my eye. “We haven’t finished.” Her eyes flickered all over my face as she whispered and traced the line of my jaw, my lips, and my cheekbones with her fingers. I brushed her lips with mine.

Her other hand pressed its way down my stomach. I had to catch her and stop her. “Another centimeter and I may not be able to stop myself.”

“Can’t we just let him ring? Switch the phones off?”

“You think he’ll get calmer and more reasonable while we ignore him?” I was thinking about him, too. Bruto was starting to seem like a problem. Her lips tightened.
 

I brushed her lips with mine. She knew this was the beginning of us returning to the real world. She kissed me. Long, hard, deep, and soulful, I felt her pull every part of herself as tight and hard against me as she could.

At that moment, I would have given anything to just say ‘fuck it’ and switch off the phones. The consequences could have been terrible for her, though, and I couldn’t allow that. I was feeling very committed to protecting her now.

She wouldn’t break eye contact as the two of us reluctantly parted and hunted out our phones. We looked at the screens. I knew that hers said the same as mine.

You have 7 missed calls

And when I listed them, they were all from Bruto. She showed me her phone’s screen. It only listed the number. “Has Bruto not made it into your address book yet?” I joked. Her face showed me the next thoughts she had following on from that.

Bruto had plans to get himself a lot closer to Alexa than the contacts list on her phone. In her face, I saw her considering what that could involve. I had only got the briefest impression of how Tony had treated her.

Really, these mob guys all seemed to have such twisted ideas about women.

Her phone wasn’t showing voicemails. Mine had two. I guessed they were, “Where the fuck are you?” said two different ways. I decided I’d better listen to them before I called him, though.

She lifted her phone and was about to call. “Wait,” I told her. “I’ll hear the voicemails he left, then I’ll call him.”

Bruto’s first message just said, “Call me. You need to get back here.”

She came close as I was listening, craned her head. I tilted the phone so she could hear better. My body felt like it expanded as she came nearer. My cock lengthened.

The second message was four minutes after the first and it said, “Where the fuck have you gone, asshole? You’ve got a job to do. Get your ass back here. Stat.” And before he hung up he added, “And hers.”

With my arm around Alexa, I felt strong and sure, like there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t face. She held herself, firm and resilient, like she was making herself strong as she leaned against me, yet still I felt her nervousness.

She was apprehensive. I saw it as my job to give her reassurance. Let her feel that, whatever happened, I was there to back her up, to take care of her and to protect her.

With her still leaning against me, even as she wrapped her gorgeous flesh in the fine cotton sheet, my cock still very much wanted a say in the proceedings. To make the call I had to move away, go and stand by the window.

Bruto picked up. “Where the fuck are you?”

I was glad he didn’t wait for an answer, because I wasn’t too sure what to give him. “You need to get her back here, and fast. You understand me?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep the sullen reluctance out of my voice.

“I understand she put on a bit of a show at the meet with the Russians.”

“She was impressive.”

“From what I hear, that would be the least of it. Is it true she took Petrov’s knife from him, stuck it in the table?”

Where was Bruto getting his information?
“She certainly knows how to make a point.”
Was it the girl at the club,
I wondered,
or did he have someone inside Vassily’s crew?

He said, “Good girl. Now, bring her back.”

“She’s a bit whacked out, you know?”

There was a hollow pause. “I’ll assume that I’m not hearing you right, Luka. And maybe you’re not hearing me, either. Do I need to tell you a second time?”

“What’s happening, Bruto?”

“What’s it to you what’s happening? Carm’s coming.” I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. I thought he said ‘Calm.’ Then I realized what he meant. I never heard him call Carmine Monreale ‘Carm’ before.

Huddled in the sheet, Alexa had caught the sense of the conversation. Her eyes studied mine.

I said, “Carmine’s coming now?”

Bruto’s voice was a schoolyard sing-song, “Oh, I’m sorry, Luka, were you on your break? Were you on a roster for the early shift? Do you have a doctor’s appointment?”

“Yeah, okay, Bruto. I get the point. I’m on my way.”

“And bring her.” He hung up. I stared at the phone, then looked up at Alexa, in a ball with her arms around her knees and her face full of clouds.

“Carmine Monreale?” Her eyebrows steepled, puzzled and fearful. “I heard you,” she said, an apologetic explanation.

“You knew him from when you were little, right?”

“‘Knew’ could be to stretch a point. I’d see him when he came to the house. He was always pretty nice to me, yeah.”

“Did you call him ‘Uncle Carm’?”

“No,” she laughed, “I didn’t call him ‘uncle’ anything. I think he’d have hated that.”

“Okay,” I said, “but did you call him ‘Carm’?”

“Nobody called him ‘Carm.’ My father called him ‘Carmine’ and so did I.”

“It’s okay.” I tried to sound like I meant it. In this whole thing, she was all that I could see that was remotely okay. She looked afraid, but I’d take care of her. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to worry, but there’s no way to say that without worrying a person more.

We learned that in insurgent ops. There were times we’d have to crash someone’s house in the middle of the night. Whole villages, sometimes. Kids would wake. We might have to take the man of the house, sometimes the sons. Once it was two daughters.

Handling the other people in a household, we learned the more you do to try and reassure them, the more afraid they get. Be clear, decisive, do what you have to do. Be responsible as much as you can, but be efficient. And be gone. The sooner you’re not there, the happier they’re all going to be.
 

There wasn’t any point telling Alexa that a meeting with Carmine Monreale was going to be a walk in the park. Seemed like she knew him a lot better than I did, though, and from what I’d heard, he was most likely going to be good news for her.

Word had come to me when I was told I’d be taking care of Fat Tony’s fiancée, “Watch your step and don’t mess up. Carmine will be watching.” With Tony gone, though, there would be some big changes in Carmine’s organization.

It would be naive to assume that his top priority would be a girl he knew since she was a kid.

I hated leaving the room. Somehow it felt like a little home we’d made. Somewhere that belonged to the two of us.

In the elevator, she said quietly, “Next time, I’ll fight you off properly. I’ll make a better job of it.”

“What next time? I only do one time.”

She looked up at me. I said, “I’m the original ‘one and done’ guy.”

Her eyelashes beat like butterfly wings. “But you aren’t.”

“What?”

The back of her hand grazed the stretched fabric at the front of my pants. It had ached so much and so long my mind had almost numbed to it. “Done,” she said. “You’re not done.”

I swear, I thought my cock would grow teeth and bite its way out. Christ, my balls hurt.

Luka held the door to the apartment open for me. Knowing that Tony wasn’t coming back, I kind of expected the place to be empty. It wasn’t. It was like one of Tony’s meets: full of guys preening their sleek hair, adjusting jewelry, and looking at their manicured nails.

I recognized Massimo Ferraro, the hulking, thick-set man with a dark complexion and tight, gray curls. He was Tony’s opposite number, the family’s other underboss, as Tony had described them. There had always been a noisy rivalry between him and Tony.

When Massimo wasn’t eyeing me like a filet steak, I saw him glower in Bruto’s direction. Behind him, with his hands clasped in front of him, was a bear of a man with dark skin and wiry black hair trimmed into a thick buzzcut. Over the top of his shades, his eyes were hard.

In the big lounge area, Bruto sat at the head of the long table. Men with shades and black leather jackets lined the wall behind Carmine Monreale. The man himself stood like Old World aristocracy in a pale gray, silk suit. When he saw me, he opened his arms.

“Alexa,
bella
! You look wonderful,
tezora
.” He’d called me that when I was little. It meant “treasure” and it always gave me a warm feeling to hear it. His smile lit the room, even under his shadowed face and his sharp, hawkish eyes. I went to him and he hugged me warmly. He held on for a long time. It was an affectionate hug, like a little girl would be glad to receive from an uncle.

Not so much like that kind of hug I more often got from uncles when I was younger. Carmine was always different. When I said so to my father in private, though, he had always dismissed it saying, “Yeah, Carmine can be natural with everyone. It’s like that when you own everybody.”

That had made me more guarded with Carmine, and I still never knew whether I was right to be or not. He was a big man in a major crime family—I knew that like everybody did—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be decent to members of the family. Some of the bosses and capos were great family men. Some weren’t. Some you never really knew about.

Carmine held me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I know you’ll have heard about Tony.” He studied me. “It may not have been devastating news to you, Alexa. I understand that.” His eyes were kind and concerned. He looked sincere. But of course, they always do.

At that moment, I blamed my father for sowing doubt in my mind so long ago. It had stopped me from being able to judge for myself. That was what I told myself, although Carmine wasn’t an easy man to read. And I never missed an opportunity to curse my father.

“There will be changes, though, Alexa.” His eyes were on mine. My sense was that he was weighing my reaction. “You’ll be a part of the changes, come what may. You’re the responsibility of this part of the family now.”

‘Responsibility.’ When the ‘guys,’ as Tony called them, talked about responsibility, they were usually talking about either ownership or a problem. What they were responsible for belonged to them or they had to fix it. Was he telling me that I was owned now, even with Tony gone?

The only thing worse would be if they saw me as a problem. When the problem was a person, there was only ever one kind of a solution.
 

My eyes flicked to Bruto. He watched with a fierce attention. I wanted to see Luka, but he was somewhere behind me and I wasn’t sure it would be safe enough for me to turn away from Carmine.

This meeting was obviously going to make a big difference as to how my future turned out, but I couldn’t keep my mind completely off the unfinished business with Luka. It was just perfect that I’d start feeling the way that I did about an archetypal ‘one and done’ guy.