Hired

by Zoey Castile

  “Mi vida,” she whispers in my ear, and I find myself making a deep growling sound as I line my hips up with her and press the head of my cock inside her.

  We hold our breath, and I feel myself coming undone with the feel of her. Sliding deep into her sex unobstructed is like seeing stars, like sliding across some unexplored galaxy where only she and I exist. She grabs my ass and brings me closer. She shuts her eyes, and seeing her react this way to me makes me harder than ever. I bring her legs around my waist, and she locks them, driving me in up to the hilt.

  “You feel,” I start to say, but I lose myself in the rhythm of her hips grinding against me, the shake of this old fucking table, the way my heart beats to the same spitfire speed as hers. “You feel like love, Faith.”

  She pulls back, and for a moment I think I’ve messed this up. That the trip and the necklace and meeting her parents has been one long dream. But she smiles against my mouth. “I love you, mi reina.”

  Even though I’m fucking inside her, I laugh. It sends a different kind of pleasure through me. “Mi rey,” I correct her.

  “Mi rey,” she says, giggling.

  “I fucking love you,” I say and lift her, keeping her taut and wet pussy tight around my dick.

  I fuck her standing up. I fuck her while walking across the room. I fuck her as I settle her on this dainty pastel fainting couch.

  I pull out and she gets on her knees, looks over her shoulder. I climb up behind her, pushing her skirts back to around her waist. She holds the ends up and watches as I part her ass cheeks with my hands.

  “Aiden,” she whimpers, and I drag my tongue from her wet pussy and up. I run my dick through her swollen wet slit and sink in again. Every. Fucking. Time. Every fucking time it feels like the first time. I keep one hand on the small of her back and the other around her ass, each second harder and harder to keep quiet.

  With her like this, something wild and primitive sparks within me, and I feel myself start to shudder. I feel her walls, too, rippling around my cock, like they’re trying to draw my come out of me.

  She gives a tiny squeal as she comes, and that sends me over the edge. I try to pull out, but she pushes herself, further fucking my dick, and then everything I have is spent inside her.

  I kiss her shoulder. Stay this way for a moment longer.

  “We have to go back downstairs,” she says. “The speech will be over.”

  I look around the room for something to clean her so her pretty dress doesn’t get soiled. There are some handkerchiefs in a drawer, and they’ll have to do.

  “Thank you for not touching my hair,” she says, and plants a kiss on my cheek. She admires herself in the mirror. “You wouldn’t be able to tell I just got my brains fucked.”

  I come up behind her. Press my fingers to her chest. “Only if someone felt how hot your skin was.”

  “I can blame it on the heat.” She turns and brushes my hair back. “You, on the other hand. Close your tux. We ripped a button somewhere.”

  “Casualty of war,” I say.

  She fixes my tie, and I could get used to this. Faith taking care of me. Fixing details about me. Her eyes widen like she remembers something.

  “Aiden, that was so much money. You gave it all to the refuge?”

  “It didn’t feel right keeping her money.”

  “That’s how much you make?”

  “Made,” I say. “My attentions from here on out are yours and yours alone. If you’ll have me.”

  She takes my hand. “I want you, Aiden. I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you.”

  * * *

  When we leave the room, the coast is clear. Until we hear some shouting coming from the room beside us.

  It takes me a moment to recognize Ginny’s voice. I look down at Faith, who is also realizing something terrible is happening. That I’m going to act. I know that this can break everything we’ve fixed. I know that if I close my eyes, I don’t see Ginny at all, but my mother calling for help.

  “Aiden!” Faith calls for me, but I’m slipping out of her hand.

  I rush into the room.

  Reginald has her cornered. His hand is clamped down around her wrist and the other is in midair as Ginny hides behind her own arms.

  “Threaten to divorce me one more time,” he says, then stops when he realizes they’re not alone.

  “Don’t you fucking touch her,” I shout.

  I see red. I relive feelings I thought were gone. But they’re not gone. They’re right beneath the surface. I grab him around his shoulders.

  “Aiden, stop!”

  I underestimated him as a weak old man. He breaks my hold and sucker punches my nose. Sweat pours from my face. But when Ginny covers her face and screams, I realize it’s blood.

  “Aiden,” Ginny cries.

  Reginald snaps his gaze between us and then to Faith. “You’re him.”

  There’s a flash. A blinding pain in my right eye. I start to lunge at him, but someone grabs me around my waist.

  “Easy, brother,” Ricky says.

  What the—?

  He and Fallon are here, as are Betty the reporter, Robyn, and Maribelle.

  “Get out,” Reginald shouts. “He attacked me first. I’m going to press charges. I have witnesses.”

  I’m breathing so hard that blood keeps on flowing, a river of madness down my face.

  “What witnesses?” Robyn asks in a steely voice I’ve heard her mother use. “When I walked in you were hitting your wife, Mayor Moreaux.”

  The man’s blue eyes are wild, enraged. When he takes a step toward Robyn, I fight against Ricky and Fallon’s hold.

  “You’re not helping her,” Fallon whispers, and his voice brings me out of my rage spell.

  “Virginia,” Reggie says.

  The woman stands tall. Something passes between her and Faith that I could never understand.

  “I was so scared,” she says, but she’s not talking to her husband. She’s talking to the reporter. And that’s when I realize, this is Virginia’s out. It’s a needle of a shot, but she’s taking it. “I blacked out when Reggie was hurting me. This young man tried to stop him. The next thing I knew, he was bleeding.”

  “You,” Reginald says in a thundering voice. “I will destroy all of you.”

  “Try it,” Faith says. “We’ve got pictures.”

  “And I’ve got pictures of that trash you call a man.”

  “No, you don’t,” Betty LePaige says. She presses her finger to her camera, and it makes dozens of clicking noises. The mayor’s veins strain in his neck as he realizes what’s happening. “I deleted them. Everything.”

  “I’m going to sue you.”

  She shakes her head. “I never cashed your check, Mr. Mayor. Unlike you, I decided to keep my dignity.”

  “We’ll see you at the polls,” Maribelle says as the mayor storms out of the room.

  As Maribelle and Faith gather around with Ginny and Betty, I know that I shouldn’t be here.

  With Ricky shouldering my weight, we leave the room, take a back exit through the kitchen where no one can see. They put me in the car, and we drive in silence to the hotel, then get terrified looks as onlookers watch three guys in suits arrive covered in blood. We take the elevator up to my room, and by then I can walk on my own.

  “How did you guys end up there?” I ask, and the surprise of the sting is worse than the actual cut on my lip.

  “Well, as I’m creating jobs here, Mrs. Charles extended the invitation.”

  “Some of the guys are still there,” Fallon says. “What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t. I had just made up with Faith and then I heard Ginny cry. It reminded me of the way my mom cried when my dad yelled and tried to hit her. It’s like everything I wasn’t able to do back then just came rushing back. It’s still there.” I rub my hands on my face and wince. That motherfucker got me good. I’m almost mad that they stopped me from hitting him back, but then how would that have looked? I would h
ave gone to jail for sure. And then I would have lost Faith. That is, if I haven’t already.

  “We’ll leave you be,” Ricky says. “Clean yourself up. Then we can see if you need stitches.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assure them. “Hey, guys.”

  Fallon and Ricky turn around.

  “Thanks for saving me. Not just tonight.”

  Ricky smirks in that knowing way of his. “That’s what family’s for.”

  Once they’re gone, I realize I dropped my phone and Faith can’t even get in touch with me. I want to go back to the mansion, but that wouldn’t help anyone. Not the way I look now. Instead, I take a hot shower. All cleaned up, I take inventory of my face. There’s a bruise on my right eye, starting to swell, and a cut on the arch of my lip that’s red and looks like I got stung by a bee.

  I get some ice down the hall and use the plastic bag in the bucket to make a pack for my eye. At some point, I manage to fall asleep, even with the anxiety gnawing in my chest at not knowing where Faith is. Is she okay? What did she have to explain to her mother?

  I must have fallen asleep, because I know I’m dreaming. Warm hands wrap around my naked torso. Kisses up along my arm.

  “Faith,” I mutter.

  She kisses around the bruises and cuts. “Thank you for what you did. I know it must be hard for you.”

  I reach out, and it’s like she’s here. My eye’s so swollen I can hardly open it. “Mi vida,” I sigh. “I need you.”

  And then my body shudders as her mouth closes over my dick. Her tongue is so real. Her teeth playing with the sensitive skin around my head. Her perfect little mouth makes a popping sound that makes me raise myself up on the mattress. Fuck her soft, full mouth. She uses her hand to stroke my length. Jerks me up and down, rolling sexy licks with her tongue until I can’t take it anymore.

  “I’m going to come,” I sigh. I push my pelvis up. In my wildest dreams I never would imagine this. Faith under my covers. Faith licking the life out of me. I shake and gasp, rake my fingers on her shoulders. Not in my wildest dreams did I conjure the sight of her taking my load in her pouty mouth.

  Because she’s here, her mouth glossy with my come. She licks it off the top of her lip and then she kisses me.

  “You’re here,” I say.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Aiden.”

  Even though my muscles ache and I can only see out of one eye, I climb on top of her. Faith parts her legs for me, wet and waiting, and I sink into her soft, tight life force. Both of us search for something from the other. Love. Sex. Desire. And I give it all to her, surrender myself to this love that has changed me, broken me, put me back together into a man who will deserve her.

  25

  You Are My Home

  FAITH

  For an entire week Aiden and I live in our private little world. We hibernate in his hotel, nursing his bruises and cuts. He browns by the pool, and I read The Sky’s Not the Only Big Thing in Montana by Scarlett West because Patrick has a whole box of them in his room. It’s a strange thing to picture the lumberjack in the book as the same guy who gets mani-pedis with me in the hotel spa, but it’s only a cover.

  Aiden drinks hurricane after hurricane, and I take my whiskey on the rocks. I don’t completely eliminate the outside world. Maribelle keeps me up to date with the campaign, and my mother and I have started texting multiple times a day. Sometimes she asks me how Aiden is doing, because he left so early. I’ll say that having your own mother use peach and heart emojis is the single thing that makes you feel like you’re in bizarro world.

  She’s leading in the polls by record numbers, and I have a different kind of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, because it’s one thing to show predictions but it’s another to get people to actually vote this week. The Moreauxs hang over me like a raincloud. I keep waiting for Reginald Moreaux to start another slander campaign against my mother with me at the center. Virginia has assured me that he won’t make a move. Not when he has more to lose.

  I don’t want to pity her. I know she wouldn’t want that of me. But what I do have is a wish that she’ll find her way through this and come out stronger.

  Strength isn’t always easy to find. Every time Aiden tells me a story about his life, about growing up in Colombia and having the kind of father who turned his back on his family, I’m reminded that Aiden is one of the strongest people I know. Just like my mother. Just like Angie. The people around me are beacons of it.

  I know that I’m lucky.

  I’m loved.

  He doesn’t let me forget it. All of it comes in different ways. In the way he searches for me in a crowded restaurant and finds I’m already looking at him. When we’re spread out on the couch and his fingers trace my skin absentmindedly. It’s in the way he pulls me close to him after hours of sex, how he loves my smell on him, how he makes sure I come first.

  But mostly, I know it when he puts me on the phone with his tía Ceci and she talks to me for so long that I suggest she take my number instead of his.

  I see it in the pendant glittering on my chest, a pale whiskey brown just like his eyes. A remnant of the woman who shaped this man’s heart.

  When the week is up, I stand in the middle of the room wearing one of his soccer jerseys and my underwear.

  “Hey, baby,” I say.

  “Mi reina?” he says, eyes lingering on my freshly lotioned legs.

  “We have to get dressed. Polls open in an hour.”

  “You can’t go dressed like that.” He climbs his way across the sofa, moving his torso and pelvis like he’s practicing one of Angie’s new moves. “I’ll help you take it off.”

  AIDEN

  I’ve never seen a second line so big before, but there’s more than enough reason to celebrate.

  Mayor Daria Charles celebrates right along with the city on a warm, sunny afternoon. There’s confetti and music and so much dancing that if I close my eyes, I can almost envision being home for carnaval. Even if the music is different, the feel of it is the same.

  I hang back and let Faith be with her family. Angie and the boys join the revelry on the streets. We grab drinks in one of the Quarter’s bars that’s waving rainbow flags and serving up a cocktail called Daria Darling.

  Never in my life have I seen a city celebrate like this. It’s like being in the middle of history, and for the first time in so long, I am more at home than I’ve been anywhere.

  When I look at Faith, grinning from ear to ear as she glides down the street, I know that she’s the reason.

  * * *

  We go our separate ways for most of the day. Family time is family time, and I understand that. I stay with Angie, Robyn, and the boys eating our fill of hot wings and drinking beer at a bar with an outdoor garden. When the sky gets dark, the entire place comes to life with ropes of white lights. Music pumps from the massive speakers, and even though there isn’t a dance floor, Angie and Vin are dancing with a couple of girls they were chatting up.

  Faith walks into the garden in the simple white dress she was wearing this morning, and my entire body comes alive when her eyes meet mine.

  The lights above us flicker when we kiss.

  “We have to stop doing that,” she says, taking a seat beside me.

  The song changes, the beat sexy and slow, and instead of letting her sit, I pull her to dance with me.

  “Congratulations,” I tell her.

  She wraps her arms around my neck. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.” I kiss her nose, and she kisses my upper lip. The cut there is only the faintest pink scar. My eye has only the slightest shade of green. She always kisses those parts, like she’s healing me with her own life.

  A waitress comes over and gives us two celebratory hurricanes on the house.

  “Your favorite drink,” I tease her.

  She rolls her eyes playfully, but thanks the young girl regardless. “What should we cheers to?”

  “To your mother.”

  “To our mot
hers,” she says.

  We clink our glasses and we slurp the sweet liquor. She sets the drink on the table and takes my hand in hers.

  “Time to go home,” she says. Her brown eyes are so full of light. I want to spend my entire life making sure they stay that way.

  “Do you need to get your things from the hotel?” I kiss her bare shoulder.

  She makes the sweetest sigh. “Actually, I’m being presumptuous but I was hoping that we could both get our things.”

  “Faith Abigail Charles,” I say, so close our noses almost touch. “Are you sure? What if my bathroom habits change? What if you hate the way I start chewing or breathing in the middle of the night or the way I fold my pants?”

  “Believe me, if you’re going to live with me, your bathroom habits are going to be pristine.”

  “Tempting.” I pull back and take a gulp of my drink. “You don’t have a gym, do you?”

  “Aiden,” she says, a playful whine in her voice.

  I wrap my arm around her small waist, and even though she wriggles against me for a moment, she eventually sinks into me. Kisses me so deeply someone (Pat probably) at the table clears their throat.

  “Let’s go get our things,” I say. “But I do expect turndown service.”

  “You’re not getting any kind of service with talk like that,” she says, but she can’t stop smiling.

  Before she can leave the garden, I pull her against my chest, cup her face in my hands, and stare deep in her eyes.

  “I’ll go wherever you want, whenever you want, Faith. I’d live here in New Orleans or in some wild place saving the world. Say the word and I’m there alongside you for as long as you’ll have me, and do you know why?”

  She juts her chin out in that way that captivated me so. “Why?”

  “Because you’re my Faith. You’re my home.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without Natalie Horbachevsky and Sarah Younger. All of my readers owe Faith’s and Aiden’s adventures across New Orleans to you.

  My endless gratitude to Adrienne Rosado for all your hard work, and my editor, Norma Perez-Hernandez, for being a ray of sunshine. Thank you to everyone on the wonderful Kensington squad, especially Lauren Jernigan, James Akinaka, Jane Nutter, Alexandra Nicolajsen, Vida Engstrand, Paula Reedy, and the production team.