by Sam Mariano
“Just take them. Pick a fucking dress or something, Jesus Christ.”
My eyes widen. “I can wear the boots?”
“You can have the boots. Come on, I don’t have all day.”
I push up off the ground and peruse the rack, looking for something to go with the white boots. Carly is more fashion-forward than I am, but I settle on a black and white striped dress with shoulder cut-outs that should work.
Sin shuts the closet door and walks out ahead of me. Pushing open the bathroom door and gesturing for me to go inside, he tells me curtly, “You’ve got ten minutes. If you’re not out in ten minutes, I’ll be in to check on you.”
Since I’m on a time limit, I make quick work of undressing and jumping in the shower. The little bottles of shampoo and conditioner I picked up at the drug store last night are in here, so he must have brought my bags inside this morning.
I’m paranoid he’s going to come inside, so I hurry through the shower and wrap a towel around my body, just in case. I don’t have my own brush, so I finger comb my hair and grab my emergency make-up out of my purse.
A knock sounds, then Sin’s voice. “Almost done?”
“Almost,” I assure him. “Two more minutes.”
I can’t do much in two minutes, but I coat my lashes with mascara and brush some color on my lips.
When the door opens, I’m fully dressed and just bending to slide my heel inside the pretty white boot. Fortunately, it fits like a glove.
Sin pauses, his dark eyes traveling over my body from head to toe and lingering on my boots. They make another trip up, but he’s paying more attention to my body—or the dress?—than me, I think.
I start to speak, but I feel like I’m interrupting, so I stop. He finally concludes his perusal, sighs quietly, then turns around and heads down the stairs.
I flip the light off and cradle all my stuff in my arm as I follow him. “Do you have a bag I could put my clothes in?” I ask him.
He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a balled up grocery bag. I straighten it out, murmuring an absent thank you, and dump my clothes inside.
Sin takes my cell phone out of his jacket pocket and hands it to me.
Eyeing him warily, I take it. It’s fully charged now, so he must have plugged it in at some point, but I don’t know how; it was in my purse. My purse which I slept with. That means he must have opened my purse and rooted around for the phone while I slept—that’s vaguely creepy.
“There’s a message from Rafe,” he informs me.
My heart drops into my gut. “What? He doesn’t have my phone number.”
“I gave it to him,” Sin states.
Instead of the excitement a message from Rafe might have stirred in me yesterday, now there’s dread. I don’t want to read whatever mean shit he has to say to me. I don’t want more accusations that I’m lying, more flippant insults about my sister. He can fuck off, that’s what he can do.
Instead of responding to his message—or even reading it—I slide the phone in the pocket of my purse and look up at Sin. “I’m hungry.”
He blinks at me. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Feed me,” I suggest. Gesturing past him, I indicate the kitchen. “There’s probably food in here, right?”
“Not really.”
“Then let’s go somewhere. Vegas must have lots of places to eat. Can we go to Caesar’s Palace? The mall where the ceiling changes colors? They probably have a food court, right?”
The man who kidnapped and cuffed me to his bed stares at me like I’m the freak. “Are you for real right now? You want me to escort you around a fucking tourist attraction and buy you food?”
I shrug. “I had to sleep with you last night; I think you owe me a meal.”
“I didn’t fuck you.”
“My stomach doesn’t care.”
Sin rubs his forehead, looking completely fucking baffled. He looks at me again—well, at my dress—then heaves a sigh, pats his pocket, and says, “Come on.”
12
Laurel
I didn’t understand why the waitress looked at me so strangely as I was ordering, but now that she brings out a tray overflowing with more food than we could consume if we had five more people with us, I begin to understand.
“Somebody must be hungry,” she states, lowering the enormous tray and moving a big plate of fried mozzarella and a similarly large plate of fried zucchini onto the table. Following that, she puts down two family-sized portions of two different pastas.
I look across the table at Sin. “This is a lot of food. Like, a lot of food.”
Without a care in the world, he shrugs. “Hey, you said you were hungry.”
“Yes, me, not me and 12 of my closest friends. Did you know there would be this much food?”
He outright grins. “Yep.”
My stomach flutters at the first real smile I’ve seen from him. He has a really nice smile.
“I hope you save room for dessert,” the waitress jokes.
“Oh, we’ll be having dessert,” Sin assures her.
I lift my eyebrows, surveying the bounty on the table. “I would normally agree with that, but I’m thinking that’s an impossibility today.”
“Eh, you could use a little meat on your bones,” the matronly waitress assures me.
His eyes dancing with pleasure, Sin adds, “And you’re eating for two now. The baby needs dessert.”
The waitress gasps and flushes with pleasure. “Aw, congratulations! That must be why you’re glowing.”
I glare at Sin across the table and he smirks, not even sparing me a glance as he scoops pasta onto his plate.
Once the waitress is gone, I reach for some fried mozzarella. “You’re an asshole.”
“Just stating the facts,” he replies.
We barely put a dent in the obscene amount of food we ordered. I blame myself for not reading the menu more carefully, because upon further investigation, I see this restaurant serves food family-style and the food is meant for sharing. It’s been ages since I’ve had family-style food. Nana and Granddad used to serve dinner family-style, but Carly and I usually just sit on the couch and eat while we watch television.
Vince’s family back in Chicago eats at a table, but they have maids who bring out plated meals like a restaurant. For Easter, Mateo’s wife helped serve dessert, but I got the impression it was more about tradition than anything. They live in a house the size of a museum, so she probably doesn’t have to lift a finger if she doesn’t want to.
Glancing across the table at Sin, I watch him tear open a piece of bread and spread some butter on it. I wonder if they have dinners like that here. It’s the same family, so maybe they share the same traditions.
“How long have you worked for the Morellis?” I ask Sin.
His gaze hastily sweeps the area around us, then he shoots me a warning look. “Six years. We don’t need to talk about that in public.”
“How old were you six years ago?”
Amusement flickers in his gaze again. “I was 21.”
I nod, satisfied I got two pieces of information out of him. “So you’re 27.”
“You’re intimidating me with that big brain of yours,” he replies.
This isn’t the first time he’s poked fun at me for the supposed breadth of my knowledge. “I never said anything about being smart, so why do you keep picking on me?”
“Rafe did. A couple times.”
“Well, I must not be too smart or I wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with,” I inform him.
Sin shrugs. “You said you used a condom. Sounds like you did what you were supposed to do. If anyone fucked up, it had to be him.”
“Maybe he’s the one who screwed up that night, but I’m obviously the one who fucked up by coming here.”
“Did you know who he was when you fucked him?” Sin asks, reaching for his water glass and watching me over the rim as he takes a sip.
I break a piece of fried zucc
hini in half, replaying the first moment I saw him in my head again. “Not exactly, but I knew he was family of Mateo’s. I knew enough to know better,” I offer. “My sister tried valiantly to stop me, but… well, my libido won that round.”
“Happens to the best of us,” he offers.
“Until Ben’s funeral, I didn’t realize the extent of it. Then he had, like… an army of soldiers with him. Then I realized he must be pretty important.”
“Yeah, you looked pretty isolated over there.”
Blinking at him, I ask, “You were there?”
He cocks an eyebrow. “At the funeral? Of course I was there. I served under Ben for six years; you think I wouldn’t go to his funeral?”
That surprises me. The way he says it like that’s unimaginable, when I’ve only ever heard terrible things about Benito Morelli. “Did you like him? Everyone I’ve talked to didn’t like him.”
Sin shrugs, like it doesn’t much matter. “He was all right. He ran things right, that’s what counts. You’ve only talked to the Chicago side of the family, so I’m not surprised no one liked him. Ben’s brother ran Chicago, and now his nephew. They all hated each other. There’s a reason they kept half a country between them.”
“Well, Rafe was in Chicago, so he must be on good enough terms with them.”
“Now he is,” Sin agrees. “That’s a recent development. None of us liked the Chicago Morellis, but then your brother-in-law brought Mateo’s wife out here and all hell broke loose.”
My brow furrows. I know highlights about my brother-in-law’s life prior to meeting Carly, but the full story remains a bit of a mystery to me. “Vince? You mean when he and Mia were together? Like, they lived out here or something?”
Sin shakes his head. “They weren’t together. She wore Mateo’s ring. I guess Vince didn’t take the break-up so well, decided to kidnap her and bring her the one place Mateo couldn’t step foot.”
My sister’s husband kidnapped the woman whose Easter dinner we went to? What? “I am so confused.”
Apparently explaining this to me is more than he wants to deal with. “Don’t worry about it. We didn’t like each other, now we do. End of story.”
“My sister is married to a kidnapper?” I demand. This seems like it warrants more than a glossing over. I understand he’s a bad-guy-for-pay, but I’m a college student, dammit; I don’t know how to process this information. “Does she know that?”
“Kidnapping is essentially one of the stages of courtship in this family,” he says, like I’m overreacting. “Nothing to get all upset about.”
I can only stare at him, eyes wide, mouth agape. “This is not normal.”
“We aren’t normal,” he states.
I notice even though Rafe told me Sin was not technically a Morelli, Sin refers to himself like he’s one of them. Given he thinks kidnapping is a socially acceptable way of courting a woman, and the hours I spent tied to his bed last night, I can’t help being curious. “Do you exercise similar methods of expressing your attraction to a woman?”
Shooting me a strange look, he remarks, “That’s a weird way to ask if I want to fuck you.”
“I wasn’t asking if you wanted to—” Cutting myself off, now I glance around. The restaurant is pretty empty and there’s no one seated anywhere near us. Clearing my throat, I take a sip of water. “That isn’t what I was asking. Obviously since you’re Rafe’s friend, my automatic assumption is that you don’t want to sleep with me.”
“Already slept with you,” he points out. “Just didn’t fuck you.”
Subtly pressing a palm against my warm cheek, I curse myself for not putting foundation in my purse. If ever there was a time I needed it, this would be the day.
“And why would my being his friend mean that?” he adds.
I look up at him. “I don’t know. Loyalty?”
“I’ve seen him treat professional hookers with more respect than he showed you last night,” Sin states. “After that performance, I wouldn’t feel bad about fucking you. Frankly, I would think he deserved it.”
“Can we stop talking about this?” I request. “I know I brought it up, but…”
Apparently unconcerned, Sin shrugs and pops a piece of fried zucchini into his mouth. “Tell me about this pregnancy.”
“What more is there to tell?” I ask.
“You’re sure it’s Rafe’s?”
I can’t help feeling mildly irritated by the question after last night. “Yes, I am positive it’s Rafe’s. I haven’t had sex with anyone else since him. Barring the second coming, it’s his.”
“No one shortly before him?”
“Rafe is the only man I have had sex with in over a year,” I state.
His eyebrow rise, like that surprises him. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, my eyes dropping to the plate.
“Well, that does narrow it down,” he admits. “What ripples do you think it would cause?”
“Ripples?”
Nodding once, he reminds me, “You said if Vince found out Rafe got you pregnant, there could be devastating ripples. Expand on that.”
I really, really, really don’t want to talk about this, especially with him. “I think there’s a major conflict of interest here. You obviously work for Rafe, he is obviously a little worried about Vince… I don’t know about all this kidnapping business, but my impression of my brother-in-law is that he’s a pretty good guy, so I would feel terrible if I got him in some kind of trouble. I don’t think we should talk about that.”
If I expected Sin to accept my unwillingness to give potentially incriminating analyses about my brother-in-law, I was heading for disappointment. Minor annoyance flickers in his dark eyes as he looks up at me, and his tone shifts, taking on more authority. “When I ask a question, Laurel, I expect an answer.”
Poking this bear probably isn’t a great idea, but what can he really do to me in a public restaurant? Smiling pleasantly, I remark, “We don’t always get what we expect out of life, do we, Sin?”
Sin is not amused. “Just answer the damn question.”
“Or what? You’ll tie me to your bed again?”
“Maybe,” he answers, easily. “Maybe this time I’ll break out all four cuffs. Tie those pretty little ankles up, too. Stand at the foot of the bed and take in the view. What color are your emergency panties, Laurel?”
He asks the questions so casually, but by the end, my face is on fire and my stomach is in knots. Now that I’m acquainted with his bed and the soft leather cuffs, I can picture the bed where I’d be spread out, feel the soft leather restraints rendering me helpless. I can even smell the shower-fresh scent of him and visualize what he looks like naked as he climbs on top of my helpless body.
Fuck, I need to go home. I’ve already done this vacation hook-up bullshit, and I do not need more of that. When did criminals get so hot?
“I asked you a question,” he states.
“I can’t remember the question,” I reply, honestly. I’m struggling to remember anything with sordid visuals flying through my mind. “When do I get to go home? I really need to go home.”
His gaze drops to the food and he grabs another zucchini disc, breaking it in half. Without looking up at me, he states, “You’ll have to talk to Rafe first.”
“I already talked to Rafe.”
Sin shrugs. “He wants to talk to you again. He may be a pain in the ass, but the man tends to get what he wants.”
“Fine.” Bending to retrieve my purse, I put it on my lap and dig out my cell phone. As much as I’ve been dreading it, if talking to him is what I have to do to get out of this place, then I’ll talk to the bastard. There’s a new message from him now, but I swipe open the message before I bother reading it.
The first one reads, “Make it home safely?”
I roll my eyes. Like he fucking cares. Asshole.
A second message only an hour later reads, “According to the airline, you have, so I assume you don’t want to talk to me.”
You assume right. Someone get the man a prize.
The newest message reads, “I have to admit, I don’t love being ignored.”
Snorting with laughter, I mutter, “Yeah, bet you’re not used to it, are you?”
“Not used to what?” Sin asks.
Flicking a glance in his direction, I say, “Being ignored. Rafe isn’t a big fan, apparently.”
The left corner of his mouth tugs up. “No, I don’t imagine he would be.”
Instead of texting Rafe back, I look across the table at Sin. “You know what’s weird? Rafe seems to think I’m back in Connecticut.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah,” I drawl.
“Strange.”
Huffing, I put my phone down on the table. “Well, what am I supposed to say to him?”
“Ask why he’s texting you,” Sin directs.
“He’s asking about my flight.”
“He doesn’t give a fuck about your flight,” he returns. “He’s making up reasons to talk to you. Find out why.”
“I don’t care why,” I tell him, honestly. “Why do I have to do this? What are you hoping to get out of it?”
“Would you just send the damn text?”
“I don’t want to,” I say, pushing the phone away. “He was a dick to me and I don’t want to indulge his bullshit behavior. Chain me to your bed for the rest of my life, or let me go home, but I’m not texting Rafe. He can go suck a dick.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sin mutters, grabbing my phone off the table and tapping out a text himself.
While he texts Rafe from my phone, I stuff myself full of pasta. I’m already starting to feel full, but it tastes so good, and there’s still so much left. Once he’s finished, he slides the phone back across the table and eyes me skeptically.
I grab my water and wash down the mouthful of pasta. “What?”
Instead of answering me, he just shakes his head.
13
Rafe
I sit in the car outside the club, growing more and more agitated as the minutes tick past. Sin is late on occasion, but today he is really fucking late, and Edmund Carmichael needs to be dealt with.