“I know she will.” Papa patted her on the back. “And now I think Grazia won’t mind so much the ride to school.”
“My name is Grace.” For some reason, it was important that Rocco call her Grace and not her full, formal, boring Italian name.
“I am honored to be your driver, passerotta.”
Her lips twitched at the corners. Although he hadn’t used her name, his term of endearment acknowledged she wasn’t a little kid like Tom, but instead was “learning to fly.”
Papa went to collect Tom, and she followed Rocco out to his car. It was shiny and red, and the front was long and round. “How old are you, anyway?” she asked. “Are you even legal to drive?”
“Twenty.”
She studied him, pursing her lips as if deep in thought. “You don’t look twenty.”
“You don’t sound ten.”
“How come you’re driving us around? Don’t you have a job?”
“This is my job.” His smile faded as he opened the front passenger door and ushered her inside.
Before she could ask what was wrong, Papa showed up with Tom and a few minutes later they were on the road.
“You got any music?” she asked, uncomfortable with the silence. Tom was in the back seat fully engaged in playing a video game.
“I don’t know any kids’ stations but you can try to find something you like.”
“I don’t listen to kids’ music.” She pulled out her MP3 player and held it up for him to see. “I like the oldies. Frank Sinatra is my favorite.”
His hands jerked on the steering wheel, making the car swerve. “You listen to Frank Sinatra?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I’m not embarrassed about it either. His songs are cool.”
He laughed out loud, and the sound made her grin. She wanted to hear him laugh again, watch his eyes crinkle at the corners, and the lines on his brow smooth with his smile. “Do you like Sinatra?”
“Maybe a little.”
“My mom loved his songs.” Her bottom lip quivered, her mother’s death still a fresh wound in her heart. “That’s how I know them all. When I listen to them I think of her.” She turned to the window so he didn’t see her tears.
“Lamento la muerte de tu madre.” He reached over and squeezed her hand. His touch eased the ache in her heart, and she turned to study his face.
“I lost my mother, too. Both parents, actually. When I was six.” His words came out stilted as if he had to force each one out. “I don’t have very many memories of them, but I remember my mother singing in church. She had a beautiful voice. Do you like to sing, Gracie?”
Her bottom lip trembled. “I love singing. I used to sing with my mom.”
“Let’s see if we can find something for you to sing.” He turned the radio to her favorite station and the first bars of Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” played through the speakers.
“That’s my favorite Sinatra song,” Grace said, blinking back her tears.
“Mine, too.”
How could they have so much in common? He called her Gracie. Just like Mama. He liked her music and he wanted to hear her sing. His favorite song was Grace’s favorite song, and he’d lost his mother, too.
It was all too much. She hadn’t cried since the day Mama died, but this man, with his handsome face and his beautiful voice, his kind words and his gentleness, had touched the very essence of who she was. He saw the girl who missed her mother, and through their shared passion and experience, he saw something more.
She felt safe with him—safe enough to let go.
“I can’t sing today,” she whispered. And then she leaned against his big strong arm and cried.
THREE
Guilt drove him to “Hell.”
Hellfire, a club for special guests with particular needs, had only just opened when Rocco parked his bike in the back alley, a few blocks away from the Freemont Street Experience in downtown Vegas. After checking the street to make sure he hadn’t been followed, he slid his membership card through the reader beside the unmarked, black steel door and descended the well-worn stairs.
Rocco didn’t come to the sex club to socialize. He had never had a drink at the bar, sat in the lounge, or enjoyed any of the play equipment on offer. He wasn’t here for sex, and the only kink he had was a need for pain so great, only one man could give it to him without causing permanent damage.
Clay, the owner of Hellfire, and once a bounty hunter for the mob, specialized in pain. Only the lash of Clay’s whip could give Rocco the numbness he needed to get through each day without self-destructing. And he had never needed that emotional void as he needed it tonight.
What the fuck had he been thinking? He had almost destroyed Grace’s life before, and he was about to do it again. She hated the mob and everything that went with it. A good man would leave her alone and let her live the new life she had created for herself in Vegas.
But he wasn’t a good man.
He was a self-centered bastard, and he couldn’t stay the fuck away.
Not on his own.
By the time he reached the dungeon, he knew an ordinary session wouldn’t be enough. Already, cracks had formed in the walls that kept his emotions at bay, and memories trickling out, a warning of the rising tide.
He pushed open the door and dropped his bag on a nearby bench. Clay had managed to squeeze him in to his busy Saturday-night schedule, and he was already checking his equipment at the back of the room. He knew better than to try and engage Rocco in conversation. Rocco came to Hellfire to suffer the way he made others suffer, and tonight he had come to atone for the sin of coveting something he could destroy with his touch.
After stripping off his jacket, shirt, and shoes, he crossed the floor in bare feet, lifting his hands to the shackles hanging overhead. Clay came up behind him and fastened the strong, steel cuffs around his wrists.
“Cuffs okay? Anything hurt?”
Rocco shook his head and steadied himself for the lash of the whip that would beat Grace out of his mind and return him to the state of numbness that had been his life since the last day he’d seen her in New York.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
The hiss of the flogger echoed in the chamber and Rocco gritted his teeth in frustration. Clay always warmed him up first with a flogger or a light whip, but tonight Rocco wanted pure, raw, and unadulterated pain.
“Get something harder.”
“I’m warming you up or I’ll damage the skin.” Clay struck again and Rocco hissed out a breath. “Fuck the warm up.”
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Clay said, not unkindly. “You aren’t in a position to do anything about it. Someone has to save you from yourself.”
“It’s too fucking late to save me.”
By the time Clay finished the warm-up, his body was hot and sweaty, his skin burning like it had been licked by fire. Clay gave him a minute to catch his breath, and then the real pain began.
Searing. Slicing. White Hot. Mind numbing.
Pain.
Pain that took his breath away.
Pain that wiped his memories.
Pain that demanded his full attention and swept everything from its path. Except this time the pain wasn’t enough. Instead of blissful numbness, he was dragged into the memory of the first time he kissed Grace. His moment of weakness. The night he had sealed their fate.
* * *
“Don’t take me home. I just want to drive.” Grace slid into Rocco’s car, and all he saw were legs. Long, tanned, toned legs going all the way up from a sexy pair of cowboy boots to a frayed pair of cut-off denim shorts. She was wearing one of those floaty tops she liked that he could see right through and some kind of leather vest with fringes.
Fuck. His hands clenched around the steering wheel as he pulled away from the curb. Why the hell did her aunt let her go out dressed like that? He didn’t know what the style was called but there was always something torn and something flimy and a hell of a lot of ski
n and it drove him fucking crazy. She was only sixteen for fuck sake.
“Thanks for coming to get me. I had to get out of there.” She pulled the door closed and leaned back in her seat, running a hand through the soft, thick waves of her hair.
Jesus Christ. It was better when she wore a ponytail. And jeans. And big sweaters. Although the sweaters were always hanging off to one side exposing the creamy skin of her shoulder and the jeans hugged every curve of her beautiful body.
Sweat beaded on his brow and he took a deep breath and focused on the road, letting her words slowly sink in as he got a grip of his out-of-fucking-control dick. She was sixteen and the daughter of the underboss. He was twenty-six and an enforcer, the lowest of the low.
“You’re quiet.” She looked over at him, her face soft in the glow of the streetlights. She’d been drinking. He knew her so well, he could tell how many drinks she’d had by how many lines of worry had smoothed from her beautiful face. Her mother’s death still haunted her, but nothing had affected her as much as finding out the truth about her father. Now she lived in a postwar on First Avenue with her maternal aunt, instead of the big mansion in Tappan, New Jersey, where there were guards patrolling the premises and her father could put his foot down if she went out showing too much skin.
He couldn’t answer her for the lust throbbing through his veins. Something had changed when she turned sixteen. His affection for the underboss’s daughter had suddenly turned to desire when she climbed into his car one day and he realized she wasn’t a young girl any more.
“What are you listening to tonight?” She reached for the radio and her shirt fell open revealing a pink lace bra. All his blood rushed downward, and the car veered wildly toward the curb. How the fuck was he going to get her home? Every inadvertent brush of her hand on his arm, every light touch on his shoulder, the scent of her perfume, and the heat of her body, so close and yet beyond his reach, all combined to create a torture worse than anything Cesare could have devised as part of Rocco’s training to become an enforcer.
With his gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead, he shrugged. He didn’t need to answer. She knew what would be on the radio. It was always tuned to the classic hits station—big band, Sinatra and the Rat Pack, jazz, and blues—because those were the songs she loved to sing.
“What happened?” he finally managed to get out.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She leaned languid in the seat, arms over her head, legs apart, body swaying gently to the music. Rocco drew in a shuddering breath, forced his thoughts away from the beautiful girl beside him and back to the meal he’d had for dinner, the game he’d watched on TV, the last job he’d done for Cesare … anything but her.
“Your aunt okay with you being out this late?” Her aunt had become her guardian after she’d left the family home unable to deal with the fact that everything her father had given her had come from money he’d earned doing work for the mob—ironically, the same organization that paid for the car Rocco drove, the gas that fueled it, and the clothes he was wearing right now. Did she know he was part of the same organization? They never talked about what he did when he wasn’t with her or how he came to work for her family, and she’d never told him why she’d left the family home. He knew only because her father had called him up the next day and explained the situation. Then he’d asked Rocco for a favor. Protect her. Drive her anywhere she needed to go, anytime she called. She trusted Rocco, he said. And he trusted Rocco with her. It would be an arrangement outside Rocco’s mandate as an enforcer. Cesare was not to know.
Even if he hadn’t been tempted by the possibility of being owed a favor by the underboss, he would have said yes. He would do anything for her. It wasn’t his first defiance of Cesare’s rules. And it wouldn’t be his last.
“Yeah. I told her a friend was picking me up. Things were getting out of hand.”
His heart leaped like he’d been shot with adrenaline. “What the fuck happened? Did someone touch you?”
Her lips tightened and she looked away, her silence triggering his protective instincts. They were passing the park in Batsto so Rocco headed for the Warren Grove bombing entrance and parked the car in a shadowed area of the lot. This late at night, there was no one at the park although the lights kept vandalism to a minimum.
“Tell me.” He turned off the car and stared at her in the silence.
“It’s okay, Rocco. I’m okay.” She opened the door and stepped outside.
Rocco drew in a ragged breath and tried to get a grip on the maelstrom of emotion that threatened to overwhelm him. Through a combination of torture, pain and deprivation, enforcers were taught to control their emotions. But when it came to Grace, Rocco couldn’t contain them.
“Grace.” He slammed open his door and rounded the car to where she was now leaning against the front bumper, looking out into the dark forest, the lights of the city twinkling in the distance. “If someone hurt you, I’ll find him and—”
“Shhh.” She put a finger to his lips. “No one hurt me. No one touched me. That’s the point. I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want to dance with anyone or kiss anyone. I didn’t want to fool around in one of the bedrooms like all my friends. I wanted you.”
No. No. No. This wasn’t happening. Not with the underboss’s daughter ten years his junior, whose safety had been entrusted to him by her father. She might not understand, but in the Mafia hierarchy, he was nothing. Boss, Underboss, Consigliere, Capo, Soldier, Associate, and then outside, but beneath the structure, the enforcers. A necessary evil.
“You don’t want me.” He drew her fingers away but for the life of him, he couldn’t let go.
“I think about you all the time.” She pushed herself to sit up on the hood, licked her lips drawing his attention to the lush bow of her mouth. “No one knows more about me than you, Rocco.” She leaned forward, put her hands on his waist and drew him forward between her parted legs. Her touch seared through his body straight to his cock, and his vision blurred.
“Grace…” His voice caught, broke.
“Do you think about me?” She looked up at him though those long, dusky lashes and he let out a groan. Cesare had beat him, so he would not feel—empathy, sympathy, guilt, desire, regret, longing, anger, fear, hate, love. He had to be ice, stone, cold and calculating to do the jobs no one else could do. But Grace had always been the chink in his armor. She was the crack that let the light shine through.
“No. I don’t think about you.” His words sounded unconvincing even to him. “Now stop this and I’ll take you home.”
“Liar.” She pulled him closer until her arms were wrapped around his body and their hips were pressed together and her breasts were tight against his chest. “I can feel you want me,” she whispered, rocking gently against an erection so hard it was beyond any pain Cesare had ever given him.
“I’m too old for you.” He touched her, his hands on her arms, his intent to push her away, and yet he couldn’t help but caress the softness of her skin, the narrow dip of her waist, the sweet curve of her hips.
“You’re perfect for me.”
Everything Cesare had taught him about inner strength and self-control fell away as his arms tightened around her. She felt right, like he’d found something he had never known was missing and in that moment he knew he had been born to be hers and she was meant to be his. And he knew something else. He would never let her go.
“You’re too young,” he protested. “You should be with a guy your age.” Now that his hands were moving, he couldn’t stop. He slid them through the hair he’d imagined holding so many times, tangled his fingers through the silky softness.
“They aren’t you, Rocco.” She leaned up, slid her arms around his shoulders and pulled him down until their lips met.
And then he was lost, swept away in a tidal wave of sensation. So soft. So sweet. So right. He hugged her to his chest and kissed her until there was no breath left in his body, and the world had narrowed to the girl in his a
rms, the pounding of his heart, and the single most beautiful moment of his entire wretched life.
* * *
The pain receded and his vision cleared. He started, jerked, coming fully to himself when the chains clanked overhead. He tried to look over his shoulder to see what the hell was going on. Once he established a rhythm, Clay never quit until Rocco passed out or went slack in the chains.
“What the fuck?”
“Your phone. You told me to stop if I ever heard Limp Bizkit’s disastrous cover of “Faith.”
Fuck. It was Cesare.
“Bring it here.”
Clay brought the phone over and used the quick release to free Rocco’s wrists. He helped Rocco over to a bench by the wall and slid the phone into his partially bloodless hand. Always discrete, he left the room so Rocco could have privacy for the call.
“Cesare.”
“I have a contract for you.” Cesare didn’t waste time with pleasantries and, as always, his gravelly voice made Rocco’s stomach twist in a knot of hate. “Nunzio Mantini is in Vegas with his son. The don sent them to find out what the hell is going on with the Toscanis. They’ve only got two bodyguards with them. I want them gone. We have Luigi’s permission for the hit.”
Luigi Cavallo was the Gamboli family consigliere, a senior family advisor who was equal to the underboss in rank. His permission was the don’s permission, and yet why would the don have sent Nunzio to Vegas to meet with the Toscanis if he didn’t expect him to return? The Toscani situation had escalated to the point where the body count was sure to attract the feds, and no one wanted the feds sniffing around.
“They are having dinner with the Bianchi family before they leave,” Cesare continued. “I’ll call with the details. Do it then. The Bianchis are expendable.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job.”
Fuck. Rocco rarely had any qualms about his contracts. The De Lucchi crew were usually only called upon to punish the most egregious of crimes or to send the most serious of messages, and their victims were almost always the worst of the worst, career criminals who had taken many lives. Nunzio Mantini would have whacked more than his fair share of men to achieve the position of underboss, but he had been a good, loving father to Grace, and as far as Rocco knew, he was loyal to the don. But it wasn’t the right or wrong about whacking Nunzio that was tearing him up inside. It was what it would do to Grace. She had never gotten over her mother’s brutal death. Losing her father and her brother would destroy her.
Rocco: A Mafia Romance (Ruin & Revenge) Page 4