by Ava Lore
Placing the condom on the soft crown of his cock, I sealed my lips around it and slowly, slowly swallowed him whole, unrolling the condom down around his shaft as I did so.
Above me, Manny let out a groan that sounded almost like pain, and when the head of his cock butted up against the back of my throat, his hips jerked and his hands went to my arms.
My heart thrilled as he ripped me away from his erection and dragged my mouth back up to his. Cool breezes rushed around us, but where we touched, we burned. Lips open, he devoured my mouth, tasting the mingled lube and latex on my tongue, and when he broke away I knew he was already on the edge.
We knelt there for a long moment, staring into each other’s eyes, the water cascading past us, turning the light inside the shallow cave behind the falls into something ghostly and alive.
Manny leaned in, his hands still on my arms, and his hot lips found my ear again.
“How do you want me?” he said. The words filled my head, and I nearly melted right there.
My hands found his thighs, as hard as the rock beneath us, but quivering with lust and need, and I said, my breath curling in his ear: “Take charge, Manny. Take me from behind.”
He didn’t ask twice. The world spun as he whipped me around in his arms, my back to his chest, and then his cock against my ass was pushing me forward, until my hips were high in the air, my back bowed, my breasts scraping over the smooth rock below us, my hands bracing myself.
I heard him call my name as he fed his thick shaft inside me, and this time there was no pain, only a mind-numbing pleasure that erased the world around us. Everything was a roar—my heart, the water, our voices mingling. My nipples brushed over the rough rock beneath us as he began to thrust into me, taking me hard. My core ached as his cock filled it, and when the tip of his erection tapped against my womb I nearly came.
Prim, proper, stodgy Rose. Fucking like an animal in heat in the middle of the jungle, naked and wanton.
And I loved it.
Manny’s hips pistoned into mine, over and over, and my cunt clenched around his shaft with each thrust. His pelvis slapped into my ass, his fingers dug into my hips, and the way he moved inside me was magic, swirling and dipping even as he took me hard and fast.
Then I felt him curl over me, the hot skin of his chest and undulating abs cleaving to my back. His hand found my hair, pulled my head up, and his lips were against my ear, holding me helpless to his pleasure.
I was changing. Had already changed. Was someone new. I could never go back to being the person I had been. No matter what happened when we returned to the mainland, my whole life would be different.
My whole life was different, because even knowing that, knowing that I was unprepared, knowing that I had no plans to guide me...I didn’t care.
The only thing that mattered was here, and now.
My body tightened, ready to milk his cock, and my breasts, so small but so heavy with need, bounced and scraped over the stone beneath me, pain and pleasure sparking fires inside me that roared to new heights with each thrust.
Then his fingers were on my clit.
“Come for me, Rosa,” he growled, and I did, over and over until my trembling legs collapsed and Manny buried himself deep inside me in one last thrust.
He yelled as he climaxed, his cum pumping deep inside me as my body quivered in pleasure, and there was no past, no future, nothing else but him and me, fucking like wild animals as the falling water roared around us.
* * *
It took us another two hours to make it back to the set, and by that time it was nearing five o’clock.
“You’re in so much trouble,” I was telling Manny as we walked the length of the beach toward the set.
“Probably,” he replied. He didn’t seem particularly concerned, and the arm he had draped around my shoulders was limp and relaxed. His stride was easy and I found I could keep up with it, even with the trembling of my post-hiking—and, let’s face it, post-coital—legs.
I smiled and inhaled deeply. The salt sea air cleared the last of the fog from my head, but I felt the same way I felt every time we came together.
Different. Light. Free. As though after years of sitting in one position, my limbs cramping, my back aching, I had suddenly found the strength to stand, and now everything was stretching out, tingling with returning feeling.
Still, we were late. Very late. “Doesn’t anything bother you?” I teased. “If I were late I’d be panicking.”
“Not much,” he confessed, then leaned over and kissed my temple. “I’ll teach you the secret. Ancient Hawaiian Secret of how to relax. You want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“Ancient Hawaiian Secret: don’t give a fuck.”
I waited. “What, that’s it?”
“That’s it. Don’t give a fuck. No fucks. No fucks are given. When someone says to you, ‘what are you going to do about this very stressful problem?’ you say, ‘hold on, let me check my Give-A-Shit list, then tell them that it is not one of the things you give a shit about.”
“But who will handle the problem?”
“Someone,” he said. “Or no one. A lot of time the situation resolves itself.”
“Really?” This was not my experience, but for Manny and his permanent feel-good force field I had to admit that it might be possible.
“Yup. Never put off today what you can put off tomorrow.”
I snorted. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“It doesn’t?”
“There’s a logical fallacy built right into it. You’d have to put something off today to be able to put it off tomorrow as well.”
“I guess. If you want to deal with ‘facts’ and ‘logic.’”
“I don’t, but sometimes you have to.”
“Not if you keep putting things off.”
I rolled my eyes. He was hopeless and I was almost ninety percent sure he was teasing me. No one could have that kind of attitude and still make it to international stardom. Right?
“So what’s our excuse for being gone so long?” I said as we rounded a soft corner of the beach and the tents and trailers came into view.
Manny didn’t answer me for a moment, and then he didn’t answer me for another moment. I frowned and looked up at him, opening my mouth to ask him what he was thinking, but my words froze on my tongue.
There was a frown on his face. No...a scowl. His thick eyebrows had drawn down, casting his golden eyes into shadow, and he seemed fixated on something just before the set.
I turned my head and now I saw them: a small group of men dressed in typical island casual—t-shirts, wife-beaters, flip-flops, cut-offs. They were leaning against the trees and seemed tired, which made sense as they tended toward older and heavyset. Nothing interesting about them that I could spy.
“Who are they?” I asked, but Manny didn’t answer. Instead his arm around me tightened, pulling me close, and then he dropped it, and I mourned the loss of his warmth next to me. Then in the next moment we were pulling up before them. Each one of them had dark hair and golden skin, and they all looked familiar. Why couldn’t I place them?
One of them was smoking, and I watched as he took one last long drag from the smoke clenched between his lips, then plucked it out and tossed it to the ground. I gasped as I watched it fall to the pristine sand and lie there smoking.
Then the litterbug stepped forward, waving at Manny.
“Hey there coz,” he said. “Long time, no see.”
Chapter Ten
I blinked, confused. Coz? As in cousin?
I looked to Manny for clues as to what to do, but he just stood there, his frown gone, a distant smile on his face. “Hello yourself, Yago,” he returned.
Yago? What was going on?
The man pushed away from the tree trunk he was lounging against. “Good to see you again. Why didn’t you come drop by while you were in town?”
Manny waved the hand that had previously been holding me. “Oh,” he
said. “You know. Work things.”
The man laughed, and it wasn’t pleasant. I had been around plenty of sociopaths in my life—and not all of them necessarily criminals, seeing as how I was a lawyer and all—and this person reminded me of all them with a powerful vengeance. Something in the way he met our eyes, with an intensity any normal person would find unnerving, set off a thousand and one alarm bells in my head.
“Work things that kept you away from family?” he said.
I hated the way he talked, the way he caressed the word family with his tongue and lips, like it was some sort of sacred word and he was profaning it. I’d heard it often among others, other people who wanted their families—who acted nothing like the sort—to treat them as though they were the closest of bosom relations, even when they were anything but the case. The sort of people entertainment lawyers were made for. The sort of people who preyed on the talented, on the lucky, sucking them dry with their own ambitions.
I felt it, right there in the warm sand. I felt the unraveling and ensnaring of familial bonds, just as I had felt it so many times in my office back in LA.
“Who are you?” I asked, stepping forward, even though I knew it was futile, even though I knew I had no idea what I was getting into.
Yago turned toward me with a wicked smile on his face. “And you are...?” he asked.
I had no answer. Honestly, I wasn’t anybody. I was a nobody, actually, and even when I might have been said to be a somebody I had been so unbearably, inevitably unfamous that it hadn’t even mattered. I wasn’t famous enough for VIP access, except for when I accompanied or name-dropped the right people. Even then...
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Sharp tones brought me out of my reverie, out of my hypnosis. I blinked, swaying where I stood, and looked, dumbly, toward the figure striding toward us without mercy in her eyes.
Me? I wanted to say. Good question.
I thought I was doing well, but one look at the tall, imposing figure of Sonya and I knew that I had not yet had my first lessons in true psychological warfare.
She came striding up the beach in white, her Greek robes flowing, her red hair flying in the wind, and I found myself wanting to be just like her—proud and indomitable.
The men turned toward her and seemed to draw together, and I had the distinct impression that they had dealt with Sonya before.
She stopped next to us, her green eyes flashing, her wild red hair floating around her head on the sea breeze like a bloody thunder cloud. She put her hands on her hips and looked down her nose at the intruders, which was quite an achievement given the fact that the intruders were a full six inches taller than her, at the very least. Nevertheless, she gave them a good glaring.
“Ah, Miss Kyle,” Yago said. “It’s good to see you again.”
Of course his tone suggested that it was neither good to see her again, nor that he’d expected to see her again.
“Fuck off,” Miss Kyle told him, clearly delineating the boundaries of the talks. She flounced over and took Manny’s arm, hugging it close to her and giving everyone in the vicinity a death stare.
The men weren’t having any of it. “Are you here to defend our cousin again, so that you can get your dirty paws on his money, or do you think that this time you’ll scare us off?” one of them asked Sonya.
“I think I’m staring at a bunch of fucking scumbags,” Sonya said, “who had better get off my property before I call the police.” Her beautiful, plump red lips curled into a devious smirk. “Unless of course you’d like to stay...?” she said.
I stiffened and leaned into Manny. “Her property?” I whispered. “What?”
Manny gave a low, guttural chuckle. “Yup. How else do you think we were able to get this whole beach to ourselves? It’s privately owned, and Sonya owns it.”
Holy crap.
I looked from him to the men arrayed around us. They looked...well, they looked like they were all a part of Manny’s family—they all seemed to have the same nose, at least—but that was where the similarities ended. Some of them looked downright embarrassed to be there, apologetic and ashamed. Yago was the only one who seemed to be scheming. Ringleader. Whatever they were going to do to Manny was his idea, or he was in charge.
“We’ll leave,” Yago said, “as soon as you pay up.”
Manny shrugged. “I don’t have any money. I told you that. This gig isn’t as lucrative as you think it is.”
“Then how’d you buy a car yesterday?” Yago asked.
I barely felt Manny twitch next to me, but it was a tell. Then he shrugged. “What use is credit if you don’t abuse it to its fullest?” he asked. “I had a girl I wanted to impress.” And he put his arm around me.
All eyes turned in my direction, and I lifted my chin. I’d been looked at plenty in courtrooms and private settlements. I was a lawyer and I had a big red baboon ass, thank you very much.
“What about Sonya?” One of them was frowning, as if he didn’t understand something.
“I told you,” Manny said, “Sonya is a friend. Unlike you, she doesn’t care about money.”
“Uh-huh.” Yago crossed his arms.
“Are you finished?” Sonya said, sounding bored. “Or do I have to call the cops?”
Yago smiled. “You know as well as I do the cops won’t do anything. Your haole ass doesn’t belong here, buying up our island. We just want what’s due.” He shifted his gaze to Manny again. “Unless you’d like to head back to the funny farm?”
The funny farm? There was so much going on here that I had no clue about, and for a moment I realized that I should have done some due diligence. Oh well, too late now. I was already in deep.
Next to me, Manny shrugged again. “How much this time?” he asked wearily.
Sonya, still standing protectively between him and his ‘cousins,’ whirled around. “No!” she said. “Don’t give anything to them!”
Manny’s shoulders fell, and he sagged into me. “Why not?” he said. “If it’ll get them to go away again. I just wanted to come here and enjoy the weather and company.”
“Because they’ll just come back!” she shouted, then seemed to remember where she was. She straightened her shoulders and stepped forward. To my surprise several of the gathered men took steps back, as though afraid of her. “Get out of here,” she said. “You’re interfering with our work.” She glanced down the beach, and I saw the figures of Kent and Carter coming toward us, with Rebecca and Aylen trailing behind. Beyond them, the sets were in confusion, with people running this way and that.
“Shit,” Yago said. He turned to Manny. “Twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “Make sure it’s there, unless you want to end up back in a straight-jacket.” He turned and walked away, far quicker than Kent and Carter were approaching, which, I think, just made Kent angrier. The rest of his little posse followed, and they disappeared up a small gravel road and into the trees in moments.
I’d never been entirely comfortable around Kent Hudson—he was intimidating, pushy, and didn’t give two fucks about how anyone else felt, except Rebecca—but right now I was glad he was here. He was the band’s father-figure, and I knew nothing would come between him and his band mates.
By the time he reached us his face was thunderous. He addressed Sonya first. “When did they get here? How’d they find us?”
Sonya’s jaw clenched. “I don’t know. All I know is that I looked down this way and there they were, keeping Manny and Rose from getting back to the set. Trying to shake down money again.” She raked a hand through her wild hair. “They want twenty thousand dollars this time.”
“Good thing I don’t have twenty thousand dollars,” Manny said mildly.
I looked at him in surprise. You don’t? I wanted to say, but I sensed that this was not the time. Manny felt my curiosity, however, and flashed me a tired smile.
“This is a long story,” he said.
“A long story we don’t have time to tell,” Kent sn
apped. “I want private security on this beach and I want it back at the house. We kept everything under wraps this time...” He growled, turned, and kicked the sand, sending wet clumps flying. “Fuck!” he yelled. “I knew we should have gone to Mexico. Fuck!”
“It’s my fault,” Manny said. “It was just cheaper to do it here since we didn’t have to rent a beach or a house.”
Now I was thoroughly confused, but I bit my tongue.
“Yeah, and you told Rick, ‘Oh, it’ll be great, the label will save money and we’ll all have a good time before the last concert!’” Sonya said. “And here we are. You need to get back to the mainland.”
“Why?” Manny said. “They can get to me there, too. It’s not like it was any huge risk to come here.”
“It is with the fucking island police,” Sonya snapped at him. “LA cops are bad enough, but small-town cops are the worst. Shit.”
Carter pulled around Kent and reached out, putting his hand on Manny’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, man, this’ll get handled. Let’s go get a drink.”
Manny sighed. “There’s a thought,” he said wistfully. “I meant to get something to drink at lunch. Totally forgot about that.”
Carter cast me a look and then grinned. “Oh, I’m sure whatever distracted you was worth it.”
I blushed intensely as Manny let his arm drop from my shoulders. “We were just...touring the island,” I said. Even to my own ears it sounded lame, and incredibly irresponsible. No one bought it anyway.
“Uh-huh.” Carter winked at me. “Come on guys, did you get anything to eat?”
“Nope.”
“Then let’s go grab some grub.”
Together they turned toward the tents further down the beach. Kent, Sonya, and Rebecca were whispering fiercely to each other, while Aylen hovered next to them, listening in and looking worried. I slipped past them and followed Manny and Carter, knowing I wasn’t privy to whatever was going on, but I still overheard them as I ducked my head and darted by.