Primal: London Mob Book Two

by Michelle St. James

  “I suppose I should have known better,” Jenna said.

  “You certainly should.”

  They continued to the back of the villa and an airy, unfitted kitchen. Mrs. Pendleton pulled out a stool next to the large island topped with white marble. Lily sat down, and Jenna took the seat next to her while Mrs. Pendleton pulled a bowl of eggs and a crock of butter from the fridge.

  “I’d like to do better for you this morning,” Mrs. Pendleton said, setting to work, “but I’ve only just arrived. I’ll have to make a trip to the market today to see that you’re fed properly. You’ll be drinking wine for breakfast and eating eggs three times a day otherwise.”

  Jenna laughed. “That doesn’t sound half bad.”

  They made small talk while Mrs. Pendleton cooked, avoiding the subject of Cornwall and all that happened there, all that happened afterward. Lily was obviously happy and at ease in Mrs. Pendleton’s company. It made Jenna think about Mrs. Hodges, about her mother and Kate. She would need to call them today and check in.

  Lily was polishing off her second egg in the basket when Ernesto stepped into the kitchen with a dark-eyed boy in tow. The boy looked to be about Lily’s age, maybe a little older, and he regarded her curiously from behind his father.

  “This is my son, Anthony,” Ernesto said, holding a straw hat in his hands. “Questo e' il giglio, Signor Black. Presentarsi correttamente.”

  The little boy stepped forward and held out his hand. “Hello, I am Anthony,” he said in halting English. “Would you like to see the goats?”

  Lily scampered off the stool. “Yes, please! Are they very friendly? Do they bite? Do they have names?”

  Ernesto laughed. “My boy knows everything there is to know about the goats. You’ll be an expert in no time.” He looked at Jenna. “Is it all right?”

  Jenna hesitated. She wanted Lily to be free, but the incident at Cornwall haunted her. The worst part of all hadn’t been the invasion itself. It had been that it happened while Lily was in the barn behind the house, looking at the horses. Jenna had been trapped in the wardrobe in her room, her mind playing out every horrific scenario imaginable, wondering what Lily was going through — if she was frightened, if she was wondering why Jenna didn’t come for her, if something terrible was happening to her.

  “Can you give me a minute?” Jenna asked him.

  He nodded.

  Jenna looked at Mrs. Pendleton. “Forgive me, I don’t know the house well at all. Where might I find Farrell?”

  “I’d suggest the study,” Mrs. Pendleton said. “It’s down the second hall off the foyer.”

  “Thank you,” Jenna said.

  She left the kitchen, retraced her steps to the foyer, then turned down the second hall. The house was quiet, and she was surprised to realize there was no traffic, nothing beyond the house except for birdsong and the occasional goat braying in the distance.

  She passed four closed doors before she came to a set of open double doors. The room beyond looked like a library, the walls lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves weighted down with books. Jenna didn't doubt that Farrell had read every one of them. She’d been surprised when they met to realize he’d attended Oxford. He quit after his father died, but he was one of the most intelligent men Jenna knew, and she never ceased to be amazed by the breadth of his knowledge.

  “Are you going to stand in the doorway, or are you going to come in?”

  His voice startled her, and she scanned the room, her gaze coming to rest on Farrell, laying on a worn leather sofa, his feet propped up on its arm.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”

  He sat up, meeting her eyes. Was it her imagination that his eyes were shaded with dark circles? Hadn’t he slept?

  “It’s quite all right,” he said. “Sleep well?”

  She nodded. “Very. You?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. “I was just wondering…”

  He stood, made his way across the room toward her. It was like watching an approaching storm. Bracing herself for it to hit. The closer he came, the harder it was to breathe.

  He stopped in front of her, lifted an eyebrow. Was that a smirk starting at the corner of his mouth? Could he know how he affected her? How difficult it was to think straight when he was so close?

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  She forced her eyes away from the sculpted peaks and valleys of his chest, clearly visible beneath his T-shirt. “You said there was security here?”

  “I did.”

  “Lily would like to see the goats with Anthony, Ernesto’s son…”

  She didn’t know how to phrase her question without being insulting. Farrell had swept in, removed them from London at a moment’s notice. He’d brought her to this beautiful place, a place where she was undoubtedly safer. She knew he’d beaten himself up about Cornwall, and she had no desire to make him feel any guiltier.

  He held out his hand. “Come.”

  She looked at his hand a moment before taking it. It did no good to brace herself against the current that always zipped along her skin when he touched her. She still felt it in her fingertips, her toes, between her legs.

  He led her out of the room to a closed door at the back of the hall and punched some numbers into a digital panel on the wall. The face turned from red to green with a quiet beep. He opened the door, and Jenna saw that it was only slightly bigger than a large closet. She didn't realize the room wasn't occupied until Farrell pulled her into the semidarkness after him. Inside, a big man in jeans and a button down was sitting in front of a wall covered with monitors, an ugly looking weapon strapped to his side. He turned to acknowledge them.

  “Mr. Black.”

  “David,” Farrell said.

  Jenna let her eyes scan the monitors. She recognized the kitchen where she’d had breakfast with Lily and Mrs. Pendleton. There was the big living room she’d passed, something that looked like a rec room with a billiards table, a large laundry. And it wasn’t just the inside of the house that was being monitored. One of the screens showed the terrace off the kitchen. On another she saw Lily, skipping beside Ernesto and Anthony on their way toward one of the outbuildings.

  “Every room in the house — and every outbuilding — is monitored,” Farrell said. “The only exceptions are my private bedroom, yours and Lily’s, and the bathrooms. The other bedrooms are outfitted with cameras, but we turn them off when someone is in them. In addition, every door and window is wired to the central alarm system. An alert is sent to this command center each time one of them is opened. If it’s Mrs. Pendleton or Ernesto or Leo or anyone else we know is supposed to be here, all is well. If it’s someone we don’t know, we have a tactical plan in place to apprehend the intruder — or intruders, as it may be — before they get two feet inside the house. There are two panic rooms, just in case, fortified to withstand virtually anything until my men can eliminate the threat. But I don’t anticipate ever having to use them.”

  She didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, it was reassuring. Farrell had clearly thought of everything. She couldn’t imagine a place they would be safer. On the other, it was exactly what she’d feared: Lily like an animal under glass, protected from the very world Jenna wanted her to be part of.

  It’s your fault, a voice whispered in her head. You’re the one who had to go to Madrid.

  The voice was right. This danger wasn’t at all due to Farrell. But someday — she hoped — this danger would pass. She and Lily would be able to move back into the little flat in London, walk the streets unafraid, without someone like Leo trailing them every step of the way. The current danger was temporary. Being with Farrell would mean new danger. Never-ending danger. It would mean armed guards and panic rooms, security systems and television monitors. Danger as a way of life.

  “Follow me,” Farrell said, stepping out into the hall.

  He closed the door behind th
em and rearmed the alarm, then started toward the front of the house. They made a sharp turn down the other hall and continued through the kitchen to the terrace doors.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her. “I want you to feel safe, Jenna. This is the only way I know to do that.”

  He opened the glass doors, and Jenna followed him out onto the terrace. The air was hot and arid. A faint breeze blew in from the trees beyond the house, and she caught the scent of rosemary mixed with oranges.

  “Where is Lily going?” Farrell asked, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket as they crossed the stone terrace.

  “With Ernesto and Anthony,” Jenna said. “To see the goats.”

  They stepped onto the lawn and Farrell chuckled. “The goats are an endless source of fascination to the children.”

  She looked up at him, trying not to notice the way his shoulders pulled at the T-shirt, the patch of skin visible between his collar, the way his thighs stretched the faded jeans. “Children?”

  “Ernesto isn’t the only one here who has children,” he said. “This is a working farm of sorts. We sell oranges, bottle olive oil, even make wine. It takes more people than you might think. A lot of them have children.”

  “And they all live here?” Jenna asked.

  “Not all of them,” he said. “But quite a few. The others live nearby. Their children sometimes accompany them here to work.” He hesitated. “I like having them here, although I’m not often here myself.”

  She heard the pain in his voice and turned her attention to the field spread out in front of them. She had never put any kind of limitation on Farrell’s time with Lily, but she knew it wasn’t the same as seeing her every morning and night, as reading her a bedtime story or smelling her hair straight from the bath.

  They crossed over from the grass to a stretch of dry brush leading to a stand of trees surrounding the property. Farrell stopped a few feet from the tree line and lifted his hand to his mouth, whistling into the trees. A moment later, Jenna heard the thud of boots on the ground, and a brick wall of a man in black tactical gear stepped from the shadows. He was holding what looked like a semi-automatic weapon, and she was almost positive those were grenades hanging from his belt.

  “Mr. Black,” he said.

  “Sinclair,” Farrell said. “Call the men, will you?”

  “All of them?” the man asked.

  “All of them.”

  The man shouted into the trees. “All hands on deck. That’s an order.”

  For a few seconds the air was nothing but the thud of boots, followed by the shuffle of footsteps through dried grass. One man stepped from the trees.

  Then another. And another.

  When it finally grew silent, the men were lined up around the property, no more than twenty feet apart. She let her gaze sweep the field, shielding her eyes from the sun. The men were like shadowed statues, still as stone, and while she couldn’t make out the details of the ones across the property — they were no more than a smudge in the distance — she had no doubt they were as well armed as the men in front of her.

  “This is…” She shook her head. “This is crazy.”

  His face was stony. “Protecting you and Lily isn’t crazy. I made a mistake in Cornwall. When I say it won’t happen again, I mean it.”

  She turned away from the men, overwhelmed by the show of force that had been assembled for them.

  Farrell nodded at the man named Sinclair. “Thank you. You can go back to work."

  The man gave a signal with his hand, and the other men stepped back into the trees. When Jenna scanned the property, it was as if they’d never been there at all.

  “Why do they stay hidden?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to scare Lily,” he said. “Or you. They monitor the property from the trees, and they have a direct line of communication to the security room inside the house. It would take the army of a first world country to get through them to the house, but if someone tries, they’ll alert the house, and the house will immediately go into lock down.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means you and Lily and anyone else who’s vulnerable goes straight to the panic rooms with two of my most deadly men while everyone else deals with the threat.”

  Jenna rubbed her arms, trying to banish the chill she felt in spite of the summer heat. “So Lily would be locked up then? Waiting for you to eliminate whoever might be coming after her then?”

  Farrell’s face hardened. “You can’t have it both ways, Jenna. You want her to be safe, but you want her to be free. That’s not how the world works, and I think deep down you know that. I’ve done everything I can to make fortifications — to this estate and the others I own — invisible to the naked eye. But I won’t let you down again. If someone wants to come for you, they’ll have to come through all of this first.” He hesitated, his voice hardening. “And then they’ll have to come through me.”

  She didn’t need to ask how hard that would be. The impossibility of it was evident in his voice. Someone would reach her and Lily over Farrell’s dead body.

  She shuddered. She didn’t want to think about Farrell being hurt. Didn’t want to think about Lily being under the kind of threat that required armed guards and panic rooms.

  “Can we go back now?” she asked.

  He nodded. They didn’t speak on the way back to the house. She wondered if Farrell was thinking about the impossibility of their situation. Of the impossibility of compromise between true safety and the kind of preparations that had to be made to insure it in his business.

  Then again, Farrell didn’t think anything was impossible. He was utterly convinced of his ability to move mountains, to defy even death. Looking up at him, she almost believed it.

  10

  Farrell leaned back in his chair, rubbing the stubble at his chin and thinking about Jenna. He’d been torn about showing her the security measures at the villa. He wanted her to know she was safe, but he knew how sensitive she was to the idea of being locked up, to having Lily overly sheltered from the real world.

  He didn’t mind sheltering Lily from the real world a single bit. In his experience, the real world sucked. He’d rather see her running barefoot in Tuscany, playing with goats, riding horses in Cornwall, playing on the beach in the French Riviera in full view of discreet but heavily armed guards.

  In the end, he’d come clean because he didn’t want secrets between them. Jenna wasn’t the kind of woman to bury her head in the sand. She wanted all the information, and she wanted to make her own decisions about what to do with it. He wasn’t going to pretend to be a different kind of man. Not even for her. It would only hurt them both.

  He was who he was. He loved her like no one else ever would. He could protect her and Lily like no other man could. But the decision to come to him had to be hers, and it had to come with full knowledge of who he was and what his life meant.

  Not that any of that made it easy to stay away from her.

  In fact, it was fucking hard. He’d stood behind her last night, her body warm and fragrant with the smell of her perfume — vanilla and something old fashioned that made him think of wild roses growing out of old stone. He’d wanted to slip his hands up her shirt, claim her breasts before he took her from behind. He knew exactly how she would feel. How hot and wet. How tight. He knew the way she would arch her back as he grabbed her hips, drove into her over and over. He knew the way she would sound when her breath caught in her throat as she climbed toward orgasm, the feel of her pussy tightening around him, making it harder and even more pleasurable to drag out of her, sink back in.

  He shifted in the chair behind his desk, adjusting his cock. Fuck. What kind of power did this woman have over him that he couldn’t even think about her without getting hard? Without wanting not only to fuck her senseless, but to own her body and soul?

  “They’re here.”

  Leo’s voice broke into his thoughts, a
nd he looked up to find the other man standing in the door of the study. “Bring them in.”

  “Want me to frisk them?” Leo asked.

  “Not necessary.” Farrell pulled his weapon from the waistband of his jeans and slipped it into the top drawer of the desk.

  Leo disappeared into the hall and returned a few minutes later with a tall, willowy brunette. She was trailed by a dark haired man in an expertly tailored suit that Farrell recognized as Armani.

  He stood, held out his hand as the woman came into the room, her stride easy and purposeful in five inch heels.

  “Carolina.”

  Her full lips turned up at the corners in a smile that was both amused and provocative. “Farrell Black.”

  Her eyes raked his body dispassionately, someone not in the market for a car but window shopping nonetheless. He took the opportunity to get a read on the woman who had inherited her father’s business after the fall of the Syndicate. Agostino Barone had been head of th

  e Florence territory under Raneiro Donati. Unfortunately, he’d been so closely tied to the man that he’d been extradited to the US and imprisoned along with several of his Italian cohorts. Farrell had met him a handful of times and had been slightly unsettled by the calculating look in his eyes, the brevity that made it difficult even to carry on a conversation.

  He’d been surprised to hear that his eldest daughter had inherited the business. Organized crime the world over was still largely a man’s world. There were exceptions, but they were just that, and Carolina Barone was certainly among the most exceptional of all.

  “Please, sit,” Farrell said, gesturing to the leather chair on the other side of his desk.

  She did, and he got a glimpse of long, lithe legs through a slit in the black dress that hugged her curves like liquid ebony. Behind her, the bodyguard stood to one side of the door, legs slightly apart, hands crossed in front of his body. Leo mimicked the position on the other side of the door. It was the worst kind of posturing, but it was necessary. The Syndicate may be dead, but their world was alive and well, ruled by rituals and tradition that went back hundreds of years. In London, Farrell made the rules.