He tastes like mint, cool and sweet, and my body aches for that cool, sweet mouth to trace every inch of my skin. I long for those lips to kiss the inside of my thighs, for that tongue to tease my most secret places. I slide my hands up his chest as he pushes me back against the seat.
He inhales sharply when my hand brushes against his shoulder—against his wound—and I’m about to apologize when I realize something. I tentatively pull his jacket back. “Is that…duct tape? On your gunshot wound?”
He chuckles weakly. “We didn’t have time to do stitches.”
“Oh Matteo.” It hits me again how much he risked for me when he tried to protect me in the parking garage. “Thank God it only hit your shoulder.”
“I would have happily been shot a thousand times if it meant keeping you safe.” His voice is low and serious. “You know that, right?”
I don’t care that the car is too small or that Matteo’s injured or that there’s a driver who can hear and see everything. I have to tell Matteo how much I love him, and more than that, I have to show him.
I swing a leg so that I’m straddling his lap now instead of sitting on it, and I find his hands and bring them to my chest, pressing them hard against my breasts. My nipples bead against his warm palms, stiff and insistent even through the fabric of my dress, and he wastes no time in plucking at them, teasing them to full attention.
He leans forward to kiss my neck, and his stubble scratches a delicious fire all along my throat. I moan, trying to wriggle down onto the thick erection underneath me.
“Please,” I whisper to the car ceiling as he bites at my collarbone. “Please.”
“Right here?” he murmurs against my throat. “We’re not alone.”
“I don’t care. I need to feel you, need to show you—” My words break off with a gasp as his hand drops from my breast to my inner thigh, trailing up under the hem of my dress.
“Need to show me what?” he asks, his mouth still against my throat.
The wide pad of his thumb presses hard against my clit the moment I say it, and the words come out in a fevered rush. “Need to show you that I love you.”
“Oh princess, I already know.”
The way he says it is half romantic, half cocky, and I playfully swat at his uninjured shoulder. “You arrogant bastard.”
Those blue eyes glimmer in the dark but he doesn’t answer me. Instead, he keeps massaging my clit through my panties.
I let out a long, low moan, fumbling with his belt and his pants, needing to have him inside me and unable to wait another moment longer. He shifts his hips up underneath me to help, and the movement makes him wince. His shoulder.
Suddenly, I feel guilty. “Does it hurt too much? We don’t have to.”
“Jessica, there’s nothing short of castration that would keep me from fucking you.”
And at that, the long-suffering driver in the front clears his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve arrived.”
“That just means I’m going to fuck you in our bed,” Matteo purrs in my ear, and the way he says our undoes me almost as much as his erotic promise.
Our bed. Our life. Our future.
We drive through the gates and park behind the house. Matteo barks out a strict order for the men not to disrupt us, and then we walk upstairs, his hand tugging on mine insistently. He needs me as much as I need him right now; it’s apparent in the thick bulge of his pants and the rough way he hauls me up the stairs. And it’s definitely apparent in the way he pins me against the hallway wall with a fierce, hot kiss, his body hard and unyielding against my soft, curvy one.
“I thought they’d hurt you. I thought they’d kill you.” His voice is raw as he confesses his pain against my lips. “Jessica…I wanted to die when I thought you might be dead. Just the idea of it made me go mad.”
I twine my fingers in his hair. “I felt the same way. I love you.”
“I love you,” he growls back, and then I’m being lifted in the air with his hands under my ass. I wrap my legs around him and he opens the door to his room, stepping inside. I go to kiss his temple, his hair, and his earlobe, but he’s gone still. Frozen against me.
I look down to his face and see that he’s not looking at me but that he’s looking straight ahead, his face a blank mask I can’t read.
“Matteo?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I do the worst thing I can do. I turn and look to see what he’s staring at. Matteo mutely lets me slide down to my feet as I do.
And then I see it. See him. My heart plummets to the floor and stays there, beating frantically.
“Uncle Jimmy,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.
He steps out of the shadows into the middle of Matteo’s darkened bedroom, a gun clutched in his hand. His arm isn’t raised, and for now the gun is down by his leg, but it’s still present, still an imminent threat. I know from our heated kissing session in the car that Matteo has a small pistol clipped to his belt at the small of his back, but could he get to it and use it before Uncle Jimmy fired his own weapon? I don’t know.
Whatever happened this afternoon in the garage has taken its toll on my uncle. His forehead is bandaged and dried blood streaks his long gray beard. One wrist has been wrapped hastily in gauze. His eyes are bright and wild with exhaustion and anger.
“Jessica, come over here,” he says, and there’s none of his usual fatherliness in his voice, none of the usual affection and softness. Of course there wouldn’t be—he must have heard that I escaped the shop and ran away. He must realize by now that I want to be with Matteo, that I will fight to be with Matteo.
“No, Jimmy,” I whisper.
“Goddammit, Jessica,” my uncle swears viciously. “Get the fuck over here right now before I come over there and make you.”
I step into Matteo automatically, and he immediately wraps a strong arm around me.
“No,” I say again, in a steadier voice this time. “I’ve made my choice. I choose Matteo.”
“You’re going to choose him over your own family?” Jimmy asks. “Over me?”
“He is my family now,” I say, jutting my chin up in the air. “He’s the father of my child.”
“Oh, right. Your Mafia baby. How could I forget?”
“How did you get in here, Jimmy?” Matteo asks. He pulls me even tighter to his side, so tightly that my arm has to slide behind him, and as it does, I feel the hard lines of his pistol against my hand. I can tell by Matteo’s intentional stillness that this was his plan in holding me close.
Maybe he can’t reach for his gun without being seen, but I can.
As Jimmy explains in almost gleeful detail how he bribed one of Matteo’s lieutenants to give him the house security code, I slowly lift Matteo’s jacket and work the heavy pistol out of the holster.
“And I knew the minute Jessica escaped that she’d wind up here,” Jimmy continues. “So I had Nate lead the search of the neighborhood, while I came straight to your house myself. You left it unguarded, and with the code, it was all too easy. You might as well have left the lights on and coffee in the pot.”
“I sent all my men to help me find Jessica,” Matteo says. “And all those same men are waiting downstairs, armed to the teeth and waiting for any excuse to kill you and your boys. If you surrender now, I’ll consider letting you live.”
“That’s not going to happen, Moretti, for a couple of very good reasons. The first being that I don’t believe for a second that you wouldn’t kill me given half the chance. The second being that surrender is entirely unnecessary—the boys are on their way here now, and when they get here, they aren’t going to play nice. Every single one of your men will be dead.”
“And you’re going to kill me now?” Matteo asks. He sounds calm, completely detached, as if discussing the Dow Jones forecast. “In front of your niece?”
“I didn’t want this,” Jimmy says. “I tried to keep Jessica apart from this.”
“Other than killing her parents, you mean.”
For a minute, I can’t breathe, can’t speak. I wish with everything I have that my mind would go blank, that I wouldn’t be able to process Matteo’s words, but of course that’s not what happens. My mind swallows the words and digests them, wraps around them and brands them into my memory. My imagination runs wild, mixing real memories of that awful night with morbid fantasies of how he could have killed them.
Because I don’t doubt that he did kill them. His silence is incriminating, yes, and his criminal history even more damning, but more than that, it’s a truth I know in my gut. I feel it in my bones.
He killed them.
And when he meets my eyes, all doubts are erased.
“Jessica,” he says. “Don’t listen to him.”
“Is it true?” I can barely force the words out of my mouth. My hand is frozen on Matteo’s gun, unable to move. “Did you do it?”
Under his bushy beard, my uncle’s jaw works, as if he’s searching for the right words to say. Matteo beats him to the punch, however, his voice low and steady in the dark room.
“He owed money to some very bad men, money he had to pay back right away. He’d exhausted every avenue, every possible source of money. Except for that juicy life insurance policy your parents had taken out. They’d named him as the recipient, expecting that he’d use it to take care of you. It was enough money to save his skin and then some. The only thing I’m curious about is how you did it, Jimmy. Did you tamper with the engine? Fray the brake lines?”
A flash of real irritation passes over Jimmy’s face, as if the most aggravating thing happening right now is Matteo’s lack of mechanical knowledge. “It’s not that simple to make a vehicle crash, Moretti. It’s not like you can clip a few cables and then sit back and wait.”
“Then why don’t you enlighten us?”
Jimmy closes his eyes for a minute, and Matteo squeezes my arm. Not an affectionate squeeze—a prompt. He wants me to get his gun.
I finish pulling the gun out of his holster and hide it behind Matteo’s legs as my uncle opens his eyes. “I didn’t want it to come to this,” he says finally. “I wanted Jessica safe and taken care of.”
“I would have taken care of her,” Matteo replies.
“She can take care of herself,” I interject, my hand growing sweaty around the pistol grip. But I’m thankful for all the guns around the shop, for all the times one of the boys showed me how to use one, because I know how to readjust my grip, exactly how to slide the safety off.
Jimmy raises the pistol. “It’s too late for that,” he says sadly. “This situation has gotten too out of hand to be resolved any other way.”
He pauses for a minute, his eyes look haunted. “And it was a code I uploaded to the computer in your parents’ car.” There’s a note of pride in his voice as he reflects on how clever he once was, solving his problems at the expense of my parents’ lives. “Once the car rose above sixty-five miles an hour, it triggered the acceleration and deactivated the brakes. After that happened, it was only a matter of time…they crashed within seconds. The doctors said they died on impact.”
There are tears in my eyes as I ask, “Why are you telling me this?”
He takes a deep breath. “I just don’t want you to die thinking that they suffered. I don’t want you to think that it was easy for me. Or that this is easy for me. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
His face twitches as he steels himself to squeeze the trigger, as his hand tightens around the gun, but my face does nothing, my heart does nothing, as I raise Matteo’s gun and unload the clip into my uncle’s chest.
13
Jess
Four Months Later
“Would you like a margarita, miss?”
I turn and squint up at the waiter, angling my body so he can see the full swell of my seven-months-pregnant belly.
“Ah, my apologies,” he says in accented English. “A bottle of water, perhaps?”
“Yes, please.”
“I’ll give you seven margaritas a day after the birth for every drink you’ve missed,” Matteo promises lazily from the chair next to me. He has his sunglasses on and his chair is fully reclined. His broad, bare chest glistens with sweat and sunscreen, and lying like this, I can fully appreciate how toned and flat his abdomen is. I want to lick every ridge and valley of that perfect six-pack, and then follow that dark trail of hair down below the waistline of his swim trunks…
Who needs margaritas when I’m already drunk on lust?
“Jessica, I can feel you leering at me,” Matteo says wryly. “If you keep looking at me like that, people are going to get the wrong idea.”
“Like what? That a notorious Mafia boss brought his unwed baby mama to Cancun for a sun-soaked sex holiday?”
He smirks. “Yes.”
I settle back in my chair. “Well, then I won’t look anymore.”
I close my eyes to return to my beachside dozing, but within a couple minutes, I sense a shadow looming across me. I open my eyes to see Matteo standing beside me with a wide grin, his dimple even more adorable when contrasted by a deep tan.
“I changed my mind, princess.”
“About what?”
“About giving people the wrong idea. Get up to our room now before I fuck you on this ridiculous chair.”
And if I weren’t already completely in love with him already, I would be now, for giving my very pregnant body the same smoldering once-over he gave to my lithe, non-pregnant body the night we met. I scramble to my feet, and soon we’re half running through the open, airy lobby of our Cancun resort, giggling as we frantically push at the elevator buttons. The minute we open the door to the room, Matteo is on me, his lips sealing over mine and his hands plumping my ass hard enough to make me moan into his mouth.
“You’ve been driving me crazy all day with that little bikini,” he murmurs against my lip. “A man might think you’re deliberately trying to seduce him.”
I laugh. “I look like a whale in this bikini.”
Matteo pulls back and his face is uncharacteristically serious. He slips his finger under my chin to lift my face to his. “Listen to me. You are so goddamn sexy that I can barely keep my hands off you. I’ve been sporting a semi all day, and you better believe it’s not because I have a whale fetish. It’s because you’re beautiful and glowing and soft and you have all these curves I want to squeeze and bite and look what you’ve done to me just by being in front of me.” He takes my hand and guides it to his erection, which is thick and swollen and harder than steel. “Believe me now?”
I run my hand along the length of his cock. “I don’t know,” I say with mock coyness. “Maybe you ought to prove it to me.”
“You minx,” he growls, and then he’s pushing me over to the bed, where I’m made to crawl up on top and stay on all fours. He slaps my ass as he climbs up behind me, pulls the strings on the bikini bottom, and then there’s nothing separating my aching pussy from his warm fingers.
He rubs my clit and strokes along my folds as he leans down and speaks in my ear, saying all the things he wants to do to me. “I want you on your knees later, with my cock in that pretty mouth,” he rasps, a finger slipping inside my cunt. I whimper as he finds the soft hollow on the front and presses down. “And I want to come all over those juicy tits. And then I want to spread your legs and eat your pussy until the whole resort can hear you coming.”
“Mmm,” I manage, because now there’s another finger inside of me and his thumb is doing the most amazing things on my clit.
Then the fingers disappear, and I open my mouth to complain, but I’m quieted by the sound of his swim trunks rustling. Without preamble, he notches his broad crown at my entrance and then pushes inside. I’m wet, but still tight, and he lets out a delicious grunt as he sinks inside.
“Jesus, you feel good,” he mutters, giving my ass another slap as he pulls back and thrusts in again. “So fucking good.”
He starts riding me hard, one hand gripped tightly at my hip to hold me in place w
hile his other hand strays up to my breasts and finally down to my clit, where he resumes his work from earlier. As he rubs me, he angles himself so that his cock strokes against my g-spot every time he thrusts in and out, and for several minutes—or maybe it’s hours—there’s nothing but the sweet sound of our mingled breathing and the sensation of him fucking me exactly the way I want to be fucked. Rough and hard mixed with slow and deep.
Deep inside my core, muscles start clenching and tightening, and I widen my knees on the bed to give his hand better access to my clit. This lets him in a little deeper, and I hear him swear savagely to himself.
I smile into the sheets. He only curses like that when he’s struggling to keep himself under control, struggling to last. He hates to come first, my Italian gentleman, and so I oblige his sense of sex etiquette by closing my eyes and letting myself be carried off by the growing tension in my pelvis. Soon, every second is torture, my body straining for release even as it shies away from the intensity of my imminent climax. But Matteo gives me no choice, his cock impaling me with perfect brutality and his expert fingers on my swollen clitoris.
I open my eyes to see out the window just as it peaks, my body going rigid and electric. For one blissful second, I see the ocean, blue as Matteo’s eyes, and pure white sand, and all I can smell is sea salt and the masculine body behind me.
Then my body judders with release, my core combusting in waves of liquid heat, starting with my pussy and then radiating up to my chest and down to my thighs. I cry out and bury my face in the bed, my entire body temporarily made of white fire and sinful bliss. As the orgasm sends sharp tingles racing to the tips of my fingers and toes, I feel Matteo stiffen behind me, and then finally, with a series of deep, erratic thrusts, he’s groaning my name and sending hot spurts of cum deep inside my pussy.
Made for Him: A Mafia Baby Romance Page 9