“Good girl,” Jesse groaned.
Jesse’s thrusts propelled her hips in a decadent rhythm over her fingers. She was lost in the pulse, absorbed in Jesse’s power. He invaded her, possessed her, intoxicated her with his strength and vigor. Each contraction of his thigh muscles as he pushed into her made her twitch in reverberating pleasure. She could feel everything, each nuance of his movement inside her, how deep his cock reached, the rapid-fire burst of his cock finding her sheath.
She felt another climax building, this time as a bolt of thunder that split down through her skull and made her body feel like it was coming apart. Everything, every inch of skin, was singed and shocked.
“Jesse! Oh Jesse! Yes! God, yes!”
“Oh baby, good girl!”
“Fuck, Jesse! Oh!”
“Yes baby, give it to me! Yes!”
“Oh god!”
“I’m gonna cum baby! Yeah, girl. Yes! Yes!”
He accelerated his tempo, fucking her like a machine until the friction was so slick and wet and hot that it became effortless and seemed to transcend time. Celestina couldn’t distinguish the difference between his body and hers, his cock and her orgasm, his momentum and her squirt of warm liquid as they came together.
“Yes girl, oh fuck!”
“Fuck!”
She could feel a burst of heat inside her as he came and his body enveloped her back, shivering. He twitched and moaned, digging his fingers into the ample flesh of her hips.
“God damn,” he rasped, biting his teeth gently into her shoulder and panting. He jerked again as Celestina’s pussy contracted over his cock, an aftershock. They rumbled into a lower gear, locked together.
Jesse slid his hand along Celestina’s side until he reached the swell of her ribcage, and then dug his hands under her body to cup and squeeze her breasts. It made her twitch and gasp in surprise, her body convulsing involuntarily and squeezing his cock again. Jesse laughed.
“It feels amazing when you do that after I cum,” he whispered. “Like a mini-cum-again.”
“A mini-cum-again,” Celestina chuckled. “That sounds funny.”
“Thank you, cum-again,” Jesse joked, exaggerating his Spanish accent.
Celestina giggled. “You are funny.”
“That’s me. All fun all the time.”
He moved lazily, fondling Celestina’s breasts and kissing the back of her neck. He was still inside her. She could feel his heartbeat through her back, and a pang of loss when he started to sit up.
“Not yet,” she murmured, reaching behind with her hand. “One more minute.” Celestina found his hair without even looking and pulled him back down with a grunt, nestling his head on her shoulder. “Stay.”
Jesse sighed deeply and went absolutely still for a beautiful moment. There was nothing but the flicker of the candles and their slow, steady breathing.
“Mi amor,” he said, “I wish it could stay like this.”
“You’re going to tell me what is bothering you now?”
He was silent.
Celestina sighed. “You’re not married or something like that, are you?”
“Jesus, no. You think I would do that?”
“No. I’m just trying to guess what could possibly be so awful.”
Jesse grimaced, rubbing his face in her hair and drinking in her scent. “I can’t talk about it like this, while I’m inside you. It’s too perfect to spoil. Please. Let’s go somewhere else, somewhere neutral.” He kissed her cheek and pushed himself up, pulling his cock out of her and standing abruptly. “I promise I will explain everything. And then you will hate me.”
Celestina rolled onto her back to watch Jesse throw away the condom and slip back into his pants. She frowned, a sense of foreboding stabbing at her. As she looked at him, it didn’t seem possible that anything could make her hate him. His beauty and darkness were at war on his face. Every fiber of her wanted to console him, to fuck him, to be with him – but hate him? No. She sensed they could defy the world together. They could destroy and re-create each other. They matched. Hate was out of the question.
“I can’t hate you Jesse. But if you want, I’ll go with you to talk. If it’s so important.”
He zipped his fly and stared down at her, his face unreadable. “It is.”
“All right.”
Celestina rocked up to her feet, for the first time noticing and laughing at the state of her dress. It was bunched up like a weird belt from the 80s around her waist, her breasts and ass completely exposed.
“Look what you did,” she chided jokingly. “And this was once Dior.”
“Oh excuse moi, Mademoiselle Princess.” Jesse fell into a sarcastic bow as he tucked his wallet back into his jeans. “My apologies for wrinkling the royal wardrobe, but I couldn’t figure out any other way to fuck you.”
Jesse’s bluntness made her laugh. “You are forgiven. Pause one second, I’ll go change and then we’ll go wherever you want.”
Celestina ran up the suspended stone staircase to her walk-in closet, tossing the crinkled dress aside and mentally cataloguing her options. Since Jesse was dressed casually, she selected sleek leggings, a silky black t-shirt and espadrilles. She brushed her hair quickly and tossed on some cherry lip-gloss, practically skipping down the stairs in her excitement to spend more time with her lover.
As she descended, she locked eyes with Jesse and beamed. Her happiness melted his troubled demeanor. The storm clouds seemed to momentarily lift from his face and he smiled back, shaking his head.
“Like a dark Venus chasing the setting sun,” he praised her. “Where did you come from, how are you possible. Are comfortable in that?”
“Of course,” she grinned. “I am comfortable in anything.”
“Ok, let’s go.”
Jesse laced his fingers firmly and possessively through hers, making her heart race, and led her through her foyer into the elevator. He kissed her eyelids as the doors closed, holding her head near his and stroking her hair. A thick and sweet silence hung between them as the floors beeped past. Not even the din waiting for them on the raucous casino floor seemed to puncture the quiet moment, the post-coital bubble enveloping them. Celestina grinned and followed Jesse through the craziness of Caesar’s Palace and waited at his side while the valet, Matthew, fetched his mud-splattered jeep. Jesse laughed at her expression when the jeep rolled up.
“Not up to Auditore standards, I am sure,” Jesse quipped. “But it can handle my driving and roll in the dirt with me.”
“I don’t mind getting dirty.” Celestina grinned.
“I know this about you,” he returned, with a suave wink.
Quirking an eyebrow, Celestina allowed Jesse to assist her into the jeep. As soon as he tumbled into the driver’s seat beside her, he turned his face and riveted her with an astonishingly intense, troubled gaze. Evidently, this was the place he felt he could talk.
“Everything I have said to you, I meant,” he bit out through clenched teeth. He seemed to be having trouble finding words through some powerful emotion. “Everything, Celestina. Whatever comes next, it will not change the fact that I meant every single word I said to you. Every action. I meant it. Ok? Do you believe me? Tell me, please. Tell me if you think I am lying to you right now, or if you trust me that I meant it all.”
“Woah,” she said. “It’s okay, Jesse. Calm down.” She leaned in and kissed his lips, meeting the intensity of his gaze with her own. “It was my idea, too, you know. For the record, I think I made the first move. But I believe you that you’ve been sincere. I would know if you weren’t.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That will not do. You must know that I picked you before I knew who you were. Clear? Who you are and who I am, that had nothing to do with what we’ve shared. All right? At the club dancing that night, we were just two people who couldn’t look away from each other. I saw you and I came to you. I measure time before and after that moment. I wanted you so fast. But I didn’t know who you were,
and you didn’t know me. Yes? Is that correct?”
Celestina remembered that moment in a flash, how she’d been captivated by the wild, passionate figure from across the room. She smiled, but seeing how serious Jesse was, how worried he seemed, her smile died.
“Yes,” she admitted, “You’re right. You came to me.”
“Before I knew who you were.” He said it very slowly, as if to a child or to himself. “Remember that part.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Celestina asked.
“Because it is about to matter. A lot. A whole hell of a lot. It’s time.”
Jesse kicked the jeep into gear and sped down the cul-de-sac away from the casino. Celestina’s sense of foreboding was weighing on her stomach and unformed questions ate away at her patience.
“Time for what? What are you getting at Jesse? You’re freaking me out.”
“Wait. You’ll see.” He said, and turned south on S. Las Vegas Blvd, west on W Flamingo Rd. He pulled a strange remote-control device from the glove compartment and put it on his lap. “Reach behind your seat, princessa. What do you find?”
Her dread growing, Celestina reached as he instructed and pulled out a leather vest. It covered her lap. The word “Ruiners” was stitched on a patch in large gothic letters, splayed across the top. A grotesque picture of a black widow and a naked woman riding a motorcycle were embroidered on another patch underneath. At the very bottom were the words “Las Vegas,” and small white patches on the side said simply “MC” and “1%.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, blankly. “What is it?”
Jesse glanced at her and cursed under his breath. “Shit. That’s my patch for the Ruiners Motorcycle Club. My tribe. You really don’t know who we are. Do you? You’re totally out of the loop. Fuck, I knew it. Fuck!” He banged his fists on the steering wheel, making Celestina jump. With an effort, he calmed himself. “You really don’t understand what’s been going on in this town the last two years, what your father does besides business. How he actually makes his money, how your Uncle really died, who are the faces behind all this ‘street violence’ your father is always trashing in the newspapers. You really don’t know?”
Cold goose bumps cascaded down Celestina’s spine, a sick feeling welling up in her belly. “What are you talking about, Jesse?”
“Baby girl, you are a gangster’s daughter—an ambitious gangster who is trying to take over another gang’s town. Our town. That’s your daddy, who really he is.”
Celestina laughed, then stopped abruptly. She tried to control herself and said in as firm a tone as she could, “That’s ridiculous.”
But her voice had a tremor of uncertainty. She’d seen her father’s books at work, the haphazard way the casino was organized. She’d been puzzled over the numbers and lack of records. And her father’s explanation of Joey’s death—that he was the random victim of gang violence—didn’t quite make sense. Especially now that she was more familiar with the town. What had Joey been doing on D Street, anyway?
There was just enough doubt for Jesse’s words to take root in her imagination.
“But he can’t be…” she murmured. Not her Daddy, the playful and affectionate man she knew at home.
Pieces of Celestina’s life history took on a different light under the lens of what Jesse said; things people had called her, the way teachers had treated her at school, even how careful her first boyfriends had been. She thought about how her mother reacted after the divorce whenever her father called them to check in, holding the phone like it was alive and might bite her. She thought of a memory, long repressed, of when she’d accidentally walked in on her dad cleaning too much blood off of his shirt in the bathroom, and how angry he’d been with her. Neither of them had ever brought it up again.
“It’s true,” Jesse said. “I don’t know how someone as smart as you got this far in life without putting it all together. But your dad is sneaky. We call him Skinny because he slips through the cracks; that’s what he’s famous for. You are a gangster’s daughter.”
“No.”
“And I am a soldier on the other side, a trigger puller, a Sergeant. They call me Nitro because I am good at bombs, because of my background in the war. We are in a different kind of war here in Vegas. A gang war, the news would say. For me, it’s just another fight to survive.”
She remembered Jesse’s tattoos, the skulls on his chest. The same design as was on the Ruiners’ leather vest she now held in her hands was written in permanent ink on Jesse’s back. She had thought nothing of the tattoos that day in the counting room, had pushed them to the back of her mind even though they sparked something she had learned in a class at Harvard about tags and prison tattoos and gangs.
Part of her had known, but she hadn’t even seen Jesse’s bare chest today and hadn’t wanted to think about it. He’d kept on his shirt the whole time and she had forgotten about the ink and scars on his back.
“No,” she repeated. Celestina’s head was spinning. Bombs, he’d said…like the one that killed her Uncle Joey.
“Yes, princessa. We belong to opposite gangs that are trying to kill each other. This used to be our town, the Ruiners, and now your father is trying to exterminate us like rats. This week your father shot my friend’s wife, killed her unborn baby.”
“No. It’s not possible! He wouldn’t do something like that, never!”
“Yes, it’s true. He crossed a line we cannot forgive. But we are also violent. I killed your Uncle. I am not pretending to be innocent in this. I told you, I too am trouble—bad trouble. You will regret knowing me. I tried to stay away from you and protect you, once I realized who you were. I knew we were fucked. But I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t hold back from you. I said you’d hate me. You do already, don’t you? I can feel it.”
“Stop it, stop talking!”
Jesse’s voice was strained. “Believe me, Celestina, please: it had already started when I met you...I was already in too deep, couldn’t get out. My hands are bloody but you…you didn’t know anything yet. I wanted to pretend that the rest of the world didn’t exist. You saw me with fresh eyes. I felt free. You didn’t know about Joey’s meth labs or Cosmo’s prostitution rings and the gunfights, about all this shit. It’s fucking chaos out here. Shit city.”
He paused a moment, gathered a ragged breath. Celestina’s head was ringing and throbbing, overloaded.
“Sometimes at night I can’t sleep,” Jesse said. “I see faces screaming at me from the fire. I hear gunfire in my dreams. Everywhere I turn, chaos.”
“Stop.”
“It’s too late, Celestina. You’re in it now. I can’t take you back. I am a Ruiner, I made them a promise and I have to be loyal. You understand, don’t you? You know what loyalty means, even when you hate what you have to do?”
“Stop the car, Jesse. Stop! Let me out.”
But Jesse didn’t stop. Instead he pressed a button on the remote and Celestina heard something behind her, felt a tremble in the road. She screwed her head to look over her shoulder and saw a plume of white smoke rising between the buildings in the vicinity of Caesar’s Palace, where she had been only a few moments before.
“What have you done?” She cried.
“I am not a good guy, quierida,” whispered Jesse with deathly calm. “I am sorry. Forgive me, please.”
Celestina couldn’t speak. She stared out the window and tears streamed down her cheeks as Jesse careened like a madman through the city, merged onto the 1-15 North and sped into the night.
Chapter Nine
It was dark by the time yellowy headlights flashed in the driveway outside the adobe bungalow in the red sandstone hills near the borders of Valley of Fire State Park. On, off. On, off. Pause. The signal repeated three times.
Rowan Thomas had just finished sweeping up the small front room and leaned on the end of her broom to peer out the window at the approaching jeep, moping at her sweat with the handkerchief that had been tied into her golden hair.
> “It’s them,” she called over her shoulder.
Behind her, Bronson Ramsey groaned up from the floor. The broken air conditioner still lay in pieces, but he let his wrench clatter from his hands and clambered up to join his wife at the window. His arm stole around her waist and drew her body close, filling every possible space with her softness. He kissed the top of her head, which was easy as pie for him to reach from his towering height of 6’5’’. They gazed out the window together as the jeep engine and headlights switched off.
“Here we go.” Bronson grumbled. “Nervous?”
Rowan sighed. “I’m not gonna lie, I’d rather be naked on the beach in Mexico than up to my elbows in illegal activity in Nevada any day of the week.”
Bronson chuckled. “Yeah me too, babe. But you know what they say: safety in numbers.”
“I thought it was more like: kill or be killed.”
Bronson cleared his throat. “You sure have a way to cut to the chase.”
Rowan smiled to herself and wiggled her ass playfully against Bronson. “That’s because I am smarter than you.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
Yesterday, when they’d received Voski’s frantic phone call about Mara, Rowan had been dead set against returning to Las Vegas. Her heart sank when she heard about the baby, of course, but she didn’t see any point to risking her and Bronson’s lives in rushing into the climax of a gang war. The Auditores had a price on both of their heads.
Bronson reasoned with her until she understood how important it was to him to return and help his brothers. After all, he’d pointed out, it had been the Ruiners MC that saved their ass from the mob in the first place. Axle’s money and permission had made it possible for them to escape and get the new liver to Rowan’s baby sister Lacy. As far as Bronson could see, refusing to show up was not an option.
In the end, Bronson had persuaded Rowan that he was right. He could be very persuasive. They’d locked up the doors of their new business, left Lacy with their neighbors, and traveled all night to get to the safe house Axle had assigned.
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