With a start, I wondered what time it was. Twisting my neck painfully to look behind me, I saw that it was nearly three thirty in the morning. I'd been out for a while. The staff would start to wake in an hour or so, but more importantly to me was that the outdoor patrols hadn't come back in yet. They were under strict orders. Once the doors were locked and the security system was armed, nobody went in or came out until the morning staff went on duty at five. There were even outdoor bathrooms if someone had to take a piss. Still, I couldn't be sure someone didn't have a case of insomnia.
With regret, I eased myself away from Adriana, my heart breaking when she mumbled in her sleep. “No . . .”
“Shh, I'm just going to stretch a bit,” I whispered softly, kissing her hair. I found the edge of the blanket and folded it over her, confident that nobody would disturb her sleep and find her gloriously naked underneath the blanket. Easing my way around the room, I was glad I'd taken the time to fold up my clothes neatly, even finding my socks still stuffed inside my shoes. I looked around after I finished dressing and nearly smacked my head as I saw two pieces of incriminating evidence: the condom wrapper and the condom itself. I gathered both of them and reminded myself to dispose of them.
Slipping out of Adriana's room, I paused at the door, sparing a look back at her sleeping figure on the bed. Memories flashed through my head, and I couldn't help but smile.
I heard footsteps coming down the corridor, and I nearly jumped out of the room, closing her door behind me. I had only a second to slide down into the chair when one of the morning staff, a cook named Kathy who I'd once hooked up with, came down the hallway. “Good morning, Daniel. Still awake?”
“Of course,” I said, pulling my laptop in front of me and hoping she didn't notice I was just turning it on now. “What's got you up so early? Trying to get a sunrise yoga session in or something?”
“Indigestion, actually,” she said. “Since all this stuff kicked off with Princess Firecrotch in there, I can't get a full night's sleep. Someone told me you were staying outside in the hall recently, and I was thinking that seeing if you were up would be a better use of my time than tossing back and forth, debating if I wanted to try and chew on a Rolaid before faking another hour and a half of sleep or not.”
Kathy's mouth was one of the main reasons I'd both fucked her and hated dealing with her. While she was a talented cook, she was disrespectful of nearly everyone else besides the Don, especially Adriana. She never missed an opportunity to talk down about her, with a list of nicknames that ranged from merely disrespectful to downright disgusting. Princess Firecrotch was one of the milder ones.
“Kathy, you know I hate it when you disrespect the Bertolis,” I admonished. “Seriously.” I figured she wasn't as careless with her tongue around anyone else, and that she thought since I slept with her in the past, I could be trusted.
“Well, what does she have that I don't have, besides a last name and some bigger tits?” Kathy said with a sneer. “She's an art student with some double Ds. At least I went to culinary school before going to work.”
I didn't want to be drawn into an argument. My lovemaking with Adriana was so near at hand that I wasn't sure I'd maintain my objectivity. “Kathy, I know your feelings. But I'm a Bertoli man, you know that. I'm asking you to cut the comments around me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.”
She crossed her arms and gave me a dirty look. “She's got you whipped, and she hasn't even given you any pussy yet. And to think, you could have been having me this whole time.”
“I've had better,” I said evenly, looking her in the eye. “Much better. Is there anything else?”
“Fuck off, Oliver,” Kathy hissed back, turning and stomping away. I chuckled under my breath and wondered if she knew that her attempt at giving me a nickname hadn't gone over my head. While I had stopped at a high school education, I'd read Oliver Twist back when I was in junior high. I mean, come on, orphan boy gets involved with criminals before making good? What kid in my position in life wouldn't want to read it? Between that and Great Expectations, I was fully educated in Dickenson’s ideas on what could happen to orphans. So far, reality was far different from fiction.
I shook my head, thanking my luck that I had gotten out of Adriana's room when I did, and turned my attention to the laptop. I hadn't been totally lying. I did want to complete some work, mainly on analysis of the photos that Vincent Drake had sent in his most recent harassing email. There was something about them that tickled my brain, and I wanted to see if my sleep-induced theory was right.
Pulling up the message, I made sure my volume was turned off and started to dissect the email. The slide show had been pretty basic, what you could put together with a typical office suite program, and by doing a little splicing of code, I was able to pull out the actual slide show itself from the surrounding programming. It surprised me somewhat that a man who had the programming skills to do a desktop hack would be so lazy as to use just an office suite for the video itself, but it was a bit of good luck for me. Perhaps he wasn't as skilled as I thought, but just knew how to use ready-made code you could pull off the right websites if you knew what they were.
Once I had the slides isolated, I took a look at the pictures that were taken with me in them. I soon saw that all of them were taken from the same area of the campus, although they'd been taken on different days. With that hint, I looked at Google Maps, using the satellite overhead shot to identify the areas of campus that he had most likely taken the photographs from. I hoped that it would be something easy, like a single apartment building or something equally stupid. In fact, the most likely area was a narrow band of woods that bordered one edge of campus, planted about forty years ago to help separate the campus from the busy street on the other side. It stretched for nearly a half-mile, and on the other side was a major street. While it helped me in that it eased my fears of Drake bringing a rifle to the same spot in order to take a shot, I still wasn't totally at ease.
I shrugged and sent the information to Adam in an email. He said in his last message that he had some feelers out on Drake's cyber trail, going through the photography equipment he'd used. Apparently, the market for such items is pretty small, and Adam had some ideas.
The gray light of pre-dawn started lighting up the sky, and I sighed, stretching in my chair. There were still at least two hours before I had to wake Adriana up, and until then, I couldn't even go get coffee, which I desperately needed. Sure, I was damned, but even the damned could protect an angel, and that was what I was going to do.
Chapter 13
Adriana
I woke up in the morning, immediately feeling like I was missing something. I reached out with my arm, pushing the blanket on top of me aside, and realized what it was. Daniel. Where was he?
“Daniel?” I said, keeping my voice down to avoid being overheard. I opened my eyes and looked around, trying not to be sad but failing when I found that I was alone.
Had it all been a dream, a morphing of my nightmare into a fantasy? I closed my eyes and knew by the pleasant ache down below that it couldn't have been. Even the smell in the air of the small room wasn't that of a wet dream or a masturbatory fantasy. There was the distinct smell of male sweat and sex in the air, and I knew it had all been real. The kiss, the tasting, the mind blowing sex, all of it.
Getting out of bed, I found my pajamas still lying where I'd left them, except for my t-shirt, of course, and I picked everything up and put it in my laundry bag. The motion must have created some noise outside the door, because seconds later, I heard a knock. “Adriana?”
It was Daniel. “Daniel?”
“Are you dressed?” he asked, his voice professional and lacking any of the passion or tenderness he'd shown me last night. Swallowing my sudden tears, I grabbed my bathrobe off the hook next to the door and pulled it on, belting it quickly. “I am now. Come in.”
He opened the door, looking in with the friendly but not enamored look that he'd had the
night before. “Hey, glad you're up. We're running a bit late this morning, so I asked one of the other guys to take you to breakfast while I run and grab a shower and change. I'll see you in the car.”
“Dan . . .” I started, but his eyes silenced me, and he gave me a shake of his head that could have been measured in millimeters. “Later.”
“At school,” he said and turned, leaving. Julius waited for me in the hallway, looking tired but not overly concerned. He'd been on outdoor patrol and probably had a very boring night.
“Good morning, Julius. Shouldn't you be heading home now?”
“Eh, I'll do that in about a half-hour or so. Just going to take you to breakfast, then grab my things and go. How'd you sleep?”
“It was . . . different,” I said, sighing. There was no other way to describe it without giving myself away. “Anyway, let me grab my shower and then you can take me to breakfast. Give me ten minutes?”
“No problem.”
The entire drive to school, Daniel was reluctant to talk, at least about what I wanted to talk about. Instead, he insisted on talking about the weather, the people driving by, the song on the radio, the normal chit-chat that I thought we'd worked past. When we pulled into the parking lot at school, I didn't even give him a chance to open my door before I was out and slamming it, nearly catching his fingers in the process.
“Can we talk now?” I seethed, angry but not really knowing why. “Or do you want to discuss if Icon for Hire is going to be putting out another new single in the next few weeks or not?”
Daniel glanced at his watch, a cheap little G-shock knockoff that he'd picked up from the campus bookstore, then pointed at the student union. “Study booth,” he said, his voice both soft and hard at the same time. He could tell I was pissed, but there was no room for argument in his voice. It wasn't a request. It was a command. “We've got ten, fifteen minutes at most.”
Thankfully, the early morning meant few people were using the booths, and as Daniel closed the door and locked it behind him, I turned, trying not to yell. “What the hell? I knew you were the type for casual sex, but I hoped after what you said last night . . . I didn't think that's all it was. I hoped . . .”
Daniel cut my words off, pulling me to him and kissing me hard, his hands crushing our bodies together as he pushed me against the wall. His tongue was electric, leaving my lips to trace around my ear again, lighting me up in ways that, until the night before, I didn't even know existed. In fewer than ten seconds, I'd gone from pissed to so aroused that I'd have had sex with him right there, regardless of the fact that I knew the booths were monitored by security cameras for preventing that exact thing.
“Dan . . .” I sighed, wrapping my arms around his neck and holding him gently as he let me go, his hands still resting on my hips, his eyes full of tenderness. “Why?”
“Why did I kiss you right now, or why did I leave you this morning to wake up alone?” he asked softly, his eyes warm and his voice tender.
“How about both?” I replied, enjoying the feeling of being forehead to forehead like this, like a couple dancing without moving. “You pissed me off.”
“I know, and I'm sorry about that. It wasn't my intention,” he said, his fingers tracing patterns on my lower back. “But I kissed you because I didn't want you going off in a rant that I knew I could explain if you just gave me a chance. I kissed you because for the past two hours, it's been the only thing I've wanted to do, ever since opening the door to your room and seeing you in that bathrobe, looking lost and scared. I wanted to tell you that you're different, that I don't want this to be only one night. But that's also why I didn't say anything at the house, and why I had to leave your room at the same time.”
“Uncle Carlo,” I said, realizing. “The rules.”
Daniel nodded, sadness in his eyes. “Ade, last night I wrote my own death warrant, and I don't regret it. Even though I was nearly caught sneaking out of your room, I don't regret it. The only regret I have is that the chances of us having real happiness, the future that I can see in your eyes and in the way you talked last night . . . the odds of that are slim to none. I'm Neiman, no man, an orphan with no family. No name, nothing but my wits, a decent gun, and what Carlo Bertoli has given me. You're his niece, the only child of his murdered brother. You're more precious to him than a daughter, Adriana. And Carlo has told me twice now, if I ever did what happened this morning, I was a dead man. Do you know your uncle to be a man who’s willing to compromise?”
I blinked, tears in my eyes. “No,” I whispered. “But Daniel . . . maybe it can still happen. Mom said she'd talk to him. Her and I together, maybe?”
He kissed me again, his lips soft and silencing. When we parted, he smiled. “I doubt it. It's okay though. You're worth it. You know, my only worry as I sat out there in the hallway was that I know if we keep doing this, doing what I have so wanted to do for years, that I'd be breaking your heart? Not because I'll leave you on my own, but because you're going to have to bury me.”
“Not going to happen,” I replied, my anger coming back but not directed at him. “You've spent weeks protecting me, and I know you'll give Vincent what he deserves. I need you to put some faith in me, too.”
“How so?” he asked, a smile on his face even as uncertainty flashed in his eyes.
“Let me protect you. You keep me safe from Drake, and I'll keep you safe from Uncle Carlo.”
Daniel's eyes were still concerned, but he nodded. “Okay. But we do have to have rules. Rule one is, no expressions of affection or our new situation in public. Not even here at the university.”
“And this study room?” I asked, pulling him closer this time. “Please tell me I can spend at least my study time in this sort of room with you, kissing those bewitching, seductive lips if nothing else?”
He took his hand off my hip long enough to glance at his watch, then nodded. “For another two minutes at least. Then we might have to take a break until after your second class of the day. You've got that meeting with your Renaissance professor at three this afternoon. That's a gap of nearly two hours.”
I pulled his head down, my lips hungry and eager for one last kiss. “Two hours . . . I can make do with that.”
Getting home that night, I was happier than I'd ever been before. The two hours with Daniel hadn't happened in a study booth. Those had all been taken up when we got back to the student union after my second class, but instead, in a little used section of the library, where we kissed and made out like teenagers in between stacks of musty books that I doubted had been taken off the shelves in years. I'd actually been two minutes late for my meeting with my professor, apologizing but not overly concerned. Artists normally have a reputation for not being on time anyway.
At dinner, even Uncle Carlo noticed my newfound happiness. “You look better than you have in weeks, Bella,” he remarked as he sipped at his wine. “What's going on?”
“Just classes went well, Uncle,” I said, not liking lying to him but knowing how important it was. “And I had a good meeting with a professor. Besides, the weather today was great, and just before dinner, I had a nice session in the pool. How could I not feel better?”
He nodded and took another drink. “I understand. I'm glad to see that you are adapting well. You know, I had a period, before you were born, when I had to go everywhere with a bodyguard as well.”
“Really?” I asked, intrigued. “What happened?”
“Eh, this was back in the late eighties, when the Japanese were trying to buy up Seattle,” Carlo said, reminiscing. “Your father was in charge then, but I was the one in charge of talking with some Japanese who came in from Osaka, wanting to muscle in on our turf. They thought they could go through the port without cooperating with the local groups. In negotiations between us and them, things quickly broke down as they thought they could bring in some Yakuza muscle and just take what they wanted without providing the proper respect. Things got quite heated for a little while, and there was a month or s
o in the middle when Johnny and I both went around with bodyguards.”
It was rare that he talked about my father, and even less often that he used Dad's name. Gianni “Johnny” Bertoli had been his closest friend and protector growing up, and it was nice to hear Uncle Carlo talk about him. “How'd it get resolved?”
“In ways that are not for the dinner table discussion,” Uncle Carlo said with a cryptic smile.
After dinner, I worked on my painting for the night. Daniel woke from his nap in time to watch me finish. “It's changing,” he remarked. “It's not as dark as it was before.”
“I've got reasons to feel more positive about the world,” I said, carefully avoiding saying what I meant. “Still, it is pretty dark for me.”
I washed up, changing into my pajamas and going to my bedroom, where Daniel's chair and new side table for his computer were already waiting for him. I paused at the door, turning around. “Come tuck me in?” I whispered, leaning in close. “Or maybe check under my bed for monsters?”
“If I do that, the only monster will be in your bed,” he growled sexily in reply, his breath tickling my ear. “Are you sure you want that?”
“More than anything,” I replied. Disregarding the risk, I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Maybe later, when everyone is asleep.”
I heard footsteps in the hallway and pulled back just as Kathy walked by, her clogs squeaking on the hallway tile. “Well, good night, Daniel. I hope you can get your work done,” I said, maybe a touch too loudly. Kathy disappeared around the corner, and I blushed. “Sorry.”
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