That meant whatever the pretty blond Elsie was involved in could have any number of unforeseeable results. Oh, and she was pretty too. Fucking gorgeous actually. D wasn't wrong calling her Barbie. She definitely had that look- tall and lean, a body that was testament to either pilates or yoga and a strict diet: all shapely legs, a nice rack, and an ass that could make a man cry. While whatever color she was sporting wasn't natural, if her brows and lashes were anything to go by, she was a natural blond. Regardless, it was nice hair and she had a fuckuva lot of it, just begging for a man to take a good handful of it while he fucked her from behind and yank it hard. The blowjob lips comment, yeah, that wasn't that far off either. They were full and pink and just begging to be kissed. And, if what I had seen in those blue eyes of hers were anything to go by, she was due for a good makeout session that led to a good fucking session.
I had every intention of letting her walk out of my life with her hand wrapped up with her not-boyfriend's. I had no reason to get involved. But I had a mostly sleepless night tossing and turning and wondering what the hell she could possibly want with a gang that sold H and pimped out whores. So I called around, dropped the names Elsie and Roman, and I got an answer pretty fucking quick.
Apparently I was one of the very few people in the area who didn't know who Elsie Bay and Roman Matthewson were. First, because they had been hellions as teens, a couple of rich kids getting themselves into all kinds of trouble. Second, because they were well-off in the way that they went to charity functions and art openings. And, third, because they were the children of some of the biggest businessmen in the state. Elsie's dad was in energy, apparently a very loud-mouthed, abrasive man who was hell to work for and, I imagined, hell to grow up with. Which made her teen rebellion less obnoxious and more understandable. And Roman's father, Rhett, had a huge tech company, but they had their hands in many different areas: medicine, military, and security.
"How the fuck you never see her at Chaz's?" Shooter, one of my best friends and also a contract killer, one of the best in the country, asked the next morning as I stuck a needle into the back of his neck, working on some rose tattoo with huge ass thorns he got it in his mind to get done.
"Dunno." And I didn't. She was the kind of woman who stood out. There was an air about her that screamed class, but with a bit of rebellion any man in his right mind would be drawn to. "You never had her?" I asked, knowing that Shooter's reputation was one of the worst around before he finally settled down with his woman a year before.
"Nah. Felt bad as fuck for that Roman guy. Didn't want to make his life any more miserable than it was."
I snorted. "She seemed completely clueless about him wanting her."
"Sees what she wants to see," Shoot shrugged. "Why are you so interested in her all of a sudden?"
"D and Trick were chasing her last night, man. I grabbed her and pulled her in, covered for her."
"D and Trick?" Shoot asked, sitting up straight. He was rightfully worried to hear those names again. "The hell could she have gotten herself into involving them?"
"I don't know."
But I had every intention of finding out.
So I got into her neighborhood and I waited outside her house for her to get home from work. It was almost seven when she finally pulled up in that sweet light blue Porsche of hers.
I hadn't exactly expected full cooperation from her, full disclosure, but I didn't expect to be butting my head against a wall either. Whatever she was hiding, it was something she really didn't want people to know about.
I listened to her go up the stairs and looked over the menu for Famiglia for a minute. I ordered tortellini and a chicken parm then went up the stairs when she still hadn't come down, needing the number to the front gate so I could tell the guard, Al, to let the delivery guy in.
As soon as I got into the hall outside her closed door, I heard her.
I heard her and it was like a shot of white hot desire to my dick.
Because what I heard was the sound of her throaty whimpers. And there was only one thing that made a woman make sounds like that. She was behind that door touching herself, giving herself some relief from the desire I had seen in her eyes down in the kitchen.
My balls felt like they were in a vice grip as her whimpers became groans that culminated in one drawn out moan as she came.
She wasn't quiet.
Even believing I was one floor below her, almost in the exact spot she was, she hadn't bit her lip or buried her face. Or, if she had, then all it did was suggest that she was even louder when she wasn't concerned about being overheard.
Fuck if I didn't want to know what she sounded like uninhibited, riding my cock as hard as she pleased, watching what I could only imagine were perfect pink-tipped tits bouncing as she did so.
I shook my head, ignoring the chafing in my jeans as I turned to go back down the stairs as quietly as I could.
I might have been a man who had the very strong urge to tell her I heard her and that I would be all too happy to give her the kind of orgasm that would make her scream until her lungs hurt. But that was a private moment. I had no right to hear it in the first place, let alone comment on it. So I took my ass back down to the kitchen and rummaged around to make coffee. If the ten minutes before she went up to change were anything to go by, I was going to need a gallon of it.
"I forgot to tell you the number for the gate..." she said, sounding a little less flustered than it had been before she went upstairs.
I turned, expecting the typical chick 'lounge around' outfit of yoga pants and a tank, but saw instead an image that was going to be playing at the forefront of my brain when I jacked off later. Because gone was the cool, calm, collected rich girl persona she usually had. In its place was the sexiest fucking nerd I'd ever seen in my life. "Oh babygirl, if you were going for unappealing, you missed by a long shot," I smiled, taking in the messy hair, the glasses, the baggy sweatshirt and the skinny jeans.
Her feet faltered a second before she forced them forward. "I wasn't trying for anything. My contacts were bothering me."
"And the hair?"
"It was getting messy. I wanted it out of my face."
"And that sweatshirt?"
"It's Rome's," she said, shrugging as she reached for the phone to, presumably, call the gate.
"Stealing his comfy hoodie and he ain't your boyfriend?" I smiled, thinking about the endless hoodies women had lifted from me over the years.
She ignored me as she talked to Al at the gate, telling him to let in the guy from Famiglia, then hanging up. "Did you make coffee?" she asked, brows drawing together.
"Yeah."
"Jeez. Just make yourself at home why don't you?" she asked, smiling a little.
"Someone's got to. Your coffee grinder still had a factory seal on it."
She gave me a small smile. "It's easier to get coffee in the lobby at the office."
"Your stove front still has that protective plastic on it," I pointed out and she laughed.
"I don't cook or bake and even if I did cook or bake, it seems pointless to just cook for myself."
"Your not-boyfriend isn't over here all the time?"
"Jesus. What is your obsession with Roman?" she asked, waving a hand out like I was being unreasonable.
"He stayed here last night, didn't he?"
"Yes."
"In your bed?"
"In the guest room!" she yelped out, frustrated. "Alright enough about Rome. You're here to give me answers."
"Actually, baby, I'm here to get answers," I countered, watching as she moved past me and went toward the coffee pot, fumbling for a second as she looked at her cabinets, like she couldn't remember where the coffee mugs were. Back to me, I got to see her fan-fucking-tastic ass in those second-skin jeans she had on.
"Well I have no answers for you. So you can just get that out of your head. What do you know about the Third Street gang?" she asked, going into her fridge for milk.
"Babygirl..." I groa
ned slightly, not wanting to go there, but knowing there was no way she was going to give in. She turned, brow lifted behind her giant glasses and fuck if it wasn't the cutest God damn thing. "Fine," I sighed. "What do you want to know about them?"
"Well, you've told me they sell slam..."
"Smack," I corrected, grinning.
"Smack, whatever. And that they are pimps."
"Yeah, babe."
"So what are they doing at that huge warehouse on Kennedy?"
The warehouse on Kennedy? I didn't know shit about a warehouse on Kennedy, let alone one connected to the Third Street gang. "Is that where you were last night?"
She waved out a hand on a huff. "Yes. Okay, fine. Yes, that's where I was last night."
"Why?"
"That's my business," she said in a firm tone, her chin lifted, her brow arched in a haughty way that had my lips twitching. "What could the Third Street gang be doing in a factory that big? Making heroin?"
"No, baby," I said, trying not to laugh.
"How do you know that?"
"You know nothing about drugs, do you?"
"It wasn't exactly in my curriculum at school, no."
Guess that made sense. Sad thing was, I knew everything there was to know about drugs by the time I finished grade school. Despite my mom's, grandma's, and aunts' best efforts, there was no shielding me from all that shit growing up in the area I grew up in.
"Heroin is an opiate, but it's part synthetic so you can't just extract it from poppy. It's made from morphine. So first you need to extract the insides from the poppy, dry the morphine so you can ship it, then chemically extract the heroin from the morphine."
"And you know that they aren't doing this because..."
"Because it's too much fucking work, Elsie. The biggest supplier of opium and morphine is Afghanistan. Do you know how hard it is to ship shit in from Afghanistan to the United States right now? Third Street isn't big enough to grease the palms they would need to to get that shit in here. And why bother when you can get a contact from Mexico or Columbia, fuck, even fucking Burma or Laos, to do the dirty work for you? You lower your overhead and your risk of getting found out. So, no, they're absolutely not making heroin in that warehouse on Kennedy."
She was silent for a moment, tapping her nails on her mug as she thought. They weren't fake nails, either, I noticed with a bit of surprise. They were short and shaped and painted a pale pink, but they were her own nails.
"Could it have something to do with the prostitutes?" she asked a minute later with a shrug that suggested she already knew the answer.
"Can't think of a reason why it would."
"All you are doing is nixing my ideas," she shrugged. "Got any of your own to throw around?"
"Babygirl, I don't know what you want from..." I trailed off as the doorbell chimed.
"Say 'saved by the bell' and I'll throw my coffee at you," she warned, clicking it down on the counter and moving over toward where she dropped her purse. I bypassed her, going to the door, taking the food and paying the delivery guy before she could even get her wallet out of her purse. "Hey what are you doing?" she asked as she walked up to me closing the door.
"Getting dinner."
"Yeah, but this is my house."
"And?"
"And that means I pay for the food."
"You have a dick?"
"I'm sorry?" she asked, her eyes almost going comically wide. Talk about how to make heroin and she doesn't even blink, use the word 'dick' and she gets the face of a school girl.
"Dick. You got one?"
She shook her head slightly as if to clear it. "Not the last time I checked."
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from commenting on just how long it had been since she checked. "Right. I got one. So I pay for the food," I said, brushing past her toward the kitchen.
I was putting the bag on the island when she came in, arms crossed over her chest. "That's incredibly sexist of you."
"My mother calls it chivalrous," I said, pulling out the takeaway containers and putting them on the counter. "You got plates?"
"Only if you want to wash them after you use them. I'm eating out of the containers," she said, going to a sliding drawer and pulling out utensils.
"You're eating out of the containers?" I asked, watching as she pried open the lids to the food.
"What?" she asked, leaning down and sniffing the chicken parm. "You've never eaten out of a takeaway container?"
"Yeah, baby, just didn't think you would have."
"Right," she snorted, rolling her eyes. "Money like me couldn't possibly know how to eat out of plastic. It's been all fine China and silver spoons for me. I hope you didn't order either of these exclusively for yourself, because we're sharing."
As if to prove her point, she stabbed some tortellini and started cutting up the chicken. "Knock yourself out," I said as she did just that, diving into the food like she hadn't eaten in a month.
"Don't look at me like that," she said, lowering her eyes at me. "I eat fatty stuff like this maybe once every two or three months. It's here in front of me and I have every intention of pigging out."
I held my hands up, palms out. "Babygirl, you stuff your face. Something sexy about a woman enjoying her food." To that, she choked on her mouthful, bringing her hand up so she didn't spit it out. "Drink?" I asked.
She waved me toward the wine rack and I moved to it, not bothering to hide my smirk. It was no secret I had enjoyed my fair share of women. More than, if I were being perfectly honest. It was rare that one genuinely surprised me. After growing up surrounded by women then spending my teens and adulthood successfully chasing them, it was hard to find one who threw me.
Elsie threw me.
She was simply a mess of contradictions. Rich girl who liked to eat out of takeaway containers, who had the money to get lasik but wore huge dorky glasses instead, who gave me bedroom eyes then went upstairs and eased her sexual tension then practically blushed when I used the word 'dick' or said it was sexy to watch a woman eat, who seemed straight up and down in every way that mattered but was getting herself involved with a fucking street gang.
I picked a bottle at random, opened it, and poured into glasses that were beside her sink like she used them recently and rinsed them out and left them to dry. Unlike her coffee mugs, her wine glasses apparently got used.
"Gonna save any for me?" I asked, pulling up a stool and sitting down next to where she was leaning over the counter steadily devouring both meals somehow simultaneously.
"Darwin," was her mouth-filled answer, her hand up masking her lips.
"What?" I asked as she reached for her wineglass and took a long sip.
"Survival of the fittest. It isn't my fault you're weak," she said, putting her wineglass down with a clink and diving back in.
Not more than ten minutes and maybe six bites later, the food was gone, mostly into Elsie's body. She finally reached out for a stool and pulled it up to sit on as she topped off her wine.
"So you have no clue what the warehouse is for, aside from telling me it's not to make heroin or store prostitutes."
"Right," I agreed. "And you're not going to tell me why the fuck you're sticking your pretty little nose in street gang business."
"Right," she agreed with a small nod.
"So that's it?" I guessed, at a loss for how I could get her to tell me anything more than what she had already.
"That's it," she agreed, standing, making it clear dinner was over. "I'll walk you out," she said, turning and walking off toward the front room, leaving me very little choice but to follow behind. She had pulled the door open and was standing off to the side. "Thanks for the chemistry lesson and dinner."
I felt my lips tip up and nodded, moving out onto the front step before I changed my mind and swung back around, pushed inside, and pressed her up against the door in her entryway. My hands went to her hips, my thumbs spanning across her stomach as my head dipped down.
"Listen, Elsi
e. I get it if you have some shit you're in and you think you need to handle it on your own. But don't get yourself in too deep without back-up. If things look like shit and you need some help, find me, okay? I don't want to read it in the society pages that you got yourself killed because you were too fucking stubborn to ask for help." My fingers dug in, pressing her harder against the wall as her mouth fell slightly open. "Got me, babygirl?"
Her lips pressed together and she swallowed hard. "Ah, yeah. I got you, Paine," she agreed with a small nod.
"Good," I said, trying to force my hands to let her go, but all they did was sink in harder as they lifted upward, bringing her up onto her tiptoes as she gasped. My lips crashed onto hers hard and fast before I tore myself away and threw myself outside, slamming the door behind me before I turned around, stormed back in and fucked her right there in the open doorway.
FIVE
Elsie
The next day went as follows: got up, didn't think about the kiss, got dressed, didn't think about it in the shower, got to work, didn't think about it during coffee breaks, set up an appointment with the Barrett guy, didn't think about it while stopped at the god damn red lights on the way to said appointment...
Yeah, so Paine kissed me.
One minute, I was walking him out the door. Everything was chaste, calm, somewhat normal. The next second, he had me pinned against the wall, his strong hands on my belly and holding on tight, pulling me almost off my feet. And, let me tell ya, for a tall girl, that was quite a feat. Then he was offering me backup if I needed it.
And then his lips were on mine.
Hard.
Crushing.
I felt it down to my freaking toes. My toes. Like a middle-school girl getting a kiss from the most popular boy in school. It went through my whole system, pinging rather intensely at the nerve endings between my legs before it journeyed down.
Savages Series Boxed Set Page 50