Wrong (Spada Crime Family #2) (6 page)

Of course. There’s always some bargain to be made. With Sal I traded myself for my bakery. Nick wants me in exchange for protection. It’s wrong, and I know it, but at the same time something about Nick feels different than Sal. I don’t feel dirty when Nick touches me. Even after what he just said, I don’t feel like he wants to use me. Maybe I’m kidding myself.

But then he lowers his head, and his lips brush against mine. I lean toward him with a soft moan that I can’t help.

“You deserve better than him,” Nick murmurs against my mouth. “So much better.”

I press my mouth against his, wanting to be closer. The panic is starting to leave me. “I probably deserve better than you, too,” I mutter.

He chuckles. “No doubt.” But then he drags me close up against him and kisses me hard, his mouth pressing hard into mine. His tongue moves between my lips, touches my tongue, dances with it. I open wider, letting him in.

It’s like the kiss from before, at the bakery, but different. He’s a bit more reserved, like he’s trying to be gentler, or persuasive, rather than just doing his best to slake a thirst. I don’t mind either way. He tastes good to me. Like something I need.

“God, you’re beautiful.”

He reaches up and strokes my hair away from my face. I can’t be beautiful—not at the moment, anyway. I’ve been crying my heart out for, God—fifteen minutes? Thirty? There’s no way I’m not streaky and swollen. Yet he seems to mean what he said.

His mouth moves away from mine, his lips walking up the side of my face to my ear, where he nibbles a moment, nipping the curve of my ear all around the row of earrings. Then he draws the lobe between his lips, lets it go. One of his hands lowers, cupping my breast, teasing my nipple through my dress. I let out another involuntary gasp. He’s pressing closer to me, pinning me against the back wall of the storeroom. I let him. Right now I don’t want to be anywhere else. God knows I don’t want to be with Sal. And while I’ve still got some doubts about Nick’s motives, I figure anything is better than going back home.

God, I hope I’m right.

I push the thoughts out of my head—all of them, leaving just a blank space behind. Right now I only want to feel.

Nick is giving me every opportunity to do just that. While one hand continues to tease my breast, the other moves down, cupping me between my legs. After a moment his fingers start to walk against my thigh, inching my skirt up until he can move his hand under it. Then his fingers are right up against my panties.

“You’re so hot,” he mutters, fingers questing. He kisses me again while he explores between my legs, testing me through the cotton of my panties then sliding one finger under the edge and into the hot wetness beneath. A finger slides inside, and I jerk with the shock of it.

Two fingers inside, then he’s pressing the heel of his hand against my mound, and I start grinding against it.

Yeah, I’m humping his hand, and I don’t even care. It feels good. It’s something I’m doing on my own, just because I want to. No matter what Nick’s ulterior motives might be, he has yet to do anything I didn’t want him to do. In my world, that goes a long way, and how sad is that, really?

At the moment it doesn’t matter. I keep rocking on his hand, his fingers driving inside me, the heel of his hand rubbing against my clit with each wavelike movement of my hips. Heat builds between my legs. He kisses me, taking my mouth hard, and then bites down the side of my neck. His teeth dig into my shoulder, and suddenly I tense, shudder, and I can feel wetness sliding along his fingers. He laughs against my skin, his teeth still tight. Some perverse part of me hopes he’s left a mark.

“Nick,” I breathe when I start to slide down from the climax. I reach down between his legs, feeling the hard length of his erection, but he tips his hips back.

“No,” he says. “It’s okay. Later.”

I look into his face, barely able to catch the glitter of his eyes. “Later?”

“Yeah.” Reaching down, he lifts the hand I’ve got curled around him. It’s my left hand. He kisses my palm, then he takes my ring finger into his mouth. His teeth nip down the full length, until they close right behind Sal’s engagement ring. Then he slides back, and I realize he’s keeping the ring behind his teeth.

It comes off my finger. I feel a strangely euphoric sense of relief seeing my hand bare. And then Nick grins. He’s holding the ring between his teeth, the diamond in front, catching the faint light and tossing it back.

He pulls it back and spits it across the room. There’s a faint “ting” as it hits the floor.

“Let’s go,” says Nick, and we go.

Chapter Four

Nick

Honest to God, I can’t believe what I’ve just done. Sal De Luca’s girlfriend—no, his
fiancée
—in my house. She’s gorgeous, even with her face tear streaked and her dress still a little askew from having my hands inside it. My fingers still smell like her cunt. I want to taste her there, drive my tongue into her. I want to fuck her every which way to Sunday.

Then she’ll be mine. I’ll fuck every trace of Sal off her, and neither of us will ever have to think about him again.

It’s a heady feeling, like being a little too drunk. Sal won’t ever recover from this. There’ll be no question, then, of who should take over as Spada’s right-hand man. It’ll be me, and they’ll run Sal out of town on a rail.

I hear a soft sniffing noise, and it pulls me out of my thoughts. Sarah’s still standing near the front door, looking almost lost. Forlorn. My triumph fades a little.

“Can I get you a drink?” I ask her.

She drags her attention to me and looks at me for a minute like she’s not quite sure who I am. Then she nods. “Sure. Something hot.”

“I can do that.”

I get her situated on a nice, comfortable chair in the living room, then go back into the kitchen to mix her up a hot toddy. Rum and butter, a little hot water. Cinnamon? Sure. Why not? I make one for myself, too, and bring them back into the living room.

In the archway between the kitchen and the living room, though, I stop. She’s sitting there quietly on the couch, and she’s started crying again. Not a lot—just a few tears streaking down her face, like they’re left over from the crying jag she had at the restaurant. She shoves her hand across her cheeks, shoving them away like she’s angry at them. She’s not facing in my direction; her focus is on the bookshelf against the opposite wall. I know what she’s doing—when you’re uncomfortable in somebody’s house, you distract yourself checking out their library. I hope she’s finding mine fascinating.

Strangely I find myself not able to move right away. I just want to stand there and take her in. She’s beautiful, yes, but it’s more than that. She’s so vulnerable right now, and I know damn well I’m taking advantage of that, but I think she knows it, too. And something about her just…

I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a sort of warm feeling in my chest. Something about looking at her makes me happy.

At least I think that’s what it is. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually
been
happy. Not like some other guys I know who’ve settled down with good women and are raising families. I always thought Dad was happy, at least in the last couple of decades or so. Maybe he fought, too. Maybe he had issues with the Spadas and everything that was expected of us. But with me and my brother, with my mom, he was good.

I swallow hard as I’m hit with a sudden vision of Sarah, still in my house, still in my living room, but with her body heavy and beautiful with a child. My child. I want that. I want that quiet kind of security that having a woman at home, having a family, gives a man. And I can’t put it off much longer. Life is short.

I must make a noise or something, or maybe Sarah just feels me looking at her, because she turns abruptly, looking almost startled. I give her a reassuring smile and move toward her with her drink.

“Hot toddy,” I tell her as she takes it out of my hand. “Good choice?”

She smiles, hesitant, or maybe still sad. “Good choice.”

Carefully she sips at the drink and then makes a face, but I can tell the grimace is because the toddy is hot and not because she doesn’t like it. “Cinnamon,” she says. “Nice touch.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Without asking permission, I sit down next to her on the couch and stretch an arm out along the back of it, my fingers only a couple of inches from her shoulder. I sample the drink; it’s hot but tasty, and the heat and the liquor feel good sliding down.

For a few minutes we just sit quietly, sipping our drinks and not quite looking at each other. It’s awkward, but that’s all right. It’s a start.

Finally I set my drink down on the end table and ask her the question that’s been bugging the hell out of me since even before we met at that party. “How did you end up with Sal, anyway?”

She tenses, and I regret breaking the quiet mood, awkward or not. With a small shake of her head, she says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I nod. I get that. “Okay. But if I know what he’s holding over your head, it might be easier for me to help you.”

Her head swivels, her eyes meeting mine directly. I can tell she hasn’t thought of that angle before. As she mulls what I just said, I can damn near see the thoughts rolling over and over each other in her brain. After a few long seconds she says, “The bakery.”

That makes sense. It’s usually something like that. Something that can be taken away without much effort. “What happened?”

Sarah takes another sip of her drink, this time as if she’s fortifying herself. “I’ve always wanted a bakery. Or a little restaurant. A coffee shop—you know, something little and intimate that adds character to a neighborhood.” With a shrug, she sets the drink aside, and from that small gesture I know she’s going to spill the whole story. “Mom and Dad wanted me to do something more useful with my life, but I just wanted that little restaurant. So I scrimped and saved and still I didn’t quite have enough. So…I took out a loan.”

“Ah.” Familiar story. I’d given out more than a few of those loans myself. It always seemed good at the beginning, but if you couldn’t pay, things got ugly really fast. “From Sal?”

“Yeah. And after a while, I couldn’t make the payments. I was having a hard time getting the place up and running. They decided it’d be a better return on their dime if they torched the place and collected the insurance money.”

I wince. Yeah, I’ve done that, too. I always told myself I did what had to be done, that the business had to go ahead of everything else. Profit. Success. Return on the dollar. Hearing it from Sarah puts a whole different spin on it. I don’t comment, though. I let her keep talking.

“Obviously I wasn’t keen on that plan, but I had no idea how to stop them. Or even if I
could
stop them. So I’m panicking, I’m already seeing my perfect little bakery going up in smoke, and when Sal comes around to collect his money, I beg him for a deal.”

She stops. After a moment she picks her drink up again and tosses off the rest of it in a single gulp. Her fingers are shaking as she sets it back down.

I decide to let her off the hook. “Sal was the deal. He’d let you keep the bakery if you moved in with him.” I put it in the most delicate terms I can think of. At the same time, my stomach’s gone cold. I suspected it was something like this keeping her under his thumb, but this is even worse than I thought. I’m queasy all of a sudden, thinking about the number of times I’ve put people in similar positions. I’ve never asked anybody to whore themselves, but I’ve done things nearly as bad. Threatened livelihoods, vehicles, homes.

In a way, though, being on the other side of it makes it easier to understand why Sarah ended up where she is. Because I know Sal was serious when he said he’d burn the place down. He would have done it just like I would have done it. Sarah just got stuck between a very big rock and an extra-hard hard place.

She just nods. “And now this. Now he expects me to spend the rest of my life with him.” I can tell from the shiver in her voice that tears are threatening again.

I move closer. “I’ll be sure that doesn’t happen. I promise you.”

Her eyes slide sideways. I know she’s wondering what the catch is. Because of course there’s a catch. Yeah, it’s probably enough that I’m giving Sal the double middle finger by stealing his girl, but I’m starting to want more. A lot more.

She doesn’t ask any questions, though, and when I lean toward her to kiss her, she doesn’t even pretend like she doesn’t want me to.

God, she’s beautiful. Even after everything she’s been through today, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman look like she does. She’s cried off most of her makeup, and without it her skin is pale like porcelain. Her eyes stand out, stark and wide. There’s still lipstick on her mouth, dark against the washed-out colors of the rest of her face. She looks so fragile, so vulnerable, and yet in her eyes I see a stubborn fire that I don’t think I want to cross.

Somehow, in spite of everything, Sal hasn’t broken her.

I smile a little at that thought, which brings with it an inexplicable surge of pride. I kiss her again, deeper this time. She’s not going to leave this house without me having her every way I can think of. And then I’m going to tell her exactly what I want from her, and she’s going to agree. Because I’m the lesser of two evils, and because I can give her things Sal can’t. Or won’t.

Her small hand comes up to comb through my hair, and she presses closer to me. I know she wants this. Regardless of anything else, we’re hot for each other. I’m hard already, my dick demanding more than just the contact of my clothes to satisfy it. It’s not good at being patient.

Neither am I, but I have to be this time. I want her on board with this from the beginning. I want her to know what she’s getting into.

I lay my hand over hers where she’s stroking my hair and make the kiss even deeper, slanting my mouth over hers. Her breath is speeding up, and I can feel her heartbeat against me, also getting faster. She feels so small against me, her hand delicate inside mine, like a small animal, fluttering.

“Nick…” she breathes after a moment, drawing back just a little.