5. Distraction
five
Distraction
He brought her home. The family had three safehouses in the Newark area, yet Romeo had brought her home with him. Even as he helped her inside, Mo following with the things Aurelio had rushed out to the second car before it had pulled away, Romeo knew this was only going to make the already delicate situation worse in the light of day.
A problem for later.
Enrico, Lucia’s bodyguard, met him at the foot of the stairs. His brows arched high up his forehead for a single second before he ripped his gaze away from Grace completely. “Sir?”
“Keep the property locked down,” Romeo said quietly. “Grace here is my guest. If you need to know anything else, you’ll be informed.” He liked Enrico—he trusted the man to protect his daughter when he couldn’t do it himself, after all—but this wasn’t the time to get into even what little he did know.
Enrico nodded and moved aside. “Everything’s been quiet here, sir.”
“Good.” Romeo held out his free hand toward Mo and Mo passed along the work bag and purse, presumably one of them containing a phone charger. Then he dipped his head and lowered his voice to speak to Grace, who was standing up against his side as if she were petrified to move away. He suspected she wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to anything outside her head right then, and he wasn’t too thrilled about the implications of that. “Come on, angel. Let’s get you upstairs. Think you can walk a little more?”
He felt her draw a breath and, slowly, she nodded. Still, he walked beside her for each step, grateful to his younger self’s indulgence and flashiness for buying a property with an extra-wide main staircase. They climbed at a more sedate pace than he’d probably ever moved before, but eventually they reached the top, and Romeo guided her in the proper direction.
He wanted to bring her to his room, to peel away her blood-stained pajamas and hold her naked body tight to his until she finally stopped shaking. But the timing was wrong for that. He knew it was. The last thing she needed was to feel trapped or pressured, to feel like she’d escaped one nightmare just to wind up in another. So he took her to the guest room closest to his own, set her things down, and pulled her against him again.
“I know this place is unfamiliar,” he said gently, “and I know some scary ass shit happened tonight, but I promise you, you’re safe here, okay?”
Grace tipped her head back, looking up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen, he thought he could see the beginnings of a bruise near her jaw, yet she tried for a smile. “Will you stay?”
Romeo almost didn’t hear her barely whispered question through the haze of his darkening thoughts. He blinked at her.
“Will you stay with me?” she repeated, her voice still too soft, too weak. “I’ve never … been more scared…”
Fuck. Romeo couldn’t fully restrain the groan as he bent down and brushed his lips over the unblemished side of her jaw. “You sure you want that, angel?”
She nodded with more urgency than she’d shown since he’d found her at her apartment.
He hated to dampen that, but he needed her to understand at least one thing. “We need to get you cleaned up, Grace. Out of these bloody clothes. I’ll find something you can wear, and you can use my shower if you want, but we can’t leave you like this.” If she had any open cuts and got some kind of infection, he didn’t know what he’d do.
She shook a little harder with her next breath, bit her lips, and nodded again. “Okay.” She was trying. She was trying to pull herself together and not let the trauma of the night overwhelm her the way it so easily could.
He was so fucking proud of her for that.
Romeo scooped her bags back up, kept his other arm around her, and walked her from the room. He’d just have to put in a little effort, too. He supposed he could be a man about that for once. So he walked her across and down the hall a handful of paces, toed his door open the rest of the way, then kicked it shut. He wasn’t worried about Lucy. He still kept a baby monitor in her room and checked it regularly to make sure she wasn’t fiddling with it, so he’d know if she got up and moved around, let alone left her room altogether.
He filled the room with soft light, enough to see by without being blinding, set Grace’s bags down again, and guided her to sit on the foot of the bed. “Wait here just a second, okay?” As soon as she nodded again, he pulled away and rushed through his closet. Giving her something of his to change into was dangerous, arguably stupid, but it was the only option. He didn’t exactly keep women’s clothing on-hand. He settled for a t-shirt he hoped wouldn’t be too loose for her and a pair of pants with a drawstring, snagged a couple of towels, and returned to the main part of the room.
Grace was where he’d left her, gripping the edges of his coat that was still wrapped around her figure, her eyes slowly roving around the space. Taking it in.
Part of him wanted to leave her to it, but he couldn’t, so Romeo set the items next to her and dropped to a crouch, not wanting to tower over her. “I know you’ve been through a lot tonight,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle. “We can talk about it if you want, or not at all. That’s entirely up to you. But let’s do the shower first, all right? And take all the time you need. Neither of us is worrying about a schedule right now. It’s important you let yourself process all of this.”
Her lips parted. “I—” She cut herself off, bit her lips again, and nodded.
Romeo stood and held out his hand for her. She took it immediately, having already abandoned her phone to the side of the bed. He pulled her up, then carefully removed his coat from her shoulders, tossing it aside the way he wanted to do with the rest of her clothes. Instead, he lifted the pile he’d gathered and held it out to her. “Some clean clothes and towels. I’m afraid you’re stuck with my hair products, though.” He tried for a grin.
She looked at the items but didn’t reach for them. “Can you … set them inside for me?” She motioned to the en suite, visible from where they stood, then to herself. “I’ll just make them dirty.”
He frowned, shifted his armload, and moved his freed hand to her nape to encourage her to walk with him. “Need me to show you how to use the shower?” He set the items on the counter when they were close enough and let his other hand glide down to the small of her back. With her hair loose for once, he got to feel it slide between his fingers and he had to fight with himself not to grab hold of the strands.
“No,” she said after a moment. “I’ll manage.” She turned to look up at him, and for the longest second, he swore he thought she was about to ask him to shower with her.
She didn’t, and he stepped back. “I’ll be right outside the door, Grace,” he promised.
She smiled, just a little, and the restraint was worth it.
He shut the bathroom door as he stepped out, leaving her alone to clean herself up, and locked his jaw to swallow the slew of curses that wanted to spew from him. He didn’t know anything for certain yet, but he didn’t believe in coincidences. The Ink Blots pop back up on the radar earlier that very day after months of silence, and then Grace is attacked? He had no goddamn clue why they’d target her, but they were the only aggressors he could think of.
Romeo shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone, but waited until he heard the shower start before opening his contacts. It was the middle of the night, and newlyweds tended to be late to sleep—or that was the impression he’d developed—but if he didn’t make the time to make a call, the argument would only be worse. He wasn’t trying to pull a Cristiano and lock the woman he wanted up in secret or something.
His thumb paused over the call button. There is a certain appeal to that… He blew out a breath and tapped the screen.
Dante’s phone rang three times before he answered, already sounding irritated. “This better involve someone I get to kill.”
“Eventually, I’m sure it does,” Romeo replied, keeping his voice quiet. “I have a customer for Cris I think you’ll agree needs to take priority, at least based on current information. He should be registering within the hour. But that’s only part of the situation.”
“You wouldn’t have woken me up for that.”
“A team of at least seven men were sent after Grace tonight. Made a fucking mess along the way.”
“What?”
“If you hadn’t put those guys in her building, she’d either be dead or captured by now. Not clear yet what their agenda was.” He was betting on dead, based on the number of men and guns. But then, they could simply have been assuming they’d run into resistance.
Dante drew a breath. “Instead?”
“She’s with me. She’s pretty shaken up, but I haven’t found any major injuries.” Romeo paused for a beat and clenched his free fist. “She asked for a personal day. I think you should give her the rest of the week.” It was a tall ask, particularly in light of his own assistant’s departure, but he put it on the table regardless.
“Why is she with you and not at a safehouse? Why did you get involved, Romeo?”
“Would you rather I hadn’t answered when she called?”
“You know that’s not my point.”
Romeo glared into the empty room, grateful they were having this discussion over the phone. They were both going to need a little time to cool their heads before it turned into a rational, productive conversation. “If I’d done nothing, or if I’d only sent a response team and instructions, that line you’re so worried about would still have been crossed. That’s not on me, brother.”
Dante cursed. “We’re talking more about this tomorrow.”
“I assumed.” Romeo pulled the phone from his ear in time to see the screen change, indicating Dante had hung up before he could do it himself. That was fine. The important part of the message had been delivered.
He tucked his phone away again and let his head rest against the door, listening to the shower. In the near-silence that rushed into the room, he was sure he could hear Grace sobbing and he hated it. He hated that she had been targeted, that she had been so scared, that she’d had to see even half of what she’d seen. He wasn’t sure yet what exactly she’d endured, but he hated all of it. He wanted nothing more than to go in there and hold her, comfort her, reassure her that she was safe and the nightmare over.
That was the last thing he could do, though, so he held his ground and waited.
It felt like everything had devolved into chaos and she was struggling to keep up. Grace wanted very much to hurry through this shower and get back to Romeo’s side, because Romeo was the only place where she felt like the ground wasn’t collapsing beneath her feet. But she made herself linger. She made herself stand under the spray, soaking and scrubbing everything with soaps that weren’t hers. Soaps that smelled like him.
She forced her mind to go backward, back to Sean’s unexpected and confusing phone call, and then to play the night’s crazy events forward again. She would never understand what had happened if she didn’t first at least sort through the things she had personally witnessed.
The tears started as the sound of that explosion replayed in her memory. She’d heard other, smaller and more muted, popping sounds minutes later. Not the same, yet something in the back of her head insisted they were. Something insisted she was sure she knew what that explosion had been. She didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to picture it, so she scrubbed harder.
She remembered hurriedly shoving a chair in the vicinity of the door, wedging herself in the far corner of her bathroom, and Romeo’s strong voice in her ear. “Don’t talk. Just listen to me. Stay down, make yourself as small as you can, and stay silent. Help’s on the way. If someone puts his hands on you before I get there, scream at the top your lungs. Find something—anything—to bash his face with. The one thing you never do is give in. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
His words had helped her drown out the alarm blaring through her apartment, only for her to realize it had silenced by the time she was off the phone. She certainly hadn’t input the code. And in the silence, she could hear movement, what sounded like multiple people. Male voices.
The door had rattled, someone trying to get in, and she’d slapped a hand over her face to keep from screaming. She’d screamed anyway when the knob was shot off seconds later, the lights flicked on, and a man with his face half covered in a bandana locked an angry stare on her. He held a gun in one hand, a gun he promptly leveled at her.
Romeo had told her to fight back, to not give in, so Grace had done the dumbest thing possibly ever. She’d lifted her phone and snapped a photo. With the brightly lit room and him facing her almost directly, she got a great shot.
By the time she did that, he was surging forward, slinging insults in what sounded like Portuguese, and had a hand in her hair. He wrenched her up, she tried to fight him off, and somehow, she took a hard hit to the jaw that had her seeing stars. The struggle ended with him and his bulkier buddy dragging her by the arms from the bathroom while she attempted to get her feet under her again.
Then another wave of chaos, with shouting in the hall and more men pouring into her apartment. These men were not wearing face coverings and didn’t really look like stereotypical gangsters, but all of them were armed and intimidating. One of her assailants released her, drawing a gun on the newcomers, and an eerily well-orchestrated wave of popping noises sliced through the air.
There had been blood. So much blood.
Grace folded her arms around herself and sucked in watery breaths. It had gotten on her.
The man whose picture she’d taken, his blood had splattered nearly the entire left side of her pajama outfit. She couldn’t tell now if her skin was still stained red from the way it had soaked through, or if the redness was from too much scrubbing. She hoped it was the latter.
She remembered hitting her knees as the other bodies fell, the room suddenly going silent again. She remembered looking around, seeing a mess beyond the death and invasion. She remembered still being afraid. Were these new men there to rescue her? Or were they merely the first wave’s competition?
Someone had tried to speak to her, but the words had garbled in her ears and Grace had scrambled to put her back to a wall. It wasn’t until she recognized a face, another of Dante’s employees though for a different business brand, that she felt a flicker of something other than imminent dread. But she was still confused and frightened and in too much shock to communicate properly.
There were too many strangers in her apartment, and none of them seemed bothered by the carnage. She wanted them all to go away. Their calmness and insistence on hanging around, with their visible weapons, kept her in a heightened state of fear.
It was only when Romeo had walked through the door, plowing past the men still standing, and the ones who weren't, like none of them mattered, that she felt something else. Hope.
Grace blew out a slow breath, the memory of his arms around her and his steady heartbeat beneath her ear as he held her helping to calm her again. Forcing herself back through that insanity didn’t make any of it make more sense. But she supposed she had recalled one potentially useful thing. She’d forgotten about the picture.
She tipped her head back, using the water from the shower that had started to run cold to wash away her tears. Then she turned the whole thing off, found one of the towels, and hurried through drying herself.
His towels were soft and somehow more luxurious than she’d expected, and she found herself wanting to just wrap her body in them instead. But she couldn’t, even though they were actually large enough. So she dried her body, wrapped up and scrub-dried her hair, and paused again.
He carried me. Romeo had lifted her into his arms and walked an unreasonable distance without making a single indication of discomfort.
Her gaze slipped to the fogged-over mirror. She knew what it would show, of course. At five-foot, nine-inches she was not a small woman in stature any more than she was in her weight. Her height made it easier to take a power position in the psychological warfare that often came with her job, because she always wore heels to work so sometimes she even stood above the men. But the overall combination just made her feel self-conscious. She’d always wanted to feel more feminine and delicate, not unlike the way she would have preferred to have a family by the time she’d turned thirty.
Grace turned abruptly from the mirror. Clearly Romeo was strong, stronger than she’d given him credit for even, but this was not the night to get lost down that rabbit hole.
She lifted his borrowed clothes, slipping on first the shirt—which smelled like him and brought a smile to her lips—then the pants. The pants were too long on her, even with the waist cinched up high, so she had to roll the ankles. The shirt, of course, swam even on her plump figure. But it was comforting, being swallowed up by him this way. It felt almost like a hug.
Then she had no other reason to put it off any longer, so Grace pulled open the door to find Romeo leaning against the wall directly beside it. For a split-second, he looked like he might have been asleep, and she finally remembered what time this had all started.
She opened her mouth to apologize, but he cut her off.
“Feel any better?” His dark blue gaze dropped down her form for a long second, then he reached around and flicked off the bathroom light.
Grace nodded. “A little.” She drew a breath. “I, um, I didn’t know what to do with my pajamas…” Or the panties she’d had on beneath, which had also absorbed some of the blood.
“It’s fine. My housekeeper will sort through what can be washed and what needs to be disposed of in the morning, don’t worry about it.” Romeo reached up while she was prying her tongue off the roof of her mouth and brushed his knuckle oh-so-lightly along her jaw. “I’m sorry, but I went through your phone a little. Was the guy you grabbed that pic of the one who did this?”
“You—” She stopped herself. Could she really be indignant that the man who’d maybe saved her life, in the middle of the damn night no less, had poked around in her phone? While she was using his shower? Maybe. But she could save it for a more clear-headed hour. “I’m pretty sure. I tried to fight him off, and he had a friend, so I’m not positive which of them hit me.”
He blinked at her, and a slow, dimple-popping smile lifted his lips. “You listened.”
Her heart beat a little harder and a wild, stupid, fabulously reckless idea whispered to her. She inched closer, having to tip her head back to keep eye-contact, and reached up to rest her hands on his chest. “Romeo,” she whispered, his name still feeling forbidden on her tongue, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.” She licked her lips. “I don’t want to think about it.”
She watched his Adam’s apple bob and his throat work down a hard swallow. “Tell me what you do want, Grace.”
She knew she shouldn’t. She knew there were so many reasons she should back away and endure the next few hours of non-sleep that were sure to follow. Except the thought of that was too much, so she embraced the reckless feeling she wasn’t known for. “Kiss me. Distract me. Don’t let me think.”
Romeo groaned, the sound rumbling up from deep in his chest, and crushed her to him. His mouth crashed against hers as his fingers lifted into her still damp hair, his tongue slipping past her lips as his other hand dropped lower to grab hold of her butt. It was not a gentle or tentative kiss. The kiss was demanding and all-consuming.
Grace whimpered against him, her fingers twisting in his shirt as she slid her tongue along his. She hadn’t been prepared. It was so much better than she’d imagined, so much more powerful than anything she remembered from past experience. He was pouring fire into her blood and she wanted more, she wanted to plaster herself against him.
Romeo broke from her lips, trailing wet kisses back along the bruise-free side of her jaw until he was sucking on her neck. At the same time, he rocked her forward, grinding her against his erection and drawing a shuddering gasp from somewhere deep in her chest.
She wedged her arms around him, trying to hold him closer, and let her head fall to the side. A delightful shiver ran through her as he pulled her earlobe between his teeth and she almost didn’t process the deep, husky timbre of his voice when he spoke.
“Tonight, your safe word is ‘stop.’ If you change your mind, or I push too far, just say that word and I will, immediately.” He pressed a kiss beneath her ear. “Tell me you understand.”
A safe word… She’d never needed one of those before. Grace clung tighter to his back. “Only … tonight?”
He huffed out a breath and his hands swept over her, diving beneath her borrowed shirt and going straight for the drawstring at her belly. His fingers moved as he lifted his head enough to find her gaze. “If you decide to let me touch you again, after your head’s clear and you’ve had time to do the thing you don’t want to do right now, we’ll talk about all that. You can pick a word you prefer. So yeah, tonight, you just use a standard word. Easy to remember.” The drawstring came loose and he didn’t ask, didn’t blink, before shoving the sweatpants to the floor.
Grace gasped at the same time as his hands curved over her bare hips, slowly dragging down.
Romeo cursed and dropped his forehead to hers. “Fuck. You’re not even wearing any panties?”
She opened her mouth, something inside tensing at the reminder, but then his lips were there again, chasing the thought away. He kissed her roughly, stretching both hands around to take a double handful of her butt this time. She wasn’t sure which of them groaned louder. She wiggled, toeing off the pants from where they’d caught around her ankles, and then he lifted her completely off her feet.
The kiss broke when her butt hit the bed, Romeo’s hands sliding down her thighs as he lowered to his knees. “Spread these legs for me, angel,” he said. “Let me see that pretty pussy.”
She complied without hesitation, the gravelly tone of his voice going through her almost as intensely as the heat of his touch. Or the power of his kiss. So she hiked up his shirt a little and leaned back, widening her legs as much as she could.
Romeo groaned and splayed his palms over her thighs. “Goddamn,” he grunted. “So fucking pretty.” He slid one hand forward and stroked two fingers through her folds, ending on her clit. “So fucking wet for me.” He rubbed his fingers around her clit until she was panting, then bent forward and buried his face between her thighs. His tongue was everywhere, licking every drop. He dipped it past her opening before dragging it up, and as his tongue found her aching clit, he sank two fingers inside her.
There was nothing subtle about the slurping, squelching noises or the moans he was drawing out of her. His fingers were pumping, his tongue swirling, and Grace barely remembered not to scream as her orgasm tore through her and she collapsed back onto the mattress, too weak to hold herself up.
Oh my god… She couldn’t believe how quickly, and how thoroughly, he’d unwound her.
Romeo released a low, deep-throated hum. “Open your mouth, angel,” he said as he leaned over her. He raised the hand he’d just had inside her. “Need to watch you clean me off.”
Her lips parted as if in a haze and he slipped his fingers into her mouth, until she was nearly choking. Her tongue swirled around them, tasting his skin beneath her own musky sweetness, and she heard herself moan.
“That’s it,” Romeo murmured, his other hand sliding beneath the rumpled-up hem of her borrowed shirt. He found one of her breasts and rolled his thumb over her nipple before slowly dragging his fingers from her mouth. “Fuck, angel, tell me you’re on birth control.”
She was gasping for breath again, or still, but she reached down and sank her fingers into his hair anyway. This was exactly what she’d wanted, what she so desperately needed. “IUD.”
Romeo’s brow pinched, just for a second, then suddenly he was yanking her upright and ripping the shirt over her head. “That’ll work.”