Chapter 21 Supporting the Weight #2
She laughed softly and bowed her head, taking another brief taste of his lips. “It means I love you,” she whispered. “It means I don’t just like you a lot, but I’ve fallen fully in love with you, Santino Guerra.”
He groaned and curved his arms around her, as if she weren’t already melded to him. “Then that’s my new favorite word.” He kissed her, slow and deep, his hips rocking up to grind his erection against her core. “Say it again,” he rumbled, lips parting from hers only enough to release the words.
Reiko whimpered as her fingers slid into his hair. “Aishiteru,” she murmured against his lips.
Santino groaned again before slipping one hand between them and reaching under the skirt of her dress.
Of course, he found her wet. She couldn’t sit on him and kiss him and feel his cock hardening beneath her and hear his words of love for her, and not also become aroused.
It didn’t matter that they’d made love twice before breakfast.
She made no effort to stop him as he pumped his fingers inside her, their tongues dancing and their hips rocking in a hungry rhythm, but she did whimper a soft protest when his hand disappeared.
Until she realized he was working on undoing his pants.
One-handed, because he hadn’t let go of her hair.
So, she removed one hand from his hair in turn, blindly reached between them, and helped him out—then curled her fingers greedily around the length of his seeping cock.
Santino grunted and nipped at her lip. “Ride me, beautiful,” he panted into their kiss. “Take my cock deep into your hot little pussy and fucking ride me until we both come. Show me I’m not the only one who’s desperate.”
His words struck something inside her and Reiko hurried on an instinct she scarcely recognized to adjust herself until she was able to sink down over his length. His free hand came to her hip, helping to anchor her, and hers lifted back to his shoulder.
Both of them groaned shamelessly as their hips ground together, his thick cock stretching her just to the right side of pain.
Reiko rolled her hips a couple of times, letting her mind linger on how good it felt to be so full that if he reached any deeper, he’d be poking places not meant to be poked.
But it was only seconds before she succumbed to the fire in her blood and picked up a fast, grinding rhythm.
She pulled her knees partially under her to better bounce, better twist her hips, both of them practically clawing at the other in a mounting frenzy.
He vibrated against her, his moans lost in her kiss as hers were swallowed in his, until she was no longer able to maintain their increasingly sloppy kiss at all.
He really was just letting her use him, his movements purely responding to hers in a way that was sending her careening at lightspeed toward oblivion.
Then Santino nudged the straps of her dress down until he could pull her breasts free, and he leaned in, catching one nipple in his mouth and laving on it with teeth and tongue. The extra sensation rippled through her and Reiko twisted her fingers in his hair as the orgasm crested.
She screamed his name, clinging to him, her body trembling and her lungs burning.
Santino latched onto her hips and slammed deep as his cock kicked before emptying inside her for the third time that day.
“Oh, fuck, baby,” he gasped on a drawn-out moan, his own body shuddering.
“So good. So fucking good.” His lips returned to her skin and he peppered lighter kisses up her collar.
“Think I need you to live on my cock.” He sucked a hickey into her neck.
“You’re mine, beautiful. You’re it for me.
You’ll be my wife, mother of all my beautiful brats, and the only one I bare my soul to.
Can you agree to that? Tell me you’ll give me that, and I’ll give you anything. ”
Something inside her fluttered so deep, Reiko feared she would have floated away if not for Santino’s unbreakable grip. She curled closer and nuzzled into his neck. “Lucky for you, I’m not a high-maintenance woman.”
He chuckled.
She pressed a kiss to the nearest patch of his skin as her breathing steadied. “Right now, all I want … is a calligraphy brush.”
“A what?” Santino straightened, prompting her to meet his eyes, and raised a brow.
She gave him her best flirtatious smile—which probably wasn’t much, considering how unpracticed it was. “You asked me to draw my kanji for you. I need the proper brush for that.”
He barked out a laugh and pressed a hard kiss to her forehead. “I did, didn’t I? Well, I guess we’ll be going shopping while we’re out, then.” Then he stood, hooked a hand beneath her butt, and aimed them for the bathroom.
Like all good plans, Santino’s began to go a little off the rails almost as soon as he set it into motion.
Almost, because the unplanned third round of emotionally intense lovemaking on the hotel sofa was in no goddamn way a negative detour.
Even if it had ended up delaying them a few minutes.
His men were smart enough not to comment, let alone complain, about the unexplained wait.
Or the literal detour to the shop he and Reiko had found online that seemed most likely to carry what she needed.
It’d taken about twenty minutes in that artsy shop for her to decide on a multi-pen calligraphy set, a labeled Japanese kanji brush set complete with small ink and pad, and special paper.
Santino overpaid so as to leave a good impression and they were back in the Rolls-Royce.
He had mixed feelings about bringing her with him to Zia Lorenza’s, where Adele was expected to be, but he had worse feelings about leaving her alone again. He was still pondering that when his phone went off.
The familiar, aged smile on the screen was enough to assure Santino he wasn’t going to enjoy taking the call.
Reiko reached over and slid her hand across his thigh with a comforting—mildly distracting—squeeze.
Santino flashed her a smile, switched his phone to his other hand, and swiped to connect the call as he laid his free hand overtop of hers. He’d pull her flush against him, but with literal family out for one or both of their heads, he’d insisted on proper use of seatbelts. Damnable things.
With the phone at his ear, he forced a smile into his voice despite knowing it wouldn’t last, and said, “Nonno, it’s unlike you to call. I hope everything’s—”
“Drop the act with me, boy,” his grandfather snapped, the raspy tone carrying through the line as perfectly as the agitation. “Who do you think you are, telling me I can’t see my own daughter?”
Santino let his expression fall to match his mood and curled his fingers around Reiko’s without thought.
“Who do I think I am?” He repeated the words slowly and clearly, not because he expected his ailing grandfather to take them back, but because he wanted to be as clear about the issue on the table.
When Nonno failed to respond, Santino kept talking.
“I think the better question is, who do you think you are that you can defy orders over something as trivial as one lost afternoon?”
Nonno sucked in a ragged breath. “How dare you speak to me that way, Santino.”
“No.” Santino cast his gaze out the scenery as it passed through the tinted window.
“You’re the one out of line. It was you who taught me that, above all, the Boss rules.
” He paused again. “I am the Boss now, Nonno. That means I rule. You, especially, are expected to shut the fuck up and be the goddamn pinnacle of compliance, because you fucking chose me.”
“Exactly!” Nonno exclaimed, nearly shouting into the line. Santino pictured spittle flying from his mouth and his arm shaking as he held the phone to his ear. “I chose you! Don’t you think for an instant I can’t change my mind!”
Santino scoffed. “Nonno, who are you fooling? I’m down one capo and damn near a third of my men, and that may not be the whole of it. If those traitors wanted to follow you, they’d have pitched you.”
“The fuck are you prattling about?” Nonno wheezed with a hard breath. “My LoLo is dying, Santino. You can’t refuse to let me see her.”
“I can,” Santino snapped. “The same way you can sit there and claim to be ignorant of the shit I’ve been dealing with for the past—”
“She’ll straighten all this confusion up with Danilo,” Nonno continued, as if Santino weren’t talking at all. “Why don’t you stay home for the day. I’ll call you when I have the whole story.” The line clicked.
Santino pulled his phone from his ear and blinked at it once as if the last thirty seconds might change in his memory if he gave them the opportunity.
Reiko twisted her wrist until she was squeezing his hand. “Santino? Is your grandfather okay?”
His chest tightened, her concern somehow jarring loose an understanding he did not want to have.
“No,” he said, too quietly. “No. That old fucker’s more senile than anyone realized.
” He’d regret the disrespectful language when his mood improved.
Maybe. Until then, he navigated quickly to the familial tracking programs he’d had installed on both his mother’s and grandfather’s smart devices.
All of them, of course, though his grandfather only had the one.
His mother’s were all over the place, which was a predictable annoyance.
Nonno’s was not at his home. Or even at Mamma’s, not that it should have been.
As Santino watched, Nonno’s signal pulled onto Lorenza’s street. His mother’s cellular signal overlapped it, indicating she—or at least her phone—was in the vehicle with him. “Fuck.”
Reiko squeezed his hand again.
“Boss?”
Santino squeezed back and projected his voice.
“Drive faster.” He didn’t have tracking information handily available for any of the Segretis.
A small annoyance turned crushing problem.
But there was very little reason for Adele to think she’d been made, and therefore very little reason to hope she wouldn’t be right where she always was—at her mother’s side.
He blew out a breath and met Reiko’s concerned frown. “Sorry, beautiful. Looks like you’re about to meet the whole rest of the family in one swoop.” He’d been looking forward to introducing her, despite his mild concerns about his mother’s reaction, but this was not the way he’d wanted to do it.
Her eyes widened. “They’re…?”
“Yeah.”
She chewed her lip for just long enough to catch his eye. “Will the men behind us be enough?”
He managed a smile. “They’ll have to be.”