Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A lessio steps outside with me. I watch him stride to the big motorcycle and haul it upright as he swings his leg up and over the saddle. I call Mikey and tell him to pick me up with the limo, “Unless you’re busy with the security detail.”
“No, Princess.” Mikey’s voice is steady. As I breathe out, I feel the strength and calm from how in control he sounds, like always.
A tiny note of tension makes me wonder if he already heard about the close-quarters gunfight Alessio and I just had. He tells me, “I’ve got good men on it and they know what they’re doing. I’ll be with you in about ten. Fifteen minutes tops.”
Alessio watches me and I feel the smoldering heat in his gaze. He shoots his cuffs and tugs one the right one. It’s a regular twitch of his. That man never looked hotter and I’ve never been more breathlessly quivering and desperate to jump him and climb his bones.
Holding back from him is always hard. But not usually this hard. My tongue moistens my lips and I’m practically squirming. My juices are burning and I ache for him, way down, where it stings.
A dark instinct howls up inside me not to give in. Resist. However bad it feels. Hold out and hold on.
I want him so much right now, I hate it.
My voice hops and skids as I tell him, “You’re right. I need to meet with your uncle Jerry. Get some perspective on this situation.” I take a deep breath. I feel like the space between us is widening. Hardening. I want to make it stop but I don’t know how.,
The beast I can do now is to avoid making it worse. The urge to shout is hard to resist. My gut churns. I want to let it all out. To yell at him, Can’t you see what you’re doing to us?
At the same time, I’m confused. I don’t see why we can’t face this together. We’re on the same side. Or we should be.
With my chest tightening I tell him, “You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this, and you have a lot riding on it. Send me his number and I’ll set up a meeting. I’ll call you after I’ve heard what he has to say.”
“Call him. You’re going to love him. I know he’s going to love you.”
Alessio shifts and straightens up, balancing the powerful bike. A long, inward sigh makes my body remember sitting behind him.
We just went through that gunfight together, He risked his life for me. I let him fly me here through the Seattle traffic on that insane two-wheeled rocket of his, and I didn’t even blink. And now he’s going to wave me off as he sells me out.
The pressure, hard between my thighs as they spread wide and gripped tight against his ass as he cut and blasted our way through the traffic. The rush of giddying, heart-in-my-mouth weightlessness as the air beat and buffeted my face and my breasts.
My face, tight against his back as his massive, sinuous abs and chest snaked and wove, strong and powerful. The almost liquid currents of flex in the hard muscles of his ass as he rocked the bike from side to side and fired it on like a rocket between my legs.
I was so underdressed for a bike ride, and so unprepared. It’s not the first time I’ve been on the back pf a bike, but it never made me shake like that before. When we got off, I was on the verge of convulsions. I would have collapsed into a wet, trembling heap if we didn’t have a life-and-death situation to confront in the Sun-a-do.
My insides boil with all of my mixed feelings about him. I’m weary from the firecracker shocks. Physical, chemical, and, deepest of all, emotional. I’m trying so hard not to believe the worst of him, not to assume that he’s betrayed me, but I’m banging up against all the evidence to the contrary.
The shocks still reverberate from his revelations about his uncle from Chicago — and now another doubt creeps into my mind. Where did they go together, Alessio and Jerry? Did Alessio bring his Uncle Jerry here, to the Sun-a-do?
Rather than quiz him on the spot, I make a mental note to call Tai. I can just ask him for the visitor logs from the lest few days. That will tell me if Alessio was here and if he brought a guest, and I won’t have to ask specifically.
That’s far better than risking a confrontation with Alessio about it. At the same time, I know it’s a bad sign that I don’t want to deal with the situation straight out in the open. We have always been able to talk.
Whatever it is that’s getting in the way, and I’m working hard not to jump to the obvious conclusions, I hate that we can’t just discuss it and resolve it openly, even if it was only the two of us. This is bad.
Holding his helmet ready to put on, he hesitates. His lips press together.
He says, “We shouldn’t be apart so much.”
“You blocked me.” That was so not what I wanted to say. And I didn’t want it to come out sounding whiny, which is how it does sound to me. It’s like my nerves are jangling out loud.
It takes him a beat before he even knows it’s the gunfight I’m talking about.
He lifts an eyebrow as a sarcastic pull lifts one side of his lip. “I saved your beautiful ass.”
His voice drops down to that low purr, the tone that always gets me. In that voice, he could ask me to do anything and I would come. Running.
“Lucia,” His head tilts and he holds out his big hand. I could climb onto him right now. Nestle into the big palm of his hand. Grind my pussy into the palm of his hand. Let the world slip away while his fingers do their sinful, musical magic on me. In me. All over me.
I hold back against the impulse to push and rub myself all over him, shove myself against him and feel all of his muscles come to life as I press my flesh into his.
All the while, I’m getting wetter, hotter, and wilder.
When he looks at me like that, I want to wrap him up and work him, squeeze and tease him, suckle and pump him. Take him in my hands, between my breasts, deep in my throat. Make him cum. Feel that force.
Let go of everything but him while he drills and hemmers me, pounds me till I’m gasping and howling, senseless. Lay with him, wrapped and wound together, in pools of my juice and his cum and our sweat, while we tumble, drowsy and lost into each other’s oblivion.
He holds out the spare crash helmet. My hands jump to take it.
His lips curl and he twinkles as he says, “Come with me.” I almost gasp as I take the helmet between my hands. He says, “Come back to the house.”
The helmet drops out of my hands and cracks on the stone ground. His eyes blaze.
I can’t think about that house. Not without remembering what happened there. And I don’t want to remember.
“Our house is not good enough for you. Not any more. Not now that you’ve got all that you need from it. Now you’ve taken the family, you want to erase the past. Why is that?” His lips tighten and I’m breathing too hard to speak. The history of the family is who we are.”
Alessio is sensitive about the family history because he has so little of his own. He’s got a fire about the traditions and stories that’s like the fanatical patriotism of a first or second generation migrant.
Words are starting out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“I don}t know what makes you so sentimental about the family history, Alessio.” His eyes narrow. “Do you spend hours turning the pages of the old family albums? Your pictures aren’t in very many of them, are they?” His shoulder slopes. “Pictures of you only go back, what nine, ten years? You and your father weren’t there, were you? Your stories all come from somewhere else, don’t they. But you never talk about those days..”
I should stop. I should have stopped a while back. I went too far. But that’s me. My voice is louder as I go on, “You talk about ‘the family,’ but never your own childhood. Why is that, Alessio?”
Somehow, his name whipped out from my lips like it’s a slap. That’s not how I mean it to sound.
I start to say something, to try and turn this around somehow, but he’s rising from the saddle, standing tall and magnificent with his eyes on fire.
“All of my family’s power and influence is fine for you, though, right? And the money is okay with you. You don’t have too much of a problem with any of that.”
His voice rasps, hard and low. “All the clubs, the bars, the income and influence that comes with all of the businesses, you’re fine with all of that. But you won’t come back to the house with me. It’s what? It’s too old-fashioned? Not modern and stylish enough for our twenty-first century mob queen?”
He slip the helmet on and fires up the bike engine. Shouting over the bike’s evil crackle, he fixes my eye as he grips the handlebars.
“Maybe that’s it. Do you prefer to be seen in something a bit less in the Old Italian style, something a bit more of the tech bro or the Silicon Valley look. Is our old ancestral home a bit too mob-like for you? Is that it? Are you trying to cultivate an image that’s above all of that graft and grit? Something shinier?”
His teeth clench.
He shouts, “Or is it just that you’ve got all that you wanted. Now you’re the top dog,” I flinch at the way he says, dog , “Now you don’t have to pretend you’re one of us any more.”
He spins the bike in a tight skid. Acrid smoke rises from the back tire and it spits shale at me as the motor roars. The front wheel lifts as the motor roars and he cannons away with a deafening blast, through billowing clouds of smoke.
I can’t see us ever being the sam again.