22. Isabel
22
ISABEL
H ow many times am I going to have to tell him?
I shook my head as I started to strip. I was long past due for a shower. After the way I woke up, to blood and guts and violence, I felt dirty and icky. Witnessing yet another murder messed with my head, but it was silly to want to think that showering would clean me or purify me at all.
I wasn’t an accomplice. It wasn’t as if I’d done anything. No, I hadn’t called the cops after witnessing Miguel killing that man. And I wouldn’t be contacting any law enforcement, either. Just like that man in the alley he’d removed from me as a threat, I was grateful for this skeptical hitman who seemed to want to find a clue I couldn’t offer him.
Lifting my face to the water, I sighed and tried to purge this negativity that consumed me from the inside out. Steam rose, and as it soothed my skin, I closed my eyes and pushed my head further into the spray of all the water.
How can I convince him that I’m innocent?
It seemed like he understood, on some level, that I was. I had to be innocent in all this because I hadn’t done anything wrong. Like he said, I was a mural painter. I had no secret double life as a femme fatale, and I wasn’t Louis’s woman in any shape or form, not even his daughter.
Miguel heard that Cartel man suggest that I was somehow tied to all this, but I saw no way that I could be.
I wasn’t a woman in Louis’s life, and I had no way to guess what woman might have that role. He’d never been faithful to my mother, even when she was most lucid and not destroyed by drugs. Countless lovers, mistresses, girlfriends, and hookups rotated in and out of his life. None stood out. Most of them were nameless to me. He’d never bothered to hide them from me—or my mother—and I never tried to form any attachment or dislike to any of them. They were just… there.
Is one of them… helping him? A partner?
That seemed most logical in terms of any Cartel member being worried about a woman in his life. If Louis had a woman with power. My mother certainly had none, withering away in a rehab facility as she faced an early death.
But that didn’t sound accurate, my father having a woman as a partner who could be feared. Louis was a loner, like me. He preferred to be the boss, the only boss in his life, and he never actually worked with anyone, always alone, against the world. I doubted he’d ever married. In fact, I knew he hadn’t because he’d never actually gone through with divorcing Esmeralda. They were legally bound, but that was it. Estranged at best and loveless as ever.
Louis’s woman…
As I shampooed my hair, I tried to picture him as half of a partnership.
I’d never given much hope to being in a partnership myself, but now that Miguel had been hired to kill me, and failed to do so, it only seemed fitting to place him in that role. So far, we had acted like partners, helping each other in this confusing mess of danger and death, sticking together despite the odds. And sharing this undeniable need to be near each other again.
But for how long?
He’d vowed to protect me always, but did he mean that in the sense that he always wanted to be with me? Like… marriage? A wife? The mother of his kids? Did hitmen want children?
I was jumping ahead of myself, my mind going a mile a minute with the possibilities of a family, the one thing I feared I’d never have or find.
My heart raced with excitement at counting on having Miguel’s attention and company forever, but I reined in my runaway imagination and tried to focus as I showered. I’d stalked out of the room because I needed a break from his challenging me, but now that I had the space and peace to think , I wanted to stick with the topic at hand.
Louis.
Connections to the Cartel.
Why someone would need me dead to lure him out of hiding.
As if he would even come out of hiding because someone might have killed me.
He couldn’t even answer the phone when?—
I gasped, freezing in place as I reached for the conditioner.
He didn’t answer the phone.
I’d called him. So many things had happened, and so quickly, that I’d forgotten about how I’d called Bayshore for a number to contact him. That call was probably how that Cartel man knew to come to that room and almost killed me. That call was likely traceable, and therefore, how they’d known to find me.
Oh, my God. It was my fault a connection had been made, then. My call to Louis was likely the piece of the puzzle that had that Cartel man sneaking into the last hotel room.
Forgetting about the conditioner, I shoved at the handles to shut the water off in a hurry. I stepped out of the shower stall as quickly as I could without slipping. Water streamed down my skin, boldening the ink I’d had done on my arms.
Soaking wet, messy hair and all, I grabbed the first towel within reach and wrapped it around myself.
I have to tell him.
I’d been insisting that I hadn’t talked to Louis in years. And I hadn’t. But I felt like a partial liar for not telling Miguel that I’d tried to reach out to him.
Running out of the bathroom and leaving wet footprints in my wake, I exited the steamy room and sought out Miguel.
He stopped pacing in the middle of the room, taking in the sight of me. His dark brows raised high as he waited for me to explain why I’d burst out of the bathroom like this, panting and frantic.
“I called him.” I swallowed hard, so worked up by this admission. “I forgot.”
Worried he would assume the worst, that I was lying all along, I rushed up to him and stared into his deep-brown eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“I called Louis yesterday.” I furrowed my brow. “Was it yesterday? Yes. Last night.” I licked my lips, rambling and too hasty with my words. “After the beach, when you told me to go to your room and wait for you, I did just that. And when it was taking you so long to come back, I thought I’d do something instead of just sitting around. I didn’t have a number for Louis for me to call and ask him what was going on, but I knew the rehab place my mother is at would have an emergency number. I called them, and they gave me a number. Then I called it. No one answered. Of course , no one answered. If that number even goes to Louis, he doesn’t give a shit about me to answer the call.”
Miguel didn’t move. He merely watched me with that serious stare.
“When I was in the shower, I realized that maybe that’s why that Cartel man broke in this morning. If by calling a number that may or may not be linked to Louis, it was a traceable call on a log somewhere. And if my calling him for answers led that Cartel man to that room, then I’m responsible for your getting shot or hurt, and I hate that.”
I heaved out a deep sigh, feeling better about shedding the burdensome weight of a secret like that.
“I keep telling you that I haven’t talked to Louis. And I haven’t. But I didn’t explain that just last night, I tried to contact him. I don’t like the idea of your thinking I’m lying to you.”
For a few long moments, he stared me down. No frown or smile showed on his rugged face. He offered me no reaction at all.
“Miguel?” I bit my lower lip, nervous. “I’m sorry I didn’t say that earlier. So much has happened so fast, and I only just now remembered how I’d tried and failed to contact him. I’m just as eager for answers as you are, and that’s the only reason I tried to take matters into my own hands and get some intel or directions.”
Still, he didn’t speak or move, only staring at me deeply.
“Miguel?” I laid my hand on his chest, feeling the rapid beat of his heart.
“Hmm?” He exhaled a long breath, gazing at me wordlessly.
“Please…” I winced. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Mad?” He tilted his head to the side as he raised his hand. With one flick of his fingers on the knot I’d tied on the towel wrapped around me, he growled.
The plush white fabric fell to the floor, leaving me naked and wet for him to stare at.
And stare, he did. The corner of his lips tipped up in a cocky smile as he checked me out.
Instant heat roared through me as desire took over. My nipples pebbled, hard and achy under his attention. My pussy started to get sensitive, slicker with arousal that he caused me to leak.
“I’m not mad…”
I breathed faster, stunned by how one smoldering stare could take me from worried and serious to relaxed and needy.
Only he could do this to me. Just him.
“Are you… patient?” I asked as I reached for his shorts.
He’d already taken his shirt off, treating me to the expanse of his sculpted chest and chiseled abs that flexed and tensed as I made quick work of taking his shorts and boxers off.
“Patient? With you? Not this time.” He grunted as he pulled me in for a hard kiss.
Moaning and leaning up into his touch, I kissed him back and fought to get his shorts down.
Moving in a daze, under his guidance, I stumbled with him toward the closest surface. A chair was as fast as we could get with the obstacles and distractions ruining our effort to move this somewhere else.
His fingers stroked and caressed my entrance, smearing my juices.
My fingers wrapped around his big dick, pumping the hard length.
His arm wrapped around me to turn me over the armrest of the chair.
My arm lifted so I could clutch his hair while I turned my head to kiss him deeper.
“One day,” he growled as he picked up my thigh, kissing along my neck. He lined up the head of his cock to me, pushing me over the armrest of the huge chair. We’d approached it sloppily, almost diagonally. With him behind me, easing that thick cock into my slick pussy, I was halfway pushed over the back of the chair while he urged my leg up higher. My thigh rested on top of the armrest until I could plant my foot on the chair’s cushion. As soon as I achieved that position, I realized how perfectly it let me thrust my ass up to him.
“One day,” he repeated, losing his train of thought as he slammed all the way into me, deep and to the hilt. “One day, I’ll take my time and savor every inch of your body.”
“I can’t wait,” I whispered, thrusting my hips to push back against him.
“But right now…” he muttered as he fucked me.
I grabbed his right hand to bring it down around me to my clit, guiding his fingers there. He gripped the edge of the chair’s back, using it as leverage to ram into me hard and fast. All the while, he rubbed my clit and pushed me toward an intense orgasm.
“But right now, I just want this. I need you, sweetheart.”
I cried out at the pleasure of his sexy, tender words that were so gentle compared to the rough and brutal pounding of his dick piercing up into me.
It wasn’t fair how quickly I could come. It was wicked magic, something I couldn’t stem or slow down.
And he wasn’t any better.
Fast. Furious. Fucking perfection.
Groaning so loudly, he white-knuckled the top of the chair as he slammed into me once more. With every deep jerk and twitch of his dick as he came, he spilled his cum into my womb, flooding me, filling me.
Completing me.
My partner.
The hitman who taunted me to trust him with not just my body.
With my heart, too.