Chapter 17
SAINT
I wake up with morning wood and Isla in my bed. We were so caught up in each other last night that I didn’t bother to lower the shades, and light is streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The sun has already crested over the city, snarls of traffic coming to life below as the morning commute takes the streets in a stranglehold. I have work to do today. Russian Bratva psychos to contend with. Shit to figure out. A disappearing mother to interrogate. Sisters to meet.
Fuck.
All I want to do is stay right where I am, with Isla warm and naked, pressed to my side. I want to fuck her all day long. And then I want to fuck her all night long too. I got a decent start on getting her out of my system last night and into the early hours of the morning.
But I’m beginning to realize that the more I have of Isla, the more I want of her. And the more I want from her. I’m addicted to her, and last night’s hit only made me need more.
She makes a sleepy sound of contentment and rolls over.
The sheet slips down, revealing the pale curve of one perfect breast and her hard pink nipple.
I can’t resist cupping it, rubbing my thumb slowly over the tip.
She’s so fucking soft. The scent of pineapple and citrus and sex rises from my sheets.
She arches her back and blinks awake, looking sleepy and gorgeous and fuckable as hell. “Is it morning already?”
I’ve never had a woman spend the night in my bed before. I don’t do relationships, because there’s no room in my life for them. I’ve dedicated myself to the family, to my duty. The fewer complications, the better.
I tug at her nipple and plant a quick kiss on her lips and then withdraw before I deepen it and roll her onto her back. The temptation to stay here, to sink my dick inside her and fill her with my come, is strong.
My aching cock tents the sheet and duvet at the thought, but I’m going to have to get a rain check. I know me, and if I start indulging in Isla, I’m not going to leave my apartment today.
“Unfortunately, yes, it’s morning,” I tell her, my voice raspy from lack of sleep and coffee. “I should get going. I’ve got shit to do.”
“Are you going to see your mom?” she asks.
I probably shouldn’t have told her about Antonella. It’s not like me to share, but in my defense, I’d just had epic, life-altering orgasms. I probably wasn’t thinking all that straight.
One bonus comes from my oversharing the night before. My cock wilts instantly, morning wood cured by the mention of the woman who spawned and abandoned my brothers and me.
“She’s not my mom,” I tell Isla, reluctantly releasing her breast and flipping back the covers to get out of bed. “She’s an egg donor, and I don’t want anything to do with her.”
“What about your sisters?”
The news is still fresh. It feels weird hearing the word sisters out loud. Knowing I’ve had siblings out there in the world I haven’t even met yet. Antonella is going to pay for this; that much I do know.
I sigh, stalking toward the bathroom. “They’re another story. We don’t turn our back on blood unless blood turns its back on us.”
“I hope you’re heading into all this with an open mind, Alessio,” she says.
And it’s so like her, such a do-gooder. Thinking the best of everyone. It’s a searing reminder, like a blade driven into my chest, of how different our worlds are.
“Stay in your lane, Emily Austen,” I tell her, intentionally fucking up Emily Bronte and Jane Austen like they’re the same person.
I know it’s going to drive her up the wall. It’s the distraction I need. Shit is getting too heavy and real with Isla, and I’m not ready for that. Not with a landslide of family bullshit barreling toward me.
I hear her softly correcting me just before I close the bathroom door.
“It’s Emily Bronte and Jane Austen.”
Then I turn on the shower and start my day.
Unfortunately, when I’m enveloped in the steam, the spray of the jets raining on my back, the scent of Isla’s pussy rises, making me harder than a rock again.
I jerk off thinking about finger-fucking my come back into her cunt like the animal I’ve become and then finish showering.
By the time I’m out and toweled off, my bed is empty.
Isla’s gone.
It feels wrong. I want her in my sheets, thinking about all the things we did together, waiting for me to come back. Never mind that I was just a dick to her and it’s my fault that she left. All I can focus on is that need.
I throw my clothing on with record speed and stalk out of my room.
“Isla?”
She doesn’t answer me, but Cid does, trotting over to me with that trilling purr thing he does, like he’s greeting me. The cat is seriously strange, but so am I. Maybe that’s why we get along so well. Even he’s looking up at me with big green eyes, kind of accusing.
“What?” I ask him.
Then I realize I’m having a conversation with a cat.
Fuck me.
“Isla?” I call again, heading to my kitchen.
She’s there, wearing an oversized T-shirt and nothing else, her blonde hair spilling down her back, all wavy and tousled.
She raises a brow at me, looking like a professor about to reprimand a student. “So I’m back to Isla again now?”
She made herself tea. There’s something so homey about seeing her half naked in my kitchen that makes my chest tighten up and my dick go hard all over again. It’s not that she’s in my kitchen making tea, so much as the feeling that she belongs here, and that scares the shit out of me.
“Why are you out of my bed?” I ask instead of answering her question.
“Because I spent enough time there.” She sips her tea.
I can see that she didn’t make one for me. Fair enough. I don’t really deserve one, and I’m more of a coffee man myself.
“Is that so?”
I stalk toward her, not stopping until I’ve pinned her against a wall of cabinets.
She tips back her head, holding my stare, stubborn and sexy as hell. “Yup. That’s so.”
“I don’t think you’ve spent nearly enough time there,” I tell her, leaning down to bury my face against her neck.
I kiss her, and I can feel her resistance crumbling like a building being imploded, falling in on itself. She inhales. I find her pulse and lick it.
“Alessio,” she protests, but her voice is silken and low. “You’re going to make me spill my tea.”
It’s only fair. She made me spill my guts to her last night. But I really don’t want hot Earl Grey dripping down my thigh, so I ease up a little, raising my head.
“I want you naked in my bed when I come home tonight.”
“Well, I want to eat chocolate cake for every meal, but that’s not happening either.”
“You want cake?” I rub my lower lip against hers. “I’ll bring you some fucking cake.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Yeah, I am. Intentionally, too. But I don’t tell her that.
I kiss her instead. She kisses me back, and she tastes like tea and makes a soft, needy sound into my mouth that I want to play on repeat.
I break it off before I make it impossible to leave. “You. Naked in my bed. Tonight.”
“I don’t take orders.”
“Then think of it as a request.”
She licks her lips. “I don’t know. That sounded kind of like a command to me.”
I growl and kiss her again. “I’ll text you. Be ready.”
Then I leave her standing there in my kitchen with her Earl Grey and Cid before I do something stupid, like throw her over my shoulder, take her back to bed, and fuck her until the sun goes down. She’s like an addiction, and I can’t get enough, constantly chasing the high of more Isla.
But I can’t give in right now.
I have work to do.
“I don’t want to see her.”
“Saint,” Lucky protests on the other end of the line. “She’s our mom.”
The G-Wagon moves through traffic at the speed of a snail. Priest’s driver who he sent back from St. Thomas, Rocco, is doing his best to get me where I need to be, but a rush-hour accident has traffic at a standstill, and getting around it is just about impossible.
“She’s the woman who birthed us,” I correct sharply.
“That doesn’t give her the right to lay claim to being our mom.
To be our mother, she would have had to have stuck around, which she didn’t.
To be our mother, she would have had to have been there for us when our father was beating our asses and turning us into men. ”
Our childhood wasn’t much of a childhood.
It’s not something I dwell on. Mostly, I tamp that shit down and bury it so deep that it’ll never see the light of day.
Our father was a heartless prick who made us in his mold by using brute force.
The day our mom skipped town was the last day we were ever allowed to be soft.
I can still hear him telling me soft guys get clipped and dumped into the river right before he smacked the back of my head. I was fucking six.
“She asked to see you, and I thought maybe you’d want to hear her side of the story,” Lucky says, bringing me back to the present with a jolt. “That’s all. Your call.”
“Damn right it’s my fucking call,” I snarl. “She can ask to meet the pope if she wants. Doesn’t mean she has a right to see him. I’ll see our sisters. That’s all. I don’t give a fuck about Antonella.”
“Fine.” Lucky sounds annoyed with me, like I’m the one being unreasonable here.
He’s the youngest, and he was so little when Antonella ditched our family that he has no memories of her.
I have memories. Bitter, painful ones. A mother with ready hugs, who did all the shit that moms do.
She decorated for Christmas. She volunteered in our school.
She baked for us, chaperoned my Kindergarten class trip, the whole thing. And then, one day, she was just gone.
No message, no reason, nowhere to find her. She just disappeared, leaving four children who desperately needed her behind. Leaving us at the mercy of our father.
“Look, if you want to pretend like mommy dearest didn’t abandon us, go for it,” I tell Lucky, irritated that he’s taking her side instead of mine. “But she’s dead to me.”
“What if she had a good reason to leave?”