6. Nyah
NYAH
Dear Diary,
Today I unknowingly masturbated in front of a Mafia prince. Kill me now.
He was jerking off.
There was no doubt in my mind, even though I couldn’t see a thing. His soft groans of need and the telltale sound of his zipper lowering gave it away.
I froze in the big bed, zero idea what the hell I was supposed to do now.
I had mentally planned for Carlos Guerra to come home, turn on the light, and be surprised when I was there, naked in his bed.
In my mind, he’d do a double take, and then his old-man wrinkles would have smoothed out into something of a leer.
He would cross the room like a panther stalking prey and then rip the sheets from my body, so he could see exactly what he was getting in his fourth wife.
I’d waited in the dark, practicing my seduction face—pouty lips and tousled hair and come-fuck-me eyes.
I would have bet money I looked utterly ridiculous.
I tried blaming it on the fact I didn’t know this man from a bar of soap. So of course I was going to be awkward and uncomfortable. He was a stranger.
Except, Dax had been a stranger the night I’d met him too. And yet there hadn’t been an ounce of awkwardness between us. He’d been sweet and kind and funny and sexy, tattooing flash pieces in a corner of Psychos, the local sex club.
It had felt like the most natural thing in the world to sit next to him and talk, falling for him minute by minute in a way I hadn’t even known was possible outside of romance books and movies.
It had felt so easy to hop up on his table and let him tattoo me.
As well as everything that had happened afterward.
I reached down to my mound, where he’d put his ink, and then closed my eyes and pretended the asshole jacking off across the room was my sweet, tattooed man.
It was the only way I would get through this.
I touched myself, thinking of him.
I didn’t stiffen when the mattress beside me dipped and Carlos Guerra rolled onto his back, jerking his shriveled salami.
The moan I let out as I rubbed my clit, pretending it was Dax’s fingers, was not for the man beside me but for the one my heart could never forget.
“What the fuck?”
The bedside lamp flooded the room with weak yellow light.
I didn’t have to use my practiced seduction face. With Dax on my mind, the need in my expression was real.
It took me a good moment of blinking to realize the man on the other side of the bed was absolutely not sixty-something.
And it absolutely was not Carlos Guerra.
I screamed.
The man jerked back from the noise so violently he teetered on the edge of the bed, his arm windmilling as he tried to find his center of balance again.
He didn’t.
He fell off the bed with a thump and a shout of his own when his tailbone connected with the floor.
To add insult to injury, the door flew open, and Lynx stormed in, gun drawn. “Nyah! What’s wrong?”
“Oh my God!” I gasped, realizing I was now very naked with not just one man I didn’t know, but two. I grabbed for the sheets; way too late.
Lynx’s eyes flashed with heat, his gaze traveling up my legs, over my pussy and naked tits.
I finally got myself covered up, but that look left behind a fire that didn’t help the blaze thinking about Dax had created inside me.
“Nyah?” the masturbator on the floor asked. “As in Nyah Matish? For fuck’s sake. Does somebody want to tell me why my future stepmommy is naked in my bed?”
Future stepmommy? What?
Red-hot embarrassment raced across my skin. Carlos only had two kids that I knew of. And that deep, gravelly voice certainly didn’t belong to his daughter.
I’d been touching myself while lying next to Luca fucking Guerra.
Oh, this was bad. So very, very bad. I clutched the sheets tighter but seriously had no idea what the hell to say to even begin unravelling the mess I’d just created.
Lynx, clearly determining that there was no real danger to me from the rapidly shriveling erection of the Mafia prince, put his gun away and just stared at the two of us with his hands on his hips. “Has one of you been watching too much stepmom porn? Is that what this is?”
“No!” Luca and I shouted in unison.
He finally got up off the floor, rubbing his back…actually, it was more like he was rubbing his ass.
I probably would have felt sorry for him if his gigantic dick wasn’t swinging in my face.
“Oh my God! Would you put that thing away?” I clapped a hand over my eyes. I did not need to see my stepson’s cock.
Also, eww. I was never calling him that again. The man appeared older than I was anyway.
Luca strode to the closet, and I half expected him to emerge wearing a three-piece suit. But apparently his ridiculous closet full of expensive clothes I’d mistaken for his father’s also held sweatpants.
Gray ones that did little to hide the outline of his cock.
Maybe my first job as his new mommy would be to buy him some fucking underwear. Good Lord. The thing was huge. It felt like it was staring at me.
I realized with a start that I was the one staring.
And that I was still very naked.
Lynx took pity on me and stripped off his ill-fitting suit jacket and tucked it over my shoulders. The sheet covered my front, but I was grateful for the oversized garment and slipped my arms into the sleeves, one arm at a time, careful not to flash anyone in the process.
Luca just scowled at me. “Now that your tits are away, want to tell me why you’re in my bed?”
“That something new for you?” I sassed him. Then blinked at myself, wondering why the hell I’d said that instead of just answering the question that he frankly had every right to be asking.
A tiny smirk quirked the corner of his mouth. “No, princess, it’s not. But normally the people in my bed aren’t engaged to my father. That’s a kink I don’t particularly want to explore.”
“So that’s a definite no on the stepmom porn,” Lynx said from the doorway he’d retreated back to after he’d given me his jacket.
Luca and I both glanced at him.
He grinned. “Hey, I was just checking. You gotta admit. The setup is there.”
Luca and I went back to glaring at each other. His eyes were so dark I got lost in them a second too long before I mentally punched myself in the tit, realizing I really was the one who needed to do some explaining.
Because Luca Guerra was not a good man. I’d heard plenty from my brothers, my father, my uncles, and cousins.
He was well known to be more ruthless than even his father.
I’d heard he’d sat in the front row as his barely teenage sister had been married off to a man older than their father.
And that he’d trafficked stolen and abused women.
A sour taste spread across my tongue.
This man was as vile as his father. Clearly cut from the same cloth.
My brain warned to tread lightly. To dial back the sass. To behave like I would be expected to. Fearful. Demure.
It went against everything I was, and if it had just been my life on the line, I doubted I could have zipped my lips.
But it wasn’t just my life. It was my baby’s too.
And that was more precious to me than anything.
So I stared Luca Guerra in the eye and gave him the truth. “I thought this was your father’s room.”
He folded his arms across his naked chest, and I tried really hard not to let that draw my attention to his abs.
But it was hard not to notice the definition of each one. If I ran my finger down them, I’d bet they’d be like speed bumps.
Lynx cleared his throat, and when I glanced over at him, he gave me a look that clearly said, “What the fuck are you doing?”
Right. Stop ogling the stepson.
Jesus, Nyah. Get it together.
I pulled Lynx’s jacket tighter across my breasts. “Clearly, I’ve made a mistake. If you’d like to just wait outside for a moment, I can get dressed and get my things together.”
I expected Luca to nod as obediently as Lynx did. He was already agreeably stepping out into the hallway to give me some privacy.
Luca did nothing of the sort. In fact, if anything, his attention on me only became more intense. “I don’t believe you.”
I tilted my head to one side. “Don’t believe what? That I’d like to get dressed?” I scoffed. “Trust me, buddy. I want to get dressed more than I want air at this moment.”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t believe that you made a mistake here tonight.”
“You think I wanted to be in your bed?”
“I think you’re here as a spy for your father. And that you wouldn’t be above trying to get information out of me while we were fucking.”
I raised one eyebrow. “It amuses me that you think I would want to fuck you, son.”
He flinched at the word.
I threw up a little in my mouth. But at least it had the desired effect of rattling him, if only a bit.
His gaze felt like it was going to burn a hole, right in the center of my eyebrows. “You’re going about this all wrong, you know? Be grateful it was my bedroom you found your way into tonight. If it had been my father’s, you wouldn’t have gotten the welcome you thought you were going to get.”
He stalked closer, so close I scuttled back until I couldn’t go any farther. But he didn’t stop. He leaned in, gripping the headboard on either side of my face, forcing me to look into his brown eyes or flinch away.
I wouldn’t flinch.
So I just stared back at him, my eyes all challenge.
He chuckled. “My father expects his wives to be virgins until their wedding night. You a virgin, princess?”
I tried so hard to ignore the tingling in my lips. It was just because he was so close his warm breath was misting over them. No other reason. I forced my words to come out hard instead of breathless and girly. “Of course I am.”
Lies. Oh, so many lies. But getting kicked out of this house wasn’t an option.
Luca moved his lips to my ear. “That tattoo on your pussy says otherwise.”
Oh my God. The words Dax had tattooed on me the first night we’d met.
“Pretty girl” in neat cursive, right on my mound.
I needed to grow a full bush back, pronto.
Heat flushed my entire body at the very thought that Luca had seen me naked for long enough to clock it all.
And yet, the heat wasn’t pure embarrassment.
If I was being honest with myself, a bit of it was desire.
The man was attractive. So sue me. I wasn’t blind. And I wasn’t a virgin.
But I did have to make this man believe I was. “Just because I have a tattoo doesn’t mean someone’s been inside me.”
Luca made a weird noise, but I couldn’t work out if it was because those words did something good to him or whether they just made him want to puke. From his face, it could have gone either way.
“You expect me to believe Jeremiah’s Matish’s twenty-something daughter has never had a man bend her over and fuck her hard and fast from behind?”
He was trying to break me. Using the fact he was gorgeous with a body made for sin to rattle me into admitting the truth.
He could go to hell. He wasn’t the first attractive man I’d gone up against. “Are you calling me a slut, Luca? How would your father feel about that? He is about to marry me, after all.”
Luca pushed off the bed abruptly, like my words had dumped a bucket of cold water over his head. The heat disappeared from his eyes. The cold-blooded Mafia prince I’d been warned about all my life stood in front of me.
“Whatever you’re up to, I’ll figure it out. But for now?” He jerked his head. “Get out of my room, princess.”
Something strong-willed and defiant inside me reared its ugly head, demanding I take this arrogant man down a peg or two. It was that hot streak inside me my mother had always tried to tame, wailing at me that I would never be a good wife if I couldn’t learn to be quiet and submissive.
The only place I wanted to be submissive was in bed.
Which reminded me that I was actually in Luca’s.
I swung my naked legs off the side of the mattress and stood. Lynx’s jacket barely covered my ass but I strode past Luca and out the door.
A glance in the hallway mirror showed his gaze following me as I walked away.
But the momentary smugness I felt at that dissolved fast. I might have won that battle, but there was no doubt in my mind that Luca Guerra and I had just waged a war.