DornanHe didn"t care that he was married, or that she was his captive. When she stuck his cigarette between her lips and inhaled, it took every ounce of Dornan"s willpower not to press her up against the wall and suck the smoke right out of her mouth as he devoured her. Instead, he settled for studying every inch of her with his ravenous eyes, as she spoke in that s.e.xy little accent and slow-blinked those big eyes at him.
And she had asked him to come back. His d.i.c.k was practically trying to jump out of his pants and into her, and he bit the inside of his cheek to distract himself.
He found himself dreaming up scenarios to extend his father"s business trip in Bogota, ways to have this girl to himself for a few days instead of just a few more hours. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to run his hands down those smooth brown arms that"d been wrapped around him for almost an hour, and he wanted to brush his fingertips against those lush rosebud lips that made the difference between her being pretty and being beautiful.
Beautiful. He realised it had been forever since he"d thought a woman beautiful. He"d seen plenty of pretty girls, plenty of s.e.xy women. But truly beautiful women were few and far between in his world. It was too violent, too b.l.o.o.d.y, too m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic for beautiful women to survive, and so they somehow knew to stay away.
But she had offered herself to his father, a willing captive, in exchange for the safety of her parents and siblings. It impressed him. It intrigued the h.e.l.l out of him. Dornan respected his father, but if the right person came along and wanted to take Emilio out, Dornan would probably load the bullets into the gun and hand it to them himself.
Yeah, he had issues. Didn"t everyone, though? He saw the haunted look in this girl"s eyes and knew that it was unintentional. She thought she was being c.o.c.ky, a smarta.s.s, and for the most part that was what he saw. But there was something else in her gaze, in those big, almond-shaped eyes that begged him to stay with her.
Sadness. Wisdom. She was older than her nineteen years, much older. He wondered about the things she had seen that would make her like that, and he vowed to keep her close until he knew all of her precious secrets.
But for now? For now, he was going to take a p.i.s.s before he exploded. Then, he was going to take a long, hot shower and beat one out. He was going to close his eyes and imagine that it was her pink lips at the end of his d.i.c.k as he took the edge off. He needed to get her out of his G.o.dd.a.m.n brain for two minutes so he could focus on business.
And the business was particularly demanding of his focus today. Ana"s father had lost a s.h.i.tload of cocaine to the DEA, and Emilio"s carefully supplied network was screaming for product that they didn"t have. The c.o.ke trade that was the foundation for everything Emilio and Dornan did was a beast, and the beast was screaming to be fed.
Despite Ana"s request, he didn"t go back into the room immediately after using the bathroom down the hall. Instead, he made the somewhat reluctant pilgrimage upstairs to the kitchen, from where his mother had been banished in antic.i.p.ation of a heated meeting with some of the Cartel"s main players. His uncle Julian was sitting at the long oak dining table, next to Emilio, who was at the head of the table. Of course. The old man took every chance he could get to a.s.sert his position of power, and remind everyone else they were beneath him.
Dornan found it both annoying and fascinating.
"You just get in?" Dornan asked, confused.
He nodded a greeting at Julian as he watched his father stab a cherry tomato and devour it.
Dornan thought of what he"d just done. He had picked the girl up with a contingent of his men because Emilio had told him he"d be away for a few more days, and couldn"t do it himself. And now here he was, in the kitchen, sitting at the dining table eating f.u.c.king tomato salad and arugula.
Emilio shrugged, chewing on a mouthful of food.
"Where is everyone?" Dornan asked, more than a little irritated.
His father shrugged again, and Dornan bit down on his tongue until he tasted blood. His f.u.c.king father was infuriating.
Dornan turned and left the room, not bothering to look back. He"d learned over the years that it was so much easier to walk away from his father. Every other motherf.u.c.ker who annoyed him had to answer to him, but Daddy dearest was sadly off limits. After all, Emilio was the man who ensured their shady world kept turning.
Dornan left the kitchen, letting the heavy door close behind him as he stalked across the foyer. Tall double doors with bra.s.s handles reached up in front of him, and he grabbed both handles at the same time, flinging them open onto the verandah that flanked the front of the house.
A sea of motorcycles greeted him, but no Gypsy Brothers to accompany them. What the f.u.c.k? A dozen guys in leathers weren"t easy to miss. He looked to his left, noticing two cars had been pulled out of the three-car garage and parked in front of the closed doors. Bingo.
He covered the distance between the house and garage quickly, throwing open the single service door to the garage that sat right next to the first of three tilt-doors. The smell of s.e.x immediately invaded his nostrils, entirely unwelcome since it wasn"t him who was taking part in the act.
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The garage was ma.s.sive. It was slightly insulting that Emilio chose to banish any of Dornan"s crew to the garage instead of letting them into the house, but right now Dornan couldn"t fault his father. He raised his eyebrows as he saw one of the young Mexican women who cleaned for his father, completely naked on the hood of his mother"s Mercedes. The poor woman would have a heart attack if she saw how her car was being corrupted. The chick on the hood, the girl who dusted his mother"s blinds and washed their f.u.c.king towels, had her legs spread wide and one of his guys was mouth-f.u.c.king her. She moaned loudly, throwing her head back as she said something unintelligible in Spanish. She looked like she was having a fine time.
Dornan stepped closer and cleared his throat, the woman"s body shuddering at the same time as she opened her eyes, the shock on her face almost comedic. She slammed a hand over her mouth and locked eyes with Dornan, stifling a loud moan as she came.
Her cheeks went bright red and she looked down at the Gypsy Brother between her legs, trying to bat him away with her free hand. Apparently Viper was too far into what he was doing to even realise his boss was standing behind him. He stood up, not paying attention to the chick"s expression as she covered her face in shame, pulling her hips closer to him and slamming himself into her.
"Vipe," Dornan said pointedly.
Viper jumped so high in the air he almost took the chick off the hood of the car.
"f.u.c.k!" he yelled in surprise, falling on top of the car"s hood and making the woman scream as he no doubt gave her his all.
"Vipe," Dornan repeated, starting to get angry. "What the f.u.c.k are you doing?"
Viper pushed himself up on the hood of the car so he wasn"t crushing the woman, a sheepish look on his face. "I was waitin" for you, D," he said, continuing to thrust.
Dornan sighed. "You"ve got two minutes to get out of that woman and into the kitchen. You can f.u.c.k the help after we"ve sorted this c.o.ke situation."
"I figured you"d be banging that one we just picked up," Vipe said.
Dornan chose not to answer. "You get your j.i.z.z on my mother"s car, I"ll cut your nuts off myself."
He left Viper to his business and stalked back into the house. There was only one other place his boys would be. He burst back into the front doors, taking a sharp right down the hallway until he reached a door at the end. He threw the door open and what he saw made him want to laugh until he cried.
His mother had insisted on having her sitting room made big enough to accommodate their large extended family. It was an impressive room, all high ceilings and wing-backed brown leather chairs nestled between overstuffed sofas. His mother sat in her own custom recliner, an espres...o...b..lanced expertly between her thumb and forefinger.
That wasn"t the strange part. The strange part was the twelve Gypsy Brothers sitting around awkwardly sipping on coffees.
"Ma," Dornan chided. "What the h.e.l.l are you doin" back here with this lot?" His mother, a short, blonde woman in her fifties, raised one manicured eyebrow as she extended a slender arm to her mouth and sipped her coffee.
"The boys have been filling me in on your latest endeavours," she said, her Queens accent as strong as it had ever been, even though she"d been in San Diego for the better part of thirty-five years. "Seems your father"s gotten himself into a dire situation."
Dornan balled his fists angrily, glaring at the brothers. "Everybody," he said, deadly calm. "Get the f.u.c.k out of this room and into the kitchen. Now."
Most of them appeared grateful as they dumped their cups on the coffee table and high-tailed it out of the room in a stampede of leather and heavy footsteps. Once the last Gypsy Brother had vacated the room, Dornan turned to face his mother. She made no move to stand as her son towered over her.
"You know," she said, glancing down into her coffee, "I used to take you and your brother to the park when you were little. You liked the swings the best. When it was time to go home, you"d scream and beg me to stay."
Dornan softened slightly; he never could stay angry at his mother, even though she did have a nasty habit of sticking her nose in where it didn"t belong. He already had Emilio breathing down his neck with every step he took. He didn"t need his mother keeping tabs on the club as well.
"I"d pick you up in my arms and carry you away. You were probably only three or four." Her blue eyes sparkled as she reminisced. "You used to yell, "Help! Mommy, help me!""
Dornan"s mouth twitched up at the memory.
"You looked nothing like me," she said, some of the joy having leaked out of her voice. "You were all your father. Still are."
Something inside Dornan"s chest buzzed painfully as he crouched down in front of his mother.
"Ma," he said gently, trying to catch her gaze.
Her blue eyes filled with water as she finally made eye contact with him.
"Not like your brother," she whispered. "He was just like me. Just like me."
Dornan recalled a small boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. A boy who never got old enough to leave high school before he was gunned down on his way from school as retribution for something Dornan couldn"t even remember anymore. A casualty of the war that never seemed to end.
"Ma," he repeated softly, taking her free hand and squeezing it between his own palms.
"I worry about you," she said plainly, her eyes still gla.s.sy. "You"re all I"ve got left."
Such a display of emotion was rare from his mother; she almost always maintained a ruthless calm that served her well. Her reputation was that of a woman to be feared, a cartel queen who has earned her right alongside the king. But here, now, Dornan saw the fear inside his mother"s eyes, and that fear pulled at him.
"You don"t need to worry," Dornan said, giving her hand one last squeeze before he placed it back in her lap.
He stood and turned to leave, her final words like a knife in his chest.
"That"s what your brother said," she murmured.
His mother"s vulnerability had rattled him. Still, there was business to attend to, so Dornan did what he was best at: pushing away everything else and focusing on the task at hand. He"d become adept at compartmentalising things after Raph had died. If he didn"t push the dark things down into the abyss inside him, he"d be eaten alive by rage.
In the kitchen, things were finally happening. Emilio still presided over the head of the table, Julian by his side. Dornan"s men sat and stood around a spot beside Emilio that was obviously meant for him. Dornan glanced at the empty seat beside his father before taking a spot at the opposite end of the table, directly opposite his father.
"What"d I miss?" Dornan asked, folding his arms across the Gypsy Brothers crest that adorned the leather cut he wore.
His father turned his eyes up to acknowledge him before returning to the map in front of him. "Los Angeles," he said briskly. "Who else do we know who supplies?"
Dornan frowned. "That"s the thing about a monopoly," he answered. "n.o.body else supplies, Pop. We"re it."
Emilio didn"t look impressed.
"We"ve got a shipment of meth coming, right?"
Emilio continued to stare at his son, a small shrug of his shoulder the only indication he had heard the question.
"We push that," Dornan suggested. "Discounted until we can get our c.o.ke situation covered."
Emilio grunted. His indifference infuriated Dornan.
"We done here?" Dornan asked. "These boys can accompany the shipment personally this time. It"s due tonight, is it not?"
"Midnight," Emilio answered. "At the dock."
Dornan nodded. When no one moved, he threw his hands up.
"Everyone get that? Nine o"clock at the dock." He glanced at his watch, seeing they still had a few hours to kill. "Leave now. Go get something to eat. I"ll see you boys out there."
Viper, who"d been silent until this point, suddenly spoke up. "You"re not coming with us, D?"
Dornan shook his head, avoiding his father"s amused stare. "I said, I"ll meet you there. Get out of here, all of you."
They filed out of the room, the heavy kitchen door slamming after them. Dornan pressed his palms flat on the table and studied his father.
"Was there something else?" Emilio asked, looking up from the papers in front of him.
Dornan shook his head, pressing off the table with his hands and leaving the room.
But he"d lied. There was something else. Her name was Mariana.
And she"d asked him to come back.
Dornan didn"t enter her room once he was downstairs. Instead, he stood outside the door, pressing his eye to the peephole that showed a fish-eye view of the small room. Yeah, he was a f.u.c.king pervert. It didn"t bother him. She was a grown woman, and she had asked him to come back.
For a while, she paced, probably waiting for him to return. He bore the time patiently, dismissing the hunger in his stomach after a full day on the road. Once he went upstairs, he"d be on the phone and screaming at the rest of the guys to try and get some product out onto the street. So he took his time, and he watched the girl pace in her tiny room.
Three paces, turn, three paces. She did this over and over again, and he imagined for a moment that she was doing it for him. But she seemed oblivious to his peeping, her stride getting quicker, her face turning from carefully controlled detachment to an anxious rage. She stopped at the far end of the room, her back to him, and struck out at the wall in front of her. She kicked it a couple of times too, but most of her energy seemed intent on using her fists to smash the f.u.c.king wall to smithereens. It wasn"t as if she was trying to escape — the wall was solid limestone, anyone could see that. No, the little Colombian girl that made his c.o.c.k ache was mad. Ropeable. Absolutely f.u.c.king enraged.
He watched her a little longer, a vague sense of concern pressing at him as he saw the blood dripping from her knuckles. She stopped hitting the wall, but she didn"t stop hurting herself. She marched over to the suitcase he"d left inside the door, opened it and spilled the contents onto the ground. Selecting a small round compact from the pile of clothes and make-up, she opened it and threw it at the ground. The mirror shattered into several pieces, and he watched with interest as she knelt down and selected one of the larger pieces.
He a.s.sumed she was going to hide it, use it as a weapon for when he re-entered the room, but what she did next surprised the h.e.l.l out of him. She took the piece of mirrored gla.s.s in her hand, sat on the narrow bed that took up one corner of the room, and held out her wrist.
Is she going to …?
She was. She dragged the sharp tip of the gla.s.s down the inside of her wrist, and fresh blood sprang forth. The sight excited him — yeah, he was a sick motherf.u.c.ker. He enjoyed the sight of blood. He wanted to burst into the room, kneel in front of her, and lick the deep cut in her arm from end to end.
As long as she didn"t stab him in the neck while he did it.
Make sure she isn"t marked.
His father"s words came back to taunt him, and it gave him the perfect excuse to interrupt her psychotic attempt at self-mutilation.
Make sure she is untouched.
Well, that one was a little more difficult, but he"d do his best to make sure he at least didn"t leave bruises on her if he found himself unable to resist. He"d never raped a woman, but he"d never needed to — they usually found his enthusiasm a turn-on more than anything. He might have coerced or blackmailed, but he"d never straight-up held a woman down and driven himself inside her against her will.
Yet.
He liked to think he never would, but he was his father"s son. The darkness that flowed through his veins disgusted him, but trying to resist it had only ever made things worse. When he tried to control the darkness inside him it didn"t abate, but stored up in increments, until it inevitably bubbled up like poison, rendering his violence uncontrollable. He"d killed people over trivial matters when he let things get too pent up, so he figured it was better to destroy the people who were the source of his rage in the first place. Even as he justified the blood on his hands to himself, he knew that he was a bad man. Hopefully, though, he wasn"t the worst.
Make sure she isn"t marked.
Dornan groaned as he opened the door and saw Ana sitting on the bed, sobbing incoherently as she bled all over herself.
"What are you doing?" he asked her as he closed the door behind him. He expected her to try and hide the gla.s.s, or run from him, or attack him. He expected something. What he didn"t expect was for her to continue what she was doing, dragging the sharp gla.s.s down her arm as if he wasn"t there, as she muttered and shook and wept.
"Hey!" he said, a little louder this time. He crossed the room in two quick steps and grabbed hold of the hand that held the offending weapon, squeezing hard until she was forced to drop it. The gla.s.s fell to the ground, breaking into two bloodied, uneven shards.
"Seven years bad luck," he said flippantly, looking from the gla.s.s to her glazed eyes. He felt relief when she glared at him, the daze seemingly broken.
"Are you kidding me?" she growled. "I think I"ve got a lifetime of bad luck ahead of me, don"t you?"
He kicked the gla.s.s away and sat beside her on the bed, close enough that his jeans brushed her blood-smeared thigh. "What did you do that for?" he asked, genuinely curious.
She shot him a look so scathing, it made him want to shrink back — only, he was Dornan f.u.c.king Ross, and he shrank back from n.o.body, not even his own father.
"I know you were watching me," she replied, and it made him smile.
"I like watching you," he said, shocked by his own honesty. "Does that bother you?"
She continued to stare boldly at him. "Your father"s men killed my boyfriend last night," she said, making a choking noise at the back of her throat.
There it was. Her anguish. Her struggle. Her why.
"I"m sorry," he said, noticing how the blood was still pouring from her wrist. She"d cut deeper than he"d first thought. "May I?" he gestured towards her wrist and she shrugged, which he took as an invitation. He gathered his grip around the underside of her wrist and cradled it up to the light, gently inspecting the cut.
"Are you trying to kill yourself?" he asked, probing at the wound with his fingers to determine its depth, all the while biting down on the tip of his tongue to stop it from darting out and licking up her blood.
"Of course not," she retorted, pulling her hand away. But Dornan didn"t release his grip on her, and they stared each other down in a silent battle of eyes and wills.
"Don"t you ever want to hurt yourself because you can"t hurt the person who f.u.c.ked everything up?"
Her words were frank and revealing, making him ponder them. Every time he smashed his own fists into a boxing bag, or a wh.o.r.e, or another Gypsy Brother, he relished the pain, and welcomed the relief that spilling his own blood offered.
"Let me guess," Dornan said, rubbing his thumb along her cut as she watched in silence. "My father?"
She snapped her gaze back to him, a sadness bursting forth from her that made him drop her wrist and stand up, lest that sadness infect him in some way.
"Yes," she said brokenly. "Your father. And mine."
He didn"t take his eyes from her until he remembered the blood, and looked down to see it coating his palms.
"You like blood, don"t you?" she asked suddenly. "Other people would recoil at the sight of it, but not you. You wear it like an old outfit. It suits you."
Anyone else would have been embarra.s.sed to admit it, but not Dornan. He traded in lives and in blood, so why shouldn"t he like it? And in this case, she had spilled it of her own volition, which made him all the more excited.
"I like your blood," he replied, smiling wolfishly. "I like it very much."