HERE WAS SHE getting all that bullshit psychobabble and what the fuck was she doing spilling it out on me?
I held her wrist and watched her eyes burn. He breath was warm and damp, close to my chest. I could have bent her backward. Shown her who was master of this situation, watched those eyes gleam and flash, then well up, peak until they rolled back. I could make her pretty lip tremble and feel her breath shake.
Her jaw set and I realized how hard my grip was on her wrist. Still, I didn’t loosen it. She needed to be taught, I needed to show her something about me. Something that she would remember. I should make her call my name until she begged me. I pulled her closer. Her eyes widened and shone as her chest swelled and her breath caught in her throat.
A scent, a dark, heady perfume burst low in the air between us. Her face was turned up to mine. Her eyes were defiant. But the scent and the heat I felt on the front of her hips, the twitch in her lip and the hardness of her nipples as they pressed through her clothes, all of that told me another story. They told the age-old tale, the story a flower shows the bee, the story that a peach tells to the hummingbird. The story a deer tells the hunter when she’s cornered and shows you her throat.
My tongue traced my lips as I thought of how her lips would taste. The sweetness of her breath gave me the clue. Her head tipped and her lips parted. I touched her bottom lip with my thumb. Brushed roughly from one side to the other. Then I looked in her fluttering eyes and she watched as I tasted the tip of my thumb.
My mouth leaned toward hers. She arched back, but mainly had the effect of pushing her stomach and her pelvis against me. She rose onto her toes and her mound shoved against the ridge of my thigh. I stiffened my thigh and her legs gripped around it.
My face was near to hers. With the very tip of my tongue, I licked her lips. First the bottom then, slowly, the top. The tremble in her stomach and her thighs made me stiffen. My hand made its way around her waist and felt the warm strength of her as I reached back. She had back muscles like a skier. With the tips of my fingers I relished the tense arc in her spine and slid down to hold her ass. The firm roundness rolled in my grip. She sighed as I pulled her to me.
My voice was just a hot breath on her throat and her cheek. “I could open you.” I watched her. “Spread you wide.” Her eyes flashed. “Take you up and fly you like a paraglider. Buffet you and spin you around until you peak and crash, soaring, plunging and moaning.”
“You mix your metaphors, mountain man,” her voice was distant and I could tell she was working to keep it steady. Her thighs were fastened on mine and her mound scraped high on my leg. The heat of her zinging pulses made my cock lengthen and twitch. I wanted to beat her with it. Inside and out.
My fingers traced the line of her throat. Slipped up the side of her neck and around her ear. I slid my fingers into her hair. Threading around and into the thick flow of her soft mane. I had all of her hair between my fingers. I had only to close my hand and I would have her at my mercy. She felt it, too. I watched her eyes. She moistened her lips and they parted again.
My other hand swept around her ass, squeezing and holding at the top of her thigh as it stroked around to the front of her pants. Then I pulled her face to mine.
My voice was a scraping rasp. “Want to mix something up with those metaphors?”
I held her so her lips were in trembling distance of mine. I tasted her breath. As her face lunged towards mine I held her back.
“Say please.”
Her temperature rose at that and she squirmed in my arms.
“Ah,” I grinned. “Doesn’t mind being held, but isn’t ready to admit it.”
Her eyes flashed hot and her lips curled back.
“Something unresolved with your Daddy, maybe?” her teeth snapped at me and I could see she was as surprised as I was. “Buried deep. There’s a ancient stream running through there.” I popped the button on her pants. Her mouth lunged at me again. And I held her back when her lips were just a hair away from mine. I could taste her. And I knew that from there she could taste me.
“Apple of Daddy’s eye? Daddy’s little girl,” the corner of her eye creased with amusement, like a triumph. “No,” I whispered, “Daddy’s big girl. Not the princess, but Daddy’s queen.” I couldn’t hold her back now. I couldn’t help but laugh when her whole body surged at me like a tsunami.
As I leaned backward and she charged up to my face, while she fixed her lips on mine, met my breath with hers and sealed our tongues in a lock, as her breasts pressed against my chest, I slipped her zipper down. Her legs wrapped themselves around me and her mound was in my palm. I closed my hand and held her and she shook.
Our kiss was long, deep and her hands clawed in my hair while we came together. Our bodies entwined as though we already knew each other, inside and out. Back to front. From tip to toe.
We swayed and rocked to the music of each other’s bodies, tangoed on the beats of our hearts and the drums of our pulses. When finally she pulled her mouth from mine, we looked at each other for a moment in silent and tense amusement. Then I hoisted her up and slung her legs over my shoulders. With her pants and her underwear still on, hot and drenched as they were, I could barely stretch my tongue inside to reach her. And that was part of the charge.
She sat astride me, looking down. I watched in the mirror to see the anguish on her face. She saw me looking and her face flushed in fury. The more she rolled her hips to get me nearer to her weeping petals, farther up her trembling thighs, the more the zipper pushed my chin and my tongue out.
I flicked the tip up my tongue up at the front of her wet panties. She shoved her hips nearer. Her pants pushed me out again.
She did that enough times that I thought I would come just from laughing. The more I laughed the madder she got. Every time I thought I would stop and free her from the torment, she would get madder and I couldn’t resist keeping it going.
I lowered her. She kept her legs tight around me. I looked into her eyes. I never before felt such a huge tug from looking in someone’s eyes. It was like there were chains drawing us together.
Slowly I said, “It’s a one-time deal, Vesper. This isn’t the best time.”
Her thighs clamped hard around my body, her ankles pulled my back practically into her. She felt like she would crush me. The look on her face said for sure that she would.
“Okay,” I growled. I wasn’t so keen to get out of that clinch either. Something had to be done. “You know what they say in Little Rock.” Her eyes blazed. “‘Eatin’ ain't cheatin’,’ so I was thinking I could maybe stretch a point.” Before I could finish my carefully constructed proposition, her body swung and she knocked me to the ground.
Memories of that night would keep me awake. For the next five years, I turned over the few words that she’d said, tried to shake something out of them. And all of the sensations of her, the sounds of her and the sights. Trying to see how she could have done what she did.
The next afternoon, the job of babysitting the Bonaventura twins got off to a bad start.
I showed up at the address at the designated time. Paulo, a tall, rangy guy with the expensively floppy black hair and scowly cherubic Sicilian looks opened the door. Took plenty of time not letting me in. Told me he was the Bonaventura boys’ ‘Major Domo,’ whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.
“We don’t really need you. I run the security here and we’re tight.”
I nodded like I understood. It was to be expected. Kids from a big-time family like theirs were bound to have about a truck full of their own protection. Honestly, I didn’t understand why anyone wanted an outsider there in the first place, unless there were concerns about the inside team. I hadn’t been briefed, so I would just run my job by the numbers, guarding in a hostile environment.
“I’ll do what I’ve been asked to do.” I told Paulo. As far as I could I sounded and acted like, we were soldiers, just doing a job. Either he didn’t have the experience to appreciate it, or he just wasn’t inclined to get along with me. In my experience, working with strangers was often a stretch for Sicilians.
“Hopefully we’ll stay off each others’ toes.” Must have been fifteen minutes he kept me out in the front yard – yup, a house in Little Italy, just south of Washington Square, with a front yard.
I worked my neck from side to side, trying to pull out the kinks from last night, it reminded me of how she smelled. And how she tasted. I saw Paulo watching me with his dark scowl.
Two or three calls on his cell phone later, mumbling in Sicilian, and he looked up and down the street . Finally, and reluctantly, he showed me inside.
He wasted no hospitality as he took me in and around the property and gave me a walking tour of the mechanical and electronic security. While he did, I watched him hard for all of the things he didn’t tell me. When he watched me checking him I gave him an insider smile. A conspiratorial, you and me, eh? kind of a smile. That didn’t get me anything, either.
I noticed that he showed me the surveillance but not the recording backup. He pointed to the alarms and cameras, but he didn’t tell me where an alarm signal would route, other than through the box under the staircase. And he didn’t tell me the codes.
He also didn’t give me lists of the people in the house, or of expected visitors. Without knowing who was supposed to be here and who wasn’t, who was friend and who was foe; simple babysitting could be a tough gig.
He introduced me to Georgio and Armando, the other men on his team. They were big and seemed capable, although they had no organization or structure. When Armando shook hands with me, he held the underside of my arm and I had the sense that he was judging my weight and strength. A famous hangman used to calculate the drop for his clients by handshake, I remembered from somewhere.
The Bonaventura twins themselves, Adrianu and Costanzu, I only saw from the far end of a long room. Lanky, dark haired and in their early twenties, they talked with their heads bowed together, eating finger food from a long table. The room had sliding doors that lead out to a garden terrace. They both wore red sweaters, and they looked stylish the way an Italian man can in a sweater. Paulo called from the doorway, his hand aloft, a finger pointing down at me.
The twins looked at him over their shoulders, flicked their eyes only for a second onto me, nodded and returned to their conversation. In that instant I saw two serious men. They gave off an attitude of superiority and entitlement, but they didn’t seem like fools.
Paulo spent most of what was left of the afternoon keeping me as far from the twins as possible, and out of sight of anybody else. He even tried to entice me down to the cellar but I told him I would take a chance to check it out later.
“There could be something vital down there,” he told me, half-heartedly.
“Cool,” I said, “I’ll wait here while you go down and get it.” I felt like I was being dragged around the edge of my fraying patience. The last night had been great as far as it went, but it was incomplete and it had left me edgy. I wasn’t in any mood for the Sicilian’s junior mobster games.
The house was set back, at the front and rear. One side was freestanding, though the other side attached to the house adjacent. It could have been breached through a side wall, so I told Paulo the twins should remain in the rooms on the east side.
He looked at me pityingly. “Look, Paulo,” I was holding my temper, but he wasn’t making it easy. “I have no idea what kind of threats we’re up against. I’ve been told to come here and protect the twins. If you really want to get in my way while I try to do it, well then, fine, but I have to wonder why you aren’t more concerned about the safety of your employers.”
“And now you listen to me.” He moved close and his voice hissed through his clenched teeth. “We don’t know why you’ve showed up here out of the blue, or who sent you, but we’ve all got our eyes on you.” He pointed two fingers to his eyes then to mine. “Minchia.” I knew what that meant, and the way he said it was not friendly.
Paulo didn’t allow me into the room where the twins were, so, in the end, all I was able to do was to sit on a chair outside wherever they were hanging out, and follow them up and down stairs and down hallways. Late in the evening, and bored stupid, I sat in a draft outside an upstairs dining room. The Bonaventura twins were inside and food and drink had been brought up from a second floor kitchen.
I remember a waiter leaving the room. I saw something in the reflection on his silver tray. A colossal whack hit the back of my head and I was face down on the floor. Then all the light drained away.
Minchia.