Ronnie put away the last of her massage supplies then tugged the scrunchie out of her ponytail and shook her hair loose. Time to head for the deck to watch the sun sink into the sea…though this time she wouldn’t be watching alone.
She aimed for the kitchen.
At the end of the day, the Cuntrera goons tended to gather at the four-person table for an espresso, or a glass of red wine, or maybe some arancini, stuffed rice balls. It was the best place to track down Antonio.
She pushed into the kitchen.
Antonio and Carmelo were sitting at the table, demitasse cups in front of them, and Donato was leaning against the sink, drinking an orange Fanta. Donato was a snot-nosed cugine who ran two-bit errands for Gaetano, eager to make his way into the Family any way he could.
Carmelo never let him sit.
“Hola,” she said.
Her entrance into the male sanctum was met with less surprise this time.
“Hello, beautiful.” The leer Carmelo shot at her was the worst ever, his upper lip lifting so high it made one nostril tug upward and wrinkle.
Carmelo had seen her naked, and now he was acting infantile about it. Alert the Times.
She passed by the table and went to the refrigerator. One-handed, she pulled out two Polar Pilsners by their glass necks then held up the beers to Antonio. “A drink on the deck?” Now that they were an item, they could talk together without suspicion. And she needed to pick his brain about how to proceed with this op, since, as it turned out, no, she did not have the combination to the safe. She should have had it, and up until last night, she thought she had…up until a wailing alarm dissuaded her of that notion, quickly and thoroughly.
Carmelo held up a staying hand to her. “Wait a minute, beautiful. You can’t run off when there are other men in need here.” He picked up his demitasse cup the way men do, not by the handle but around the rim, and shot down the espresso. He smacked his lips at her. “Why don’t you come over here and sit on my face first?”
“Sit on your face?” Tilting her head, she adopted a curious expression. “Now why would you want me to do that, Carmelo? Is your nose bigger than your penis?”
Donato jettisoned Fanta from his nostrils, shooting liquid clear across the kitchen.
Carmelo grinned. “Oh, beautiful, I would be very happy to show you how big my dick is.” His eyes glinted fiercely.
Bracing his palms on the table, Antonio shoved to a standing position.
A normal enough thing to do—to stand up—but something about the way he did it made her slice a sideways glance at him.
Muscles concentrated with energy, weight poised squarely, feet light, power worn like a second skin: these were simple things individually—together, they made a man into a predator.
Keeping one hand planted on the table, Antonio set the other on the back of Carmelo’s chair and leaned in close, a gathering fixation in his eyes that seemed vaguely…carnivorous. “Mine,” he ground out, sounding like he was using every tooth in his head to do the grinding.
Ronnie’s lips parted.
Donato perked up, watching the exchange with a lowlife’s avid eagerness for violence. A “made” man in the making, to be sure.
Carmelo leaned back in his chair. He put on a good show of not being intimidated, but he’d definitely dropped the cocky act. “Calm yourself, Antonio, eh? I was only playing.”
Antonio straightened, his expression less tense, but his biceps still flexed into two small mountains. “Say shit like that to Verónica again, Bellomo, and I’ll break off your cock and stuff it crossways up your ass.”
A tingle of sensation trickled down through Ronnie’s lower parts. Antonio was being so utterly medieval about this; she should be all sorts of feminist-style offended, fist in the air, fire in the belly. But his protectiveness made her feel kind of nice inside.
Antonio strode over to her and placed a hand at the small of her back, a territorial gesture that spoke as loud as his words. “Let’s go.” He steered her outside, escorting her along the short path to the deck stairs.
They descended to the wooden deck where Antonio pulled out a chair for her from a table with a wide canvas umbrella. “Before you blister my ears with a lecture about how you can stand up for yourself—which you clearly can—I can’t look like a cafone with those pricks.”
She sat. “I wasn’t going to give you a lecture.” She smiled up at him. “I think what you did was very sweet.”
“Sweet?” He sat down in the chair next to hers with a tad more violence than necessary. The word clearly tasted like a sour ball in his mouth. “Why do women always think calling a man sweet is a compliment?” He picked up one beer, opened it and gave it to her, then opened the other for himself. “All right, what am I in for?”
“Excuse me?”
“You clearly brought me out here to talk, and the last time you cornered me for a private conversation, you blasted me with a lot of oh, shit information.”
“Ah. Well, yes. I’d say it’s an oh, shit that I don’t have the safe combination.” She rubbed her throat, her sense of failure like poison in her mouth. She’d botched the mission.
He took a swig of his beer. “What happened with that?”
She dropped her hand. “The Extraction went wrong. It doesn’t happen often, thank goodness, but occasionally I draw out an answer from a subject that is the truth but only how he or she remembers it—meaning it’s not officially the exact truth. Humans are imperfect creatures with less than perfect memories, after all. Gaetano obviously remembered a number incorrectly. Unfortunately, I have no idea which.”
“Can’t you start over from the beginning?”
A sharp clap of laughter burst out of her. “That would kill me. This op has already taken way too long. What should have been a few weeks of undercover work has turned into three long months because I haven’t been able to keep Gaetano’s mind on task whenever I ask him Extraction questions. God knows how long a do-over would take me. And our timing may be limited even more by Denaro’s arrival tomorrow.” Matteo Messino Denaro was the capo di tutti capi out of Sicily, coming to Venezuela to check on Gaetano’s drug trade.
Antonio gave her a considering look. “You’re worried that Cuntrera is going to turn the formula over to his boss?”
“It’s a good possibility,” Ronnie agreed. “What about you—how did you plan to break into the safe?”
“Cut the right wires in the electronic combination panel.”
“Oh. Well, good. Let’s—”
“It’s a riskier operation than you might think.” His mouth slanted. “Third World nations don’t always follow textbook rules when it comes to their wiring.”
She spread her hands, holding her pilsner in one. “Can you think of another option?”
He drank his beer in silence for a few moments. “No. Okay, you’re right, we’d better do it my way. But we’ll need to pull off the heist before Denaro arrives and—no. While he’s here would be better. Everyone will either be attending to the main capo or distracted by him. Why don’t you meet me in Cuntrera’s den tomorrow thirty minutes after Denaro arrives?”
“Okay.” She said it dutifully then glanced down, tracing her thumb through the perspiration on her beer bottle. The one thing she’d been sent here to do was find the right combination…
“Did I forget something?” Antonio asked.
“No. Just…” She twisted her lips. “My presence in the den doesn’t seem necessary.”
“I need someone to watch my back, so yeah, I want you there.” He paused. “Weren’t you the one who said it’s better to work together and help each other out?” His voice lowered a notch. “Why do you think I stayed?”
She met his gaze, her mouth unsteady. “You stayed because I blew it last night, and you understandably didn’t want to leave the formula’s safety in the hands of an amateur.”
He shook his head. “Come on, Ronnie. Shit happens—sometimes for no explicable reason. Humans are imperfect creatures; you just said it. And when shit does happen, two things need to be remembered: no one is to blame, and two heads are better than one for figuring it out.” He paused and frowned like he’d just said some stuff he should be listening to himself.
“Maybe.” She lifted a single shoulder. “I just wanted to save the formula by Extracting the combination. I mean…” She gave him a swift look. “I’m not being territorial. I only…” She exhaled. “In a lot of ways, my psychic ability has been a curse to me rather than a godsend. I wanted it to feel like a gift for once, Antonio.”
He sipped his beer and studied her face. “How has it been a curse? And it’s Tony, by the way.”
Tony. Yes, it fit him better. “It has to do with my dad.” She ran her thumbnail along the edge of her beer label. “When I was sixteen I discovered my psychic ability, and it freaked me out at first, you know? Was I an aberration of nature? A circus act grotesque? My parents didn’t do anything to help me come to terms with it. My mother followed my father’s lead, and my father saw my ability only as a goldmine for his business. He was a corporate landscaper, and so he wanted to know things like what was the top-end price a client would pay for a job? Or how much was a competitor going to bid?”
Tony sipped his beer quietly, just listening.
“But remember how I told you I have to touch people to Extract truth, and sometimes this leads men to think I’m hitting on them? That’s what happened with my dad’s male clients, and they started hitting on me back, more and more aggressively. The situation became unsafe. I told my father I didn’t want to Extract for him anymore.” Her next words rose painfully, and her throat tightened around them. “He wouldn’t let me stop.” She set down her beer and let her hands fall loosely into her lap. “He cared more about his success than his daughter’s well-being.”
Tony sat very still.
“After I found out my father’s success meant more to him than my welfare, I estranged myself from him. When I left for college, I cut off contact.” Her eyes prickled. “I didn’t call him, and I didn’t go home for visits, and then four years later, he passed away. I’d never resolved the rift between us, and then I couldn’t—he was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Tony said. It was such a simple thing to say, sorry, but so much coming from him.
“Thank you.” She glanced down at her hands. Her skin was still a little shiny from leftover massage oil. “One of the worst parts was losing my hero the day my dad refused to let me stop Extracting. Kind of leaves a big hole in a girl, you know?” She supposed that’s why showy men caught her attention—she felt a pull to fill that hole with another hero. But those flashy men only looked the part of hero and, so, consistently let her down…and wasn’t that a disconcerting epiphany?
“Ever since my dad died,” she continued, “I’ve hated my psychic ability—it was the thing that came between us. But my ability is such a part of me that hating it has felt like hating myself. I was hoping to redeem that side through this mission. Because somehow it feels like if my psychic ability does good, then I’m good. Does that make sense?”
His mouth leaned sideways. “More than you can guess.”
“Really?”
“Unfortunately, I know what it’s like to feel crappy about parts of yourself. I feel the same way…or like I’m never doing the stuff right that I want to get right.”
She arched her brows. “You?” She couldn’t imagine him not doing everything right.
“You want an example? Before hiring on with Phoenix Agency, I was with the DEA. On my last undercover drug op, I let my female partner, Nicole, take her top off at a strip joint while I just sat there, thinking she could handle it when I should have known she couldn’t. Now she might quit her job. You want another example? How about you, on Cuntrera’s desk?” He leaned forward, his gaze penetrating. “I felt how tense you were when I was fucking you, Ronnie, especially toward the end. I was letting you get messed up too.”
“Sorry, paisano.” She smiled. He really was so sweet. “But you’re wrong about that. I was tense because I was trying not to have an orgasm.”
He sat back abruptly, and his eyebrows flew up, rising almost comically high on his forehead.
“I didn’t want to give you the gotcha! But…” She tossed him a wink. “You almost had me.”
He moved his jaw around then snorted softly. “Fuck me.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Once again,” he muttered, “I’ve proven that my perceptions about women are totally skewed.”
She tilted her head. She didn’t see that about him. “Why do you think that?”
A sea-scented breeze gently shifted Tony’s hair, lifting a few strands up to reveal a chaotic mess of waves and curls underneath. “It’s the way I was raised.” He ran a hand through his hair, tousling it even more. “My mother was a prostitute, and, no, I did not live a debauched life. I grew up in a homey two-story, five-bedroom house in Pilsen, Chicago, a lower-middle-class neighborhood on the edge of nicer neighborhoods. My mother could barely afford the house, but if she lived someplace too grungy, clients would’ve been too afraid to come see her and the others. There were four prostitutes total, two Italians and two Colombians, which is why I’m fluent in those languages. I grew up speaking all of them. According to Mom, I didn’t utter a single word until I was three, and then English, Spanish, and Italian all came pouring out.”
Ronnie tried to smile over the image of Tony as a toddler, maybe with his diaper half falling off when he ran around too much, but she couldn’t bring up a pleasant expression. He was raised by a woman desperate enough to go into prostitution, and that wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“The fifth bedroom was mine,” he went on, “which I was required to stay in during certain times. My mom tried her best to shield me from the seedy side of her profession, and she did a pretty good job.”
“You really never saw anything?”
“Not until I hit puberty. Then”—he flashed her a quick smile—“I wanted to see stuff and so started sneaking peeks. Of the other workers, of course, not my mom. And what I saw were women who were affectionate and congenial about everything asked of them. No matter what, they did it, and with what appeared to me like absolute joy. It was only later I figured out that most of the things they did, they didn’t want to do.” He ran his thumb along the scar on his forearm. “It was stupid of me not to know. Their unhappiness was in their eyes. I should have seen it. I should have done something about it. Helped my mom…stopped her somehow.”
“As a child?” Ronnie didn’t even try to hide her astonishment.
“She didn’t have anyone,” Tony returned, the line of his jaw stiffening. “She didn’t have a husband or… She only had me to look out for her, and I let her down.”
Ronnie shook her head. “You’re putting too many shoulds on yourself, Tony.” Which was both sad and sweet. Sad that he heaped such an impossible expectation on himself, but sweet that he was so noble about it, even at such a young age.
“The fuck I do.” His eyes turned dark and intense, his tone tautening. “I think it’s completely reasonable to expect that I wouldn’t let my DEA partner be gawked at by a bunch of assholes—to be used, the same as I saw happen to my mother. I let Nicole down. I let you down. Because,” he growled, “I used you myself.”
She sat up straighter. “You did not use me,” she shot back. How dare he take the decision out of her hands. “I am the one who pushed us to screw on Gaetano’s desk. You tried to stop several times, and I didn’t let you.”
He tsssed between his teeth. “I could’ve stopped us if I—”
“You are not,” she cut in sharply, “taking this away from me too, Tony. I”—she slapped her chest—“did what needed to be done to keep the mission from folding. Me.”
He slammed his beer down. “I could’ve stopped you if I really wanted to, Ronnie, but I liked fucking you too much.”
“You—” She stopped. Her mouth hung open for a moment then she closed it. “Really?” She smiled. Maybe she was off her rocker, but that felt nice, too, same as when Tony protected her from Carmelo.
Tony stared at her bright expression for a second then pressed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “You confuse me.”
She gazed at the top of his head, feeling affection well into her chest. “That’s the worst part for you, isn’t it? That you liked having sex with me.” She pressed a hand to her heart.
He gave his head a self-deprecating shake. “You have no idea about the man you keep supporting, Ronnie.”
Carmelo banged out of the villa’s side door and crossed the path above them. He was no doubt on his daily trip to the servants’ quarters to seduce one of the maids, although he had yet to—
Tony captured her wrist and tugged her out of her chair.
She gasped as she flew at him.
He caught her firmly by the hips and dragged her down onto his lap, one solid arm anchoring around her waist. He buried his other hand in her hair, gripping the back of her skull as he bent his head. His mouth hovered a whisper away from hers. Their chests pressed together. He was so close she could see herself in his pupils.
“What are you doing?” Her voice had an embarrassing, squeaky quality to it.
“Just keeping up our roles for Carmelo.” He crushed the silky warmth of his lips down on hers, and her next gasp spilled directly into his mouth—because his lips were already parted, his tongue invading her, the moist touch of it rolling into a take-no-prisoners chase after her own tongue.
He tasted like salt-of-the-earth man, like a conqueror of vast lands and the maidens who populated them, and she instantly ignited: flames ran up her spine, desire burned feverishly between her legs, and her nipples became two hot points.
A common-sense agent would have pushed him away before things went too much further. But half a beer and a sudden desperation to consume him hijacked her judgment and left it somewhere in a dark alley to fend for itself. She moved her lips back and forth over his in an erotic way that shifted his lips everywhere. He welcomed her assault by working his jaw, jacking up the aggression, increasing the heat as he left no part of her mouth unclaimed, his tongue tracing patterns of fire around hers.
With a low sob of pleasure, she threaded her fingers into his hair and arched her breasts against him.
As soon as she did those two things, he pulled back and gave her a smoky look and a slow smile. Picking her up from his lap, he gently returned her to her own chair.
She sat there dumbstruck, breathing through an open mouth, her lips slack. Then she blushed. “I suppose I deserved that after feeling you up last night in your bedroom.”
He laughed and also sounded breathless, which was gratifying.
With further satisfaction, she nodded at his erection. “Do you always get those so easily?”
He smirked. “Only in the line of duty.”
“Ah, that’s right, we were only role-playing, weren’t we? Or maybe that was a demonstration of what a bastard you truly are.”
He picked up his pilsner. “Maybe.”
She watched him work the label loose from the beer bottle. His hands were like the rest of him—not overly large but powerful, the nails square and masculine, the fingers long and almost sensual-looking.
She shivered. “Do you want to screw for reals?”
He looked at her.
She smiled serenely. “I guess your bastard-demo didn’t work.”
“I’m just forgiven? That’s it. No penance to pay?”
Not for the bold kiss. He meant for the night in the den on the desk. “You don’t think,” she tossed back, “that all the blue balls I’ve been giving you lately is enough?”
He answered her saucy comeback with a sober expression. “No, Ronnie,” he said quietly. “It’s not enough.”
He aimed his gaze at the view of the Playa Puerto Real, where sea met sky in astounding shades of cerulean and aquamarine.