“I think so,” she answered him. “You?”
Leon couldn’t ever remember being in bed with a woman and just holding her in his arms. Even when he had been married to Rosa, for the year before she died giving birth to Natalia, the two of them had separate bedrooms. Rosa had never taken the initiative, so Leon had always visited her bedroom for sex before leaving to sleep in his own room. He preferred it that way.
Leon had claimed the arrangement was because he didn’t want to disturb Rosa when he never knew at what time he would be able to fall into bed at night after taking care of his father’s business. But the truth was, Leon had liked his privacy, and his bedroom had provided exactly that.
Theirs had been an arranged marriage, rather than a love match, between two powerful Mafia families. It was what the men of the Mafia did with their daughters. Rosa’s father had been the don of California and Leon’s the capo dei capi in New York. Rosa’s eldest brother, Angelo, had now taken over that role from his father, as Leon had from his own father.
Oh, Leon had grown to care for Rosa, those feelings becoming genuine affection when she became pregnant with their child. He had been saddened when she died in childbirth, but not devastated on his own behalf, only on Natalia’s. His daughter had been denied a mother’s love and care. Despite being pressured into doing so, he had refused to even consider marrying again simply to give Natalia a mother and to increase his ties with the other dons. Instead, he had hired a nanny he could trust and whom Natalia grew fond of so that she had a female influence in her life.
Which, Leon now realized with a wince, hadn’t exactly been fair to Rosa. She had only been nineteen when they married and she moved to live with him in New York, and just twenty when she died a year later. Rosa hadn’t been any more in love with Leon than he was with her, but if she had lived, that affection might have deepened between them, in time.
As it was, Leon had spent the past twenty years bedding random women when he felt the need and ignoring them when he didn’t. Mostly, he ignored them.
It had been impossible for him to ignore anything about Carla from the very first moment the two of them met.
Having her lying in bed beside him now, the warmth of her body pressing against his, her breasts soft as a pillow against his side, the slight weight of her arm an anchor about his waist, was strangely both erotic and the most at peace Leon could ever remember feeling with anyone. In or out of bed.
“I think so,” he echoed her reply to him.
She snuggled in closer. “Good.”
It was good, Leon agreed drowsily.
More than good. It felt like perfection holding Carla in his arms. Like finding a quiet oasis in the midst of a raging storm.
Leon didn’t need to open his eyes to know it was morning. He was aware of the daylight infiltrating his closed lids.
But it wasn’t the impending daylight that had woken him.
No, that was completely due to the feel of a slender hand fondling his balls!
Carla’s hand.
And it was the warmth of Carla’s breath he could feel traveling down the length of his chest, over his abdomen, and then lower—
Dear sweet Mother of…!
Leon’s back arched, his mind going completely blank, as the wet heat of Carla’s mouth engulfed the bulbous tip of his aroused cock. Her tongue was a moist rasp over and against that sensitive flesh, before she took the pulsing and heated length to the back of her throat. Her slender fingers curled around the inches she couldn’t fit inside her mouth, her other hand continuing to fondle the tautness of his sac.
If Leon had thought holding Carla in his arms during the night was perfection, then this was exquisite torture. The softness of her hands and those caressing fingers, her tongue swirling and licking against and around his cock, was enough for Leon to feel the familiar tingle at the base of his spine as a warning of his impending release.
He almost released the moment he raised the duvet to look down at Carla, her eyes black with her own arousal as she gazed back at him. Her cheeks were flushed, and her lips were red and swollen about the girth of his cock. “You shouldn’t be doing this,” he rasped. “You were shot yesterday.”
She arched a brow as she slowly lifted her mouth off his cock. “It’s a flesh wound.”
“Even so…”
“Do you really want me to stop?” she teased.
“Fuck no!” Leon was pretty sure that if Carla stopped now, he was either going to spontaneously combust, something he hadn’t done since his wet dreams as a teenager, or suffer with blue balls all day. Neither or those things boded well for his temper or anyone who managed to piss him off today.
She gave a husky laugh. “Then be about your business—which is lying back and thinking of England, or in your case, New York—and leave me to carry on with mine.”
Leon chuckled as she gave a dismissive wave of her hand for good measure. In response, he obediently lowered the duvet and dropped his head back on the pillow to give himself up to the pleasure of having Carla’s hands and lips on him.
Her mouth was hot and very wet about his cock, her fingers firm about the base of his hard length, her other hand once again cupping and caressing his balls.
Leon had never before considered the latter as being an erogenous zone
