“The P stands for penthouses, I presume?” There was no missing the derision in Carla’s tone as she stepped inside the mirror-walled elevator.
“Penthouse, singular,” he corrected, repocketing the key card as he joined her and pressed the button that would take them up to the forty-fourth floor of the building. There were only the two buttons, up or down. Jericho and his cousin Kieran would now have moved into place outside the elevator.
Her eyes widened. “You’re occupying the whole of the top floor of this massive hotel?”
He shrugged. “Me, Natalia, half a dozen of my own men, plus Natalia’s bodyguard, Killian. Killian’s cousins, Kieran and Jericho, are part of my own protection detail.”
“Interesting choice of bodyguards.”
“I don’t adhere to the saying ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer,’” he dismissed harshly. “The cousins grew up poor on the streets of Belfast, and they have absolutely no interest in rising in the hierarchy of the Italian Mafia.”
“That’s—” Carla broke off what she’d been about to say as Leon moved to stand mere inches in front of her.
Leon placed his hands on the mirrored wall either side of her head. The throb of the pulse at the side of her throat visibly increased, her breathing becoming shallow, her cheeks infused with a delicate blush, and her soft lips parted slightly.
A reaction and response that Leon had no doubts was completely on his behalf.
He slowly leaned forward to close even the few inches that separated them. “I like my privacy,” he murmured against her perfumed throat. Leon wondered if she was aware she had instinctively bared that throat to him by the tilting of her head.
“The walking-around-naked sort of privacy, or for your protection?” she prompted nervously.
He huffed a laugh as his lips slowly kissed and tasted the smoothness and heat of Carla’s throat. “I doubt Natalia would appreciate seeing her father walking around naked.”
“For your protection, then,” Carla said knowingly.
Leon raised his head to look at her. “Does that bother you?”
Her laugh lacked humor. “That you’re not only one of the most powerful men in the world, but also one many people would probably like to see dead?”
“I sincerely hope there aren’t as many people wanting the latter as you’re implying,” he drawled.
“No?” she challenged. “Name me one of the dons or underbosses downstairs who wouldn’t like to take your place as capo dei capi.”
“I see you’ve been doing your homework on my organization.”
“I’m Italian. I was born knowing the Mafia hierarchy,” she dismissed. “So, name one.”
“Matteo.”
“Apart from your new nephew-in-law.”
Leon didn’t answer as the elevator doors swished open on the top floor of the building. He took hold of one of Carla’s slender hands to take her with him as he stepped straight into the main sitting room. A wall of windows looked out over the river and the London skyline. For all that she acted tough, and romancing a woman wasn’t Leon’s thing, he had a feeling Carla would appreciate the view.
She had also, probably without realizing it, touched on a subject he would have preferred to avoid on his niece’s wedding day.
Because someone, and Leon had no proof yet as to which of the New York underbosses it was, had their eye on becoming the next capo dei capi. Which, as Leon wasn’t dead yet nor had any intentions of being so in the near future, was more than presumptuous. It was downright dangerous.
Unfortunately, there were shipments of drugs being received into New York from cartels Leon had instructed they would never deal with. Cartels that also dealt in the misery of the trafficking of children as well as adults, all destined for the sex trade.
Leon was the father of one beautiful woman and uncle to another, and the thought of either of them, as a child or adult, being treated with such disregard for human dignity made him nauseous.
But someone else in his organization was disregarding his instructions and not only bringing those drugs into the country from banned cartels, but also the poor wretches who, once in the States, would be locked up in brothels. They would then be forced into becoming addicted to drugs so they would comply with whatever was done to them until their usefulness was over. At which time, they would be thrown out onto the streets, usually to meet an untimely death from bad drugs or an overdose. Or at the hands of other vagrants for the little they might possess, which in most cases was only the clothes and shoes they were wearing.
Leon already had his suspicions, but they had been confirmed when a woman had escaped from one of those brothels. She’d been lucky enough to be found and taken in by one of the women’s shelter groups. Word of her plight had eventually reached Leon, and he’d had the woman brought to his estate just outside New York so he could speak to her.
She’d been dazed still and had no idea where she’d been held for the past three months. Only that it was somewhere in New York, which Leon already knew.
She’d told him that she and a dozen other women and children had been taken from a village in Colombia and brought into the States on a cargo ship along with a hundred or so other women and children. The care on the ship had not been good, no food and very little water, and her ten-year-old daughter had not survived the journey. Although the loss made the woman weep, she had again thanked God for saving her daughter from suffering the same cruelty and degradation she had since she’d arrived here.
Leon never again wanted to hear a woman so desperate, she thanked her God because her child had died.
The woman had turned down his offer to provide transport for her to return to her village in Colombia, because she had no
