“What?” I say when he trails off. “What is it—”
“Quiet,” he commands, his voice changed, deep and certain. “Listen.”
He raises the package and tilts his head like a predator listening for the noise of its prey in the underbrush.
“There’s a fucking bomb in here,” he whispers.
And then everything happens fast.
He spins and tosses the package and then leaps over the hood of my car, sliding with the speed and agility I’d never guess from a man of his size.
With one hand he drags me down and with the other, he efficiently grabs Poppet and guides her behind the car, and then he shields us both, putting his back to the rear car door and enveloping us.
The explosion tears through the ground.
Through the car.
Through everything.
Chapter Three
Domenico
“We think there was a radio mic in the package,” Gabriel murmurs, standing at the window of my hospital room with his arms behind his back.
But that doesn’t hide the way his fingers twitch, conducting an invisible orchestra, or the frantic quick-fire bursts of his speech.
“They wanted to wait until we were together. Maybe they got the time of the meeting wrong. Maybe we’ve got a mole, Skip. I don’t know anymore. But when they realized they’d been made, those motherfuckers detonated it and almost killed my best friend and my daughter.”
His daughter.
After waking up in the hospital, the events of that alleyway groggily returned to me.
I felt my body seizing up in those first moments of consciousness, something deep inside of me roaring that it wasn’t true, the savage primality I felt for that woman, felt for her the second I laid eyes on her.
She’s mine, she’s fucking mine to take and impregnate and use any damn way I want.
My carnal thoughts exploded as my mind repainted her image.
With her cascading blonde hair down to her shoulders, her eyes looked even brighter. Her stark blue eyes and lips were sassy and brimming with personality. And her body—her fucking body. She was wearing light jeans and a T-shirt, but her curves drew my gaze inexorably, her hips wide, made for grabbing, for guiding, for dominating. Her ass was round and juicy and those breasts, the way the strap of her bag kept digging into them was driving me mad.
This feeling is entirely new to me, seeming to seize onto me, as though a deeper, more ancient force is trying to make me do things I shouldn’t. She is Gabriel’s daughter, for fuck’s sake, Gabriel’s daughter, the one woman I feel a damn thing for and of course, fate makes it her.
I feel a swelling of relief knowing that she and Poppet are at Gabriel’s penthouse apartment, surrounded by armed guards. They weren’t hurt in the blast. My body shielded them. They’re both safe.
Gabriel turns to me, drawing me from my thoughts with a raised eyebrow.
“I take it strong-arming the Unions isn’t our plan of action now?”
“No,” I sigh. “They made an attempt on my life. We need to respond with violence. But controlled violence, Gabriel. No deaths. Attack their warehouses. Attack their bars. But only when they’re closed and we’re certain no-one is inside. The police chief will tolerate some retaliation, but the second this goes overboard, she’s no longer our man. Perhaps even the Feds will get called in. We need to keep this shit contained.”
“What if they shoot at us?”
“Defend yourself,” I growl. “But if I learn of one man overstepping his mark, I’ll put a bullet in his head myself. There are too many lives at stake to play this stupidly. If we don’t retaliate, we risk seeming weak. If we go too far, we’ll get innocents hurt and most likely bring in the National Guard.”
Gabriel drops down on the seat next to my bed. I let out a slow breath, feeling the bruising pulse across my back. The blast sent a shockwave through the car, thundering into me, but it stopped with my body.
I protected her. And I always will.
I push that thought from my mind as I sit up, bringing my feet to the cold hospital floor. Now that I’ve been checked over, I’ve got no desire to stay here to be pampered back to health.
I stand up, ignoring the pain lancing through me, and walk over to the door where my men have hung my suit, with a small bag next to it with my other clothes inside.
“You saved her, Skip,” Gabriel mutters at my back, as I begin to carry my clothes toward the bathroom. “If you didn’t throw that bomb away, Jesus Christ, my daughter would be dead right now. What the hell was I thinking, hiring her to be a messenger for us?”
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him firmly. “It’s Patty McGuinness’s fault.”
“Fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that I owe you.”
“You’ve never owed me anything, Gabriel,” I say. “You’ve more than earned your place. Now let me get changed. I feel like an asshole standing here in this hospital gown.”
He chuckles grimly and I shut the bathroom door behind me, trying to tug my mind away from Dallas Smith, my consigliere’s daughter, my best friend’s daughter.
I never saw her again after her mother took her out west. Sometimes Gabriel would travel there to visit her, and sometimes she’d come here, but I never had cause to see her. Or, if I did, she was just a background teenager, a girl I’d never look twice at.
But the woman I saw in that alleyway is an entirely different story.
My heart starts hammering the second I think about the way her denim jeans tried to trap that round-as-fuck ass. Then, as I shrug off the hospital gown, I can’t stop myself from imagining that ass naked and bent over for me, smothering shiny oil all over it, getting it wet for me, and then
