“My brother will be back any minute, and when he sees you—”
“He’ll what?” I wrench her dress up around her hips, grinning to myself when she doesn’t yank it back down again. “Tell me something, Lola… Is he coming here to drag you back to Mexico? Will you be a willing passenger, or will you be screaming inside the whole time because Daddy’s taking all your dreams and wishes and drowning them in a river named Carrera?”
Her body sags. I’ve just deconstructed her truth into something real and ugly.
Like a dick, I take advantage of the situation and ram my knee between her legs, spreading them wide.
“How long have you known?” she rasps. She’s almost compliant as I brush my thumbs against the underside of her breasts.
“The day you started at Rutgers.” I slide a hand between her thighs, trailing upwards; smirking as she pushes back on me, biting out a moan.
“That was over a month ago… Santiago could have come for me anytime—”
“But he didn’t.” I reach the damp apex of her thighs and slide a finger inside the crotch of her soaking-wet panties. I’m so close to losing my shit over this woman it’s unreal. One more breathy moan and I’ll be destroying her virginity for the rest of the night.
“Am I supposed to offer my gratitude?” Hissing out the word, she tries to push me away again. “Do you know what he did to mamá eighteen years ago? To me?”
“Toss a story in the air and the facts will fall differently every time, Lola. Your father sent him and my stepfather an invitation to their own fucking murders. They got lucky. Your dad got pissed. Cue two decades of East Coast anarchy.”
“You’re a liar!”
“And you’re a fucking lunatic,” I roar, losing my temper. “Flashing your pussy to the night like that… Not to mention sucking that asshole’s face earlier.”
She stills. “Did you hurt him?”
“Damn right I did.” I pinch her swollen clit in delicious punishment, inhaling her pained groans like oxygen.
“Ay Dios mío,” she gasps, and shudders, cursing me in Spanish. “¡Hijo de su puta madre!”
She’s right. I am a son of a bitch. In more ways than one. In response, I drive my middle finger so deep inside her she loses her balance, slamming her palms against the wall as I circle and stretch her, prepping her for an even bigger surprise.
“You’re sick!” she cries, angling her hips for more. “I know you’ve been stalking me.”
“Did you like it, Lola? Did it pique your interest? Did you climb down from your ivory tower to take a closer look? Maybe we should climb back up together?” With this, I give her exactly what she needs, ramming a second finger inside her. I pump mercilessly in and out of her body as she curses again.
“God, I hate you!”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
“You’re a creep,” she groans, squeezing my fingers as her pussy starts quivering.
“You’re a tease.”
“You’re a filthy Santiago pendejo!”
“And you’re mine!”
Ripping my fingers away, I spin her back around, smashing our mouths together to drown out her next insult. I taste peaches and cream, relief and desperation, before shouts and heavy footsteps in the parking lot outside send us spiraling back to earth.
Shit.
Tearing my mouth from hers, I slam my hand down in its place. “Don’t make a fucking sound. I mean it, Lola. There’s a fine line between the two factions of this war, and we’re slow-dancing on the edge of it.”
I think fast. I have exactly three minutes before Santi Carrera sees what I did to his sister’s bodyguard and starts redecorating her apartment in my blood.
There’s a stairwell at the end of her hallway. It leads to the front of the building where my car is parked. I hear Lola’s silent question in my head, and my mind is made up.
Wherever I’m going, she’s coming too.
If looks could kill, Lola would have sent me to hell and back a couple of times over by now.
She’s in the passenger’s seat of my black Bugatti, her hands tied to the Jesus handle above her head. I can’t tell if she’s madder at me for kidnapping her or at herself for coming all over my fingers as her brother was storming the stairs. We made it out with seconds to spare, and now we’re speeding down the freeway and into the eye of the storm.
The last few days have been hell. Not knowing Santiago’s intentions toward Lola pushed my obsession into a wasteland of uncertainty. I followed her back to her apartment this evening, like every other, and then she hit me with that sexy-as-fuck floor show.
In that moment, ambition, lust, Santiago…all that other stuff ceased to exist. There’s only her to drown in now, and what a glorious death it promises to be.
We drive for five hours straight, kissing the coastline all the way up to New England. At two a.m., I see a derelict road sign for some roach motel a couple of miles shy of Newport, Rhode Island.
Pulling into the parking lot, I switch off the engine.
“Are you going to play nice, Lola?” Turning to her, I trail a finger down one flawless cheek, feeling a surge of hope when she doesn’t unleash a string of Spanish insults at me.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” she whispers, looking vulnerable and so fucking beautiful, I want to kiss all her doubt and hesitation away.
She’s wrong. I know exactly what I’ve done. By taking her, I haven’t just declared a new war on the Carreras, I’ve declared war on my own family too. We’re on the run from the two biggest criminal organizations in the world, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
I think I need a fucking drink to process it all, though.
“Let me go,” she urges, her blue eyes wide and wary. “I’ll tell Santi
