Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) (14 page)

It simply
was
.

“The arm’s fine, boss,” I said, reconfirming the hierarchy with that ‘boss’. “I can use it if I have to.”

“Good, good. I hope you will not need to this evening. Tonight is all about show, yes?”

I’d worked that out a long time ago, but I said nothing.

I know my place, and my place just then was to not let the bastard know I was watching him, sizing him up, working him out.

Because one day, I knew, I would come up against him, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

§

The party was in a walled estate just outside town.

I’d seen wealth here on the Costa – ridiculous levels of wealth – but nothing quite like this. This was rock star levels of wealth; movie star; founder of multinational software empire levels of wealth. The grounds must have covered several square miles, the buildings a small village in their own right, the white-sand beach fenced off from the rest of the world.

I held the car door for Markov and he stepped out, looked around, and drew in a deep breath. Then he leaned close to me, put a hand on my back and said, “One day, eh, my friend? One day.”

We passed through an archway between white-painted stuccoed buildings, and almost immediately we were in the thick of the gathering. Dozens of people around a pool, more at a straw-roof-shaded bar. Serving staff passing among them with trays of drinks and canapés.

The guests might easily have stepped out of a glossy magazine’s photo shoot – beautiful people gathered in a movie-set location. Outfits ran the scale from haut couture designer dresses – Imelda immediately looked like she belonged – to guys in shorts and joggers, but I’d have been willing to bet that even the most dressed-down outfits must have cost at least mid-three-figures.

In my time I’d minded all kinds of people. Reclusive billionaires, movie stars, musicians. Not to mention all the gangsters like Markov and my own brothers. But I’d never been at a single gathering where so many of them came together as they did here.

Everywhere I turned there was a face I recognized. Pop stars and sports men and women, actors, TV personalities... lots of faces I half-recognized but couldn’t quite place, and most of them sporting jewelry and cosmetic enhancements that must have cost somewhere close to the economy of a small country.

And among them, mixing with them and exchanging jokes with them, the other faces of the Costa, the drug barons and armed robbers and people traffickers and extortionists...
my
people.

Did all those rich celebrities know who they were mixing with? Was that part of the buzz for them?

Did that Argentinean La Liga star know he was shaking hands with a guy who’d been on the run from London’s Metropolitan Police for the past twenty years? An old buddy of my father’s, in fact – I made a mental note to catch up with him if I got the chance; I hadn’t known he was out here.

Did that pop nymphet realize she was being chatted up by a Colombian who’d had more coke pass through his hands than all of Atlanta?

And what in fuck’s name was Jack the Knife doing here?

I was hanging back at Markov’s elbow when I spotted him, me on one side, Georgi on the other.

Imelda stayed close to Markov, never touching, but always close enough so it was a statement, a proprietorial thing.

Always just a step or two in front of me so that my eyes were drawn to the exposed curve of her spine.

That was the thing about her body and the way she dressed: those slits in the skirts she favored always led the eye to forbidden places, just as the open back of this evening’s dress drew the eye: down to her ass, of course, but also around to the sides, to the glimpses of exposed ribcage, to the imagined swell of a breast – ‘side cleavage’, Dean had always called it.

She probably didn’t even know she did it. There was so much about her that was instinctive, spontaneous.

I was staring. Trying not to think about what had been.

I dragged my eyes away.

I’d never been so easily distracted before: I needed to focus. Take in my surroundings. Not miss a thing.

I glanced across at a small group gathered by a bar. Two black guys in flash suits – one of them a footballer, I was sure – laughing with a couple of big-breasted Mediterranean babes with the look of high-class hookers about them... and Jack.

He had his hand on the hip of one of the girls, a cocktail in his free hand, saying something to the footballer. He looked better than he had the other night when I’d taken him out with a single punch. A bit of color to him, more relaxed. That was the odd thing: he looked at home in these surroundings.

Had I underestimated him when I’d last seen him?

Back in London he’d been an over-ambitious climber who had never really amounted to much, but had he gone up in the world since then?

§

I got distracted.

Markov said something to Georgi, and they moved away, leaving me briefly, tantalizingly, with Imelda. Not alone, but in that ever-changing crowd it was the next best thing: alone in full view.

Finally, she met my look.

Up to now she’d behaved as if I wasn’t there. No glances, no hint of concern at my strapped-up arm, nothing I could read. The perfect gangster’s adornment, not a step out of place.

And now, at last: eye contact.

And I wished there had been none, for there was nothing in those eyes. None of the connection we’d shared. The passion. The longing.

Nothing.

For a moment I wondered if she was on something, but no. That wasn’t a coke stare or a heroin glaze, it was simply cold, aloof, distant.

“Have you considered my proposal, Mr Bailey?” she said. “You would be paid well.”

I’d considered nothing else. Fake her death. Give her an escape route. Banish her from my life forever.

All the various permutations had gone round and round in my head continuously, and it came to this: a business deal. Work for hire.

“I–”

Markov was back, Georgi at his side, and I changed tack immediately: “I’ll get you that champagne, Ms Sanchez. Boss?”

He nodded, said, “Make that two. Hell, make it four. We party, yes?”

§

What did I have to lose?

Stupid shit in my head was all. Sure, she’d swept me away, but I’d built it up into far more than it really was.

Who wouldn’t be blown away by someone like Imelda?

But that was all it was.

A sex thing. No more than that.

She’d said I’d be well paid. All I had to do was work out if it was worth all the risks.

When it came to it, that was how I operated. I assessed risks. I made sure I understood consequences.

And every conclusion I reached was that I should steer well clear of Imelda Sanchez and her plans to escape from Markov.

For me, no good could ever come of it.

There was nothing left between us.

There never really had been.

Later, as the sun set spectacularly over the mountains, a face-lifted jazzy crooner performed standards with a who’s who house band by the biggest of several pools.

I’d left Markov and Georgi in the main house talking to a couple of Colombians. Out here I breathed deep and allowed my guard to drop for a moment as I tried to work out which band the bass player had started his career with.

And then I saw Imelda.

Loitering in another of those archways between the interconnected buildings. Peering about as if lost, or looking for someone. Then her eyes lighted on me and I knew she had found him.

I went to her.

How could I not?

For all my brave, dismissive thoughts, my attempts to rewrite the history between us into something less scary, I went to her.

Not directly – I went to the bar first, and picked up a glass of champagne from a tray. Just one.

I took a sip, and paused to watch the band.

When I glanced across again she was gone, but I knew.

I strolled over to where she had been, threading my way through knots of party-goers who mostly ignored me, because people like this have an uncanny knack for recognizing the difference between their own and hired help like me.

When I came to the archway where I’d seen Imelda I paused again. Took another sip.

I deposited my glass on a low wall and passed through the archway, through the space between two low buildings, and emerged in a lush garden, all English roses and the kinds of greens you rarely saw on this dry, hot coast.

She stood alone in a gap between trimmed, sculptural shrubs, gazing out towards the sea. Her bare back was lit a vivid bronze by the dying sun, her hourglass shape picked out as if by a spotlight.

She took my breath away every time, and in that moment I knew I’d be a sucker for her until my dying day.

She must have sensed I was there but she didn’t turn, even when I came to pause a couple of paces behind her.

She barely moved, just the slight rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed, and the sea breeze plucking at her hair.

“I shut you out,” she said, still without turning. “I did what I long ago learned to do with anything that mattered: put it in a box in my head, closed it away, put it somewhere safe but where I didn’t have to be reminded of it. I cannot love you.”

And with those last four words the knife twisted in my gut.

Four words that said she loved me but also that it was impossible for her to love me.

I’ve hurt many, many people in my time, but never with such exquisite artistry.

“Then don’t,” I said, and I think maybe that hurt her just as much.

Finally, she turned. Her face was lined with tears, highlighted by the setting sun, and that was it... I slipped my arm free of its sling and went to her and she slipped into my arms, her face damp against my shoulder.

Just holding her again was... I don’t know what it was. Didn’t know what I was feeling.

I longed for a time when things had been simple. When there hadn’t been a woman like Imelda in my life to make me feel these things I didn’t understand.

“When Hristo told me... when he said you’d been shot... That was when I had to cut off my feelings. When I couldn’t allow myself to think.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a nick.” And it was. It didn’t matter.

“But it could have been, and I couldn’t react. I couldn’t
feel
.”

I kissed the crown of her head, breathed her in. Something I’d thought I might never experience again.

“I thought I could do it,” she said, her words almost lost against my shoulder. “I thought I could shut you out.”

She turned her head, peered up at me... And just for a moment I wondered: was this an act? Was she relentlessly drawing me in? Manipulating me?

Then she kissed me, and the moment those soft lips met mine I hated myself for even thinking such a thing.

I don’t know if it was the situation, the risk, or if it was the simple fact that every kiss might be our last, but there was something about that kiss... an intensity, a passion like no other.

We couldn’t do this.

Not here.

Not anywhere, but especially not here, not now.

But there were irresistible forces of nature at play.

My arms around her, I drew her against me, one hand on her ass and the other on the smooth, bare skin of her back.

This was madness.

My mouth dragged down her neck, followed one of the gaps in her dress to her cleavage, the swell of breasts.

I dropped to my knees, hands on her legs, one hand running up the inside of one thigh, beneath the wispy fabric of that dress.

Both hands, raising the material so my head could duck under, inside.

I dragged my teeth across the front of one thigh, turned to kiss the inside of the other as she shifted position, gave me more room.

Tipped my head back, up, my mouth cupping her sex through flimsy fabric.

She gasped, groaned, and hands clutched at my head through her dress.

With one hand I pulled the fabric aside, pressed my face against softness. Salt and sweet and wet. The firm flesh of my tongue against her, the tip probing her opening, the fingers of my free hand parting her lips so my tongue could slide freely from opening to clit and back in a steady, long sweeping motion.

Her legs trembled. Great, juddering trembles so that I thought they might give way at any moment.

I slid two fingers deep inside her, tipped forward to run up and down the front wall of her pussy while my tongue danced around her clit, circling it, flicking across it delicately, teasingly.

I sensed the first pulse of her orgasm as a tightening around my fingers, and then her legs clamped hard against my head. I pressed my tongue against her, and let her push against me, finding just the right contact and pressure. Felt her pulsing against my tongue and fingers and lips. Holding my head, using me against her to milk that climax out into long, long seconds, muscles pulsing, easing, tightening again.

Finally, I rocked back onto my heels, found my way out from under the dress, looked up at her and she was alight with the sunset, a golden beacon, her own head tipped up to the darkening sky and her magnificent breasts heaving.

It was madness.

Utter madness.

To do such a thing.

Anywhere, but to do it
here
...

Utter, glorious madness.

§

She was still shaking when she left me there. When I made her leave me.

Sent her away, even though I felt like I was about to burst – her juices all over my face, my dick hard and throbbing in my pants. Aching for her.

I’d been so close to losing it. To ripping that flimsy dress from her body, dragging her to the ground... filling her...

Madness.

I’d realized that, made myself stop. I don’t know how, but I did.

Maybe the sounds from the party had broken through. Voices too close.

I stood, held her, and still she was shaking.

Murmured into her ear that she must go now, right
now
.

Watched her stumble away from me, legs still unsteady, and always knowing that this could be the last time.

Forcing myself to turn, to stare out at the sea, stained red like blood with the dying sun behind me.