Desired Too (2 page)

I called out over my shoulder, “Clean up and put everything back where it was. I want this place to look as if we never stepped foot in this warehouse. Also, sweep this place for any hidden devices and check out Worm’s story about ‘hiding with some bitch.'” I turned just as I got to the door. “And call ‘The Patriot.' Whatever his price is to make sure this place is spotless, I’ll pay it. I don’t want anything leading to me, or to that useless sack of shit, being here.”

“The Patriot” was a person you’d call a cleaner. He cleaned up various messes of the blood, guts, and dead body persuasion. He was discreet and pricey, but he was worth it. He’d been on my father’s payroll for decades.

Still holding the drugs, Darrell said, “You want me to put the drugs back too?”

I opened the door right before I called back, “As if we were never here.”

As I revved my engine and peeled out of the parking lot, I thought about Eddie. He had some shit up his sleeve; I felt it. He had been the doting brother, and I was sure if I went to Pops and told him about the drugs and my suspicions about Eddie, there would be nothing to link him to this, except Lincoln and me. I also knew my father. He wouldn’t care where the drugs came from or who put it there. He’d tell me to clean this shit up and make it disappear.

Pops and Eddie weren’t in favor of legitimizing our family. They were still living in the past while I, with the help of Lincoln, was trying to bring us into the twenty-first century.

Running guns and shit shouldn’t be the only way we make money. We needed to legitimize our business. We needed to invest and do it right. We had to be strategic about it, smart and under the radar. From what I could gather, Eddie was trying to sabotage everything for his selfish gains. He knew he wasn’t getting the crown. Instead, he was attempting to get me out of the way and take it.

Well, he’ll have to bury me first to get it, and that shit ain’t happening
.
Fuck that!

What I needed to do was get ahead of him. I needed to stop him from making a mockery of this family, number one, and number two, I needed to bury him six feet under; it’s what he deserved.

Once I got on the highway, I saw red and blue headlights in my rearview mirror. I wasn’t speeding, nor did I break any laws.

So, why was I being pulled over?

Good question, and I’d find out the bogus reason in a minute, but I wanted to point out to you the irony of it all. As I pulled over, I realized that my brother really thought I was stupid. He was underestimating me
again
, and really, he shouldn’t.

Yeah, that motherfucker is dead!

I heard a tap on my window, and I plastered a fake ass smile on my face as two other police cars pulled up behind me. I rolled down the window and said as pleasantly as I could, “What seems to be the trouble, officer?”

Why am I still here?

“Yeah, things are good with my business. I’m making moves that’s going to catapult my career, putting me as one of the top paid salesmen in my company,” marveled this tall, dark-skinned brother with black slacks and button down black shirt.

This dude couldn’t be serious. Did he really believe that all he needed to do to impress me, and get me all hot and bothered, was to tell me what tax bracket he was in, then look at me as if I was a piece of juicy steak?

He wasn’t bad looking in the face, and he had a
really
nice looking body. The problem I had was his breath. I was flabbergasted by it at this point. He’d been talking about himself for at least twenty minutes, and I was thinking,
Shouldn’t he be able to smell it himself? You smell yourself first before anyone else does, right?

I don’t know about anyone else, but
I
could definitely tell when my breath was in need of refreshing, but this dude here…

Anyway, I forced myself to smile as he told me his life story, trying my damnedest not to inhale.

See what happens when you try to be nice, Raquel?

I didn’t want to, but he’d asked me to dance five thousand times. I said yes just to get him out of my face. Now, he’d been talking to me non-stop since we moved from the dance floor.

I made eye contact with the bartender and motioned for him to come to me. Once he got close enough, I smiled thinking,
Shit, I need something strong if this guy is going to continue to char my eyelashes off
.

“Tanqueray straight,” I told the bartender.

“Mr. Hot Breath” leaned into me and smiled, “Damn, baby, you don’t play, do you?”

Oh God!

He then had the audacity to move closer to me and gave me, what I assumed was, his best “devour you” look.

He then said close to my ear, hot breath now charring the side of my face, “Yeah, I love a woman that knows how to handle herself.”

Yeah, and I love a man whose breath doesn’t smell like ass…I think I’m going to vomit.

It’s hard out here for men I get that. Women could be complex creatures to understand. Sometimes you just don’t know what you’re going to get. There were women with standards, such as myself, with a long list of requirements that a man had to meet before a phone number would be passed. On the flipside of that, other women would be so impressed with this dude that they would gladly be on their backs or their knees tonight. There are so many variations of women that I could explore with just these two examples. I could only imagine what men go through. It’s confusing, I get it. It’s hard for a man to try to gauge the quality of a woman they’re trying to get to know. But could they at least feel us out first?

“Mr. Hot Breath” and I had been talking for a few minutes now, and I was pretty sure he’d been clued in that I wasn’t the type of chick that’s impressed by the size of his wallet. With that bit of information, he should have come with something better than telling me how much money he made while blowing his stinking breath on me. But that’s not the case right now. No, right now he was invading my space and pouring it on a little too thick. He was completely oblivious to my subtle hints of disinterest.

Do you see what happens when you try to be nice and smile at them?

Now, he was forcing me to be that bitch. Please note, I’ve given no indication that I was feeling this dude, but it seemed it didn’t matter. He thought he had a shot and assumed that I had no other options but to be into him.

“Listen, I was thinking…” he started to say but I was done with being nice. Plus, I was running out of fresh air.

I stood from my seat, ready to end this
. Just rip off the band-aid, Raquel.

I touched his arm. “Yeah, okay, it was nice meeting you. I’m going to mingle a little more. Thanks for the dance and good luck with um… whatever it is that you said you did.”

I smiled, grabbed the drink that the bartender sat in front of me and moved away.

I looked back at him and saw that he was watching me walk away, or rather he was watching my ass.

Ugh, I knew it was a bad idea coming out by myself, but I’d been home for two weeks now, and my father was working me to death. I needed to get out, have a few drinks, and get drunk. Maybe with the consumption of alcohol I could finally wrap my head around that, after three years, I was back in Philly.

I made my rounds through the club, this time trying not to make eye contact, hoping I would be left alone. It didn’t work. Instead, I was proposed to, fondled, grabbed, hit on, stepped on, and hair pulled! By the time I made it back to the bar in the front of the club, I was so ready to call it a night. I found an empty bar stool and sat, signaling for the bartender to grab my tab, when I felt a pair of eyes on me.

No, I take that back. Actually, it felt more like someone was looking through me than at me. I looked around the large bar area and suddenly my eyes stumbled on a pair of dark gray eyes that seemed to set me instantly on fire.

Oh shit! It can’t be him!

I squinted my eyes, somehow thinking that my otherwise perfect vision would improve, and my heart literally stopped beating.

Breath girl,
I coached myself quietly as breathing had suddenly become a chore for me.

It was painful as my brain willed my lungs to contract, but that’s what he does to me. That’s what he’d always done to me. He was my guilty pleasure, my forbidden desire and the true reason why I left this city three years ago. I brought my hand to my throat in the effort to massage the muscles there, to allow me to take in each and every arduous breath.

Damn, I didn’t expect to see him again…
ever
.

Okay, that was a little farfetched on my part, but Philly was a big city. The odds were so slim that I would bump into him; I never prepared myself for this moment.

I quickly reached for my glass and brought it to my now dehydrated mouth.

If I can just concentrate on swallowing, I can…
Shit!

I looked down at the wetness that poured from the invisible hole in my bottom lip and wiped my chest and chin. This had to be one of the most embarrassing moments of my life… No, I take it back it wasn’t, but it’s damn close!

You’re embarrassing yourself, girl. Get a grip. Hell, he’s just a man, right?’
I chuckled to myself and shook my head, knowing that was far from the case. Yes, he was just a man, but was so much more than that. He was the sexiest man you’d ever meet. Never mind that, he was built to freaking perfection with a face that could move mountains! Hell, never mind that, he pleasured my body in ways I’d never dreamt could be possible.

Yes, he’s just a man…Not!

I grabbed a calming breath from the pits of my soul and exhaled.
You can handle this!
I attempted to peek over the rim of my glass, drinking slowly this time, and as my eyes casually fell on him, I found myself not being able to turn away. Shit, he was breathtakingly beautiful. I didn’t know if men were allowed to be beautiful, but I’d make the exception for him.

He looked good enough to eat, as always, drenched in one of his many expensive dark colored suits. His hair, which was typically short on the sides and long on the top, just added to the sex appeal that was Angelo “Angel” Leonetti.

I shifted in my seat and crossed my legs, remembering the way he made me feel, how he orchestrated the most sinful and amazing waves of unadulterated desires I had ever felt in my life.

I met Angel through my older brother during my first year of college. He and my brother used to hang out all the time. They’d met through our fathers. Angel’s father was some type of an associate of my father’s. I didn’t know what kind of associate he was at the time, and quite frankly, I didn’t care. I just looked forward to seeing Angel come to the house all the time. I was okay with just breathing the same air as he as long as he came around. You could safely call it a teenage crush. I was eighteen, horny and just figuring out what kind of power being a woman could possess.

I was much younger than he was; four years to be exact. It didn’t matter how many times I batted my eyes towards him. It didn’t matter how many times I walked around in my next to nothing two-piece bathing suits, until of course my brother or father would run me off. No matter what I did, he never crossed that line. I figured that I wasn’t appealing to him, but that didn’t stop my thoughts from always going places that they shouldn’t.

But sometimes I would catch him watching me with a look that, for the life of me, I didn’t have a clue what it meant. It wasn’t a look he used to give the hot asses he and my brother would bring to the house with them. No, the looks he would give me were something deeper, something darker.

Unfortunately, he would never expound on the meaning of that look. He would just always smile at me or treat me like a kid sister. That was until I forced him to look at me differently. He finally saw me as the person I was; a hungry, desirable, sex-craved woman. It was my last day in Philly. I had finally graduated from college, and the moment I had my degree, I was on the next thing smoking out of here. God, I needed to get away from my life. My father and brother were suffocating me to death. That’s what it felt like living in my house.

My mother died giving birth to me and my father treated me with kid gloves ever since I was born. My brother did the same. He also became my protector and bodyguard/warden when I became old enough to notice the world and, most importantly, when the world took notice of me. My brother, being four years older than me, felt it was his duty to step in as my father when our father wasn’t around. He scared all of my boyfriends, or hell, any male, away all the time. I was sick of the two most important men in my life smothering me to death. So, once I received my degree from the University of Pennsylvania, I was planning to leave. I had accepted a job in San Francisco with this Marketing firm as a General Accountant while I studied for my CPA.

There had been tears and lots of huffing and puffing before my brother agreed with my father to “let me go.” Let me go? Yeah right. I was going regardless. My bags were already packed, my ticket had been purchased, and my brother and father had no idea. Hell, they were lucky that I even told them about the job and that I was moving. I was out of that prison whether they liked it or not, but I had unfinished business to attend to before I left. I was getting my freedom, and what better way to kick start my freedom by getting tangled in something I knew I wasn’t ready for. I wanted to play with fire. I wanted to finally sell my soul to the devil. That night, I went hunting and found my prey at his usual spot; some dive bar in South Philly.

I walked in the bar trying to act as if I belonged, knowing damn well no sensible woman would ever walk into a place like this. I looked around the grunge and hoped I wouldn’t catch anything by just breathing the air in this place. However, my eyes had found the person I wanted, so I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

I ran my hand through my mid-shoulder length dark hair as I set my eyes on the meaty, wife-beater-encased bartender. I tried to concentrate on my walk, instead of how the soles of my seven hundred dollar knee high boots were sticking on the floor.

Ugh, did they even clean the floors in this place?

The bar was your typical biker looking hole-in-the-wall type bar that you might see on television, filled with a bunch of questionable patrons. And as you might’ve guessed, the characters in this place probably wouldn’t take too kindly to being called “patrons,” or “characters,” for that matter.

All eyes were on the one that didn’t belong; me. But I didn’t care one bit. The moment I felt a pair of gray eyes studying me gave my confidence and the boost it needed to walk to the bar.

I hiked up my jean skirt and sat down, feeling the scratchy stickiness of torn and worn out leather on the back of my thighs, and smiled at the bartender.

“Shot of gin. Seagram’s, if you have it.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t understand English, so I repeated my order.

He grunted at me and seemed to be two seconds from throwing me out when he looked slightly behind me, bobbed his head, and then sauntered to make me a drink.

God, I hope they clean their glasses
.

“Someone’s far from home.”

I closed my eyes and gripped my thighs, trying my best to get a hold of myself. When my drink appeared in front of me, I took it quickly, tried not to cough and looked at the bartender. I pushed the glass to him, signaling that I wanted another, and he didn’t move until, I guess, he got the okay from the man behind me.

I felt the object of my desires move closer to me before he took the seat next to me. I risked a glance into those eyes that haunt me in my dreams twenty-four seven. He smiled and looked me over.

Now I told you what I had on my feet and that I wore a skirt, but let me tell you that “said skirt” was nothing but dressing to cover my essentials. I was on a mission, I told you, and I needed my ammo to trap whom I wanted. I topped my outfit off with a simple black tank that covered the girls, but prominently displayed their potential. I know they weren’t what he went for normally. They barely filled my hands. However, I will say they were upright, perky and spectacular.