Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) (10 page)

She had to get away.

When she heard the gunshots they were distant.

She felt sick.

Lee could be lying in a pool of blood, breathing his last. Or dead already.

And she would be responsible. Because she had made sure that Hristo knew that the guy he’d had on trial at Hermanos had a brother, and the two of them came to the Costa with a reputation, one far bigger than Hristo’s so he had better watch out. Taunting him with it. Provoking him.

And that was when he had slapped her.

§

Some time later her phone went.

It was Lee and he was
alive
.

Imelda felt sick all over again. Sick with relief. Sick with guilt at her betrayal.

“Yes?”

“Hey, it’s me. Lee.” Even now, feeling so bad, she smiled. She loved those little moments of uncertainty he exhibited – worried she might not recognize him on the phone. That hint of insecurity that smoothed the rough edges, undermined the hardness in a most endearing way. “Listen... where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why?” Play it cool. That was one thing she was good at.

“We’ve had a spot of bother at the Duchess. Hristo’s boys waving guns around.”

“Are you okay? Jess? And Dean?”

“Yeah, yeah, we’re all fine. One of Hristo’s boys is going to need a bit of patching up, though, if you know what I mean. Listen, are you still in San Pedro? You might want to keep your head down if you are, make sure they don’t spot you.”

“I’m here, yes,” she said. “Just along the seafront at the Bar de Martín.” Standing outside it by the beach, in truth: she hadn’t fancied the noise and lights, had been too worried sick to face people right now. Then: “But Hristo, you say? What would Hristo want with your brother?”

She felt guilty misleading him, pretending innocence, but while there were all kinds of conflicting needs and desires battling it out in her head, and in her heart, there was one that always rose to the surface: survival.

From an early age she had worked out that the only person she could ever trust to put her own interests first was herself: Imelda Maria Sanchez. She was a survivor, and that was the most important rule of all. And if survival meant using Lee Bailey, the man who had worked his way into her heart, then so be it.

“You tell me,” Lee responded. “I have a few ideas why he might be interested in the Bailey Boys, but nothing concrete. I need to work him out. I need to understand how he operates, and where he’ll go next. You stay there, Imelda. I’ll come and find you. I need to know you’re safe. That’s the most important thing right now.”

More guilt: maybe she wasn’t the only one who would put her interests first after all.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said softly.

“Him coming here,” Lee went on, “I don’t know if he expected to beat us into submission, or if he was looking for some kind of fight. But whichever... his man’s not in a good way. I think I might have escalated things.”

Finally, she allowed herself to smile. He seemed okay, he was coming to her, and he had inflicted damage on Hristo’s gang.

Lee Bailey really was the genuine article.

Which was exactly what she’d both hoped and believed, because now, at last, Hristo Markov might have come up against his match.

The Bar de Martín was a classy place occupying a high point on the promontory that enclosed the old harbor at San Pedro.

I spotted Imelda straight away, standing on the paved terrace between the bar and where the cliffs tumbled away to the beach.

A below the knee skirt slit up one thigh, killer heels, pale pink blouse. How did she have a fresh outfit when all she carried was that small purse? She must have been shopping during the day, I guessed. Freshened up.

She watched me approach. Waited until I stood before her before opening her mouth to speak.

I silenced her with my mouth on hers, one hand cupping her jaw.

When finally I pulled away she seemed flustered, eyes flitting, breath rapid.

I liked that I could do that to a woman.

Liked that I could do it to
her
, because she was unlike any woman I’d ever known, and with Imelda I knew all the rules were different.

I stayed close, so that our faces were almost touching and she had to tip her head up to meet my look.

I wanted her right then. Hard and relentless. Up against that metal railing. Down on the beach among the rocks. Bent over a big boulder, feet in the surf.

I bit my lip until I tasted blood. So much sexual tension between us!

She reached up, then, and touched my jaw. Said, “Are you okay? There’s blood on your face.”

I rubbed my cheek with the heel of my hand. “It’s not mine,” I said. “I made a bit of a mess of the other guy’s face.”

“Who was he? How do you know it was Hristo’s gang?”

“I didn’t recognize the three who came in and started messing up the Duchess,” I said. “Two younger guys and one in his mid-thirties: dark, cropped hair, a scar across his forehead.”

“That one sounds like Anton Dimitrov.”

“I watched them leave. Guy waiting for them in the car outside was Georgi. I met him at Hermanos that night – he was checking me out for Hristo.”

She was nodding as I spoke. “Yes, yes,” she said. “He is a favorite of Hristo’s. So what did they want?”

“Your man–”

“He’s not my man.”

“–he wants a stake in the New Duchess. But I reckon it’s because of who we are: he wants to make a point. Wants to assert himself over Dean before we start to get any ideas about operating in his territory. Does that sound about right?”

She nodded again. “It does. You working at Hermanos: he is clearly aware of you since then, and you turned him down. He doesn’t like people who stand up to him.”

“I stood up to him tonight.”

“You inflicted damage.”

“I could inflict a lot more.”

And that was when she looked up and met my gaze and made her proposal.

She’d been staring down at the ground, clearly thinking things through as we spoke. Chewing on her lower lip in a way that was intensely distracting. She did that when she was building up towards climax, too.

And so those dark eyes flashed up at me, fixed me, suddenly intense, focused.

“I think I have a plan,” she said. “A way for me to get out of this mess I am in. He has me trapped. It seems I cannot breathe without his consent.”

“You could just walk away.”

“He would find me.”

“You could stand up to him.”

No words, just a raised eyebrow.

I put a hand to her cheek again, tender and intimate. “I’d protect you.”

“There is no protection from Hristo,” she said. “He is the
tutto di capo tutti
, as the Italians say. Of all the gang bosses in this place, he is the most feared. He has that
locura
, that madness. Every one of you has their rules, their limits, yes?”

That ‘you’... she had my mark. She knew what kind of a man I was.

“Hristo, he has no rules,” she went on. “He does what he has to do. He lets no one stand in his way. He sees nothing beyond getting what he wants.”

“You say you have a plan.”

She looked away, down to the ground, and then back up again. I really am not any kind of pushover, but when she did that with her eyes... I’d do fucking anything for her.

“I need a hitman,” she said, in a tone of voice not far removed from one she might use when stating she needed new shoes, or a carpet cleaner.

I held her look, said nothing. Nobody should say those words without having put a lot of thought into them. The implications, the possible consequences; the huge psychological leap from being an ordinary person to one who commissions the ending of someone’s life.

Those dark eyes...

She had followed those thought processes through.

She understood.

She meant it.

Finally, I nodded, only a slight movement of the head but enough for her to know I understood, too.

“Is that something you could do, Lee Bailey? Do you have the courage to do such a thing?”

Again, a brief nod. A pause. Then I said, softly, “It wouldn’t be my first.”

And then I kissed her again.

Hard up against those railings, so hard I feared they might break and we would go crashing to the rocks below.

Lips hard against hers. Tongue driving.

So hard her head was forced back and she gasped for air and I thought she might choke and I didn’t care, I just had to have her, to possess her, to make her mine.

Her hands to the sides of my head broke the moment, cut through the need with sudden tenderness. Fingers stroking my short hair. Thumbs caressing my cheeks and jaw.

I paused, made as if to draw my head back and now she took control, her soft lips working across my face in a delicate patter of touch, the tip of her tongue flicking between those lips and across my skin. Kissing the taut skin of my neck. Stretching to reach one ear, to draw the lobe between her lips, her teeth, so that I gasped.

I pressed against her, enclosed her in my arms, my erection hard in her midriff.

Her mouth moved down my neck and then she clung to me, her face cradled against my shoulder, her body molded to mine.

I pulled away, peeled her from me.

Took her hand and turned.

There were steps down to the beach from here. A little cove tucked into the headland, sheltered by the rocks and the crags above, casting an illusion of privacy. Illusion it surely was, but I didn’t care just then. Illusion was all I needed, for there, on the beach with the rocks all around us, the town might have been a million miles away, and I didn’t care that it was not.

I turned to her, held her. Again, savored the way her body molded itself to mine, soft against hard.

My hands moved down to the narrowing of her waist, the spread of her hips... that perfect hourglass figure. Round to cup her ass, the firm flesh, the softness.

I pressed against her, needed so much more. Urgently.

Lifted her so that her legs had to wrap themselves around my waist, one long bare leg emerging from the slit in her skirt.

Now my hardness pressed against her sex, grinding against her as we pressed and rolled our hips.

Her lips brushing my ear, she said that thing again. “
¡Hazme el amor!
Make love to me. Fuck me.”

And then, so soft I could barely make out her words: “I think I love you, Lee Bailey. I think I love you and I am scared.”

I drew my head away, tried to meet her look, but she was turned away.

That wasn’t like her. She knew the power of eye contact... and she knew the power of
not
making eye contact.

I dipped my head, kissed the side of her neck. My turn for tenderness, restraint.

She turned to me, then. Dark eyes finding mine. I’d never seen her look so vulnerable. “Do not hurt me,
mi amor
. Do not break me.”

For a few long seconds we had paused, and I held her, her legs still wrapped around me, her weight on my hips and hands, and on her arms around my shoulders and neck.

No need for words, except...

“I... I don’t know what this is,” I told her. “I don’t understand what I’m feeling. I don’t know the words. I don’t
use
those words! This is all so different for me. So new. I don’t know how to...”

Express my feelings. Say the words she had said to me.

Now I pressed my mouth against hers again, expressing myself in a way I understood.

We moved until her ass was against the rocks where they rose up towards the town.

I pushed against her and she moaned around my kiss.

She fumbled at my waist, found buttons, freed them. Pulled at my jeans, pushed them down until they would go no further past my thighs. One of the consequences of being built like I am is that clothes would never just fall away.

Her hand closed on me, and it was my turn to gasp.

My turn to fumble at her waist, find the catch of that skirt and pull it away.

Now she leaned back on the big slab of rock, high heels sunk into the sand, long legs exposed all the way up to the tiny lace patch of her panties.

I hooked fingers into that lace, felt softness, heat. She was wet for me.

She steered me against her, sliding the swollen head of my manhood against that softness.

Squeezed her fist tight around my shaft.

Squeezed so hard it made me gasp, so hard it did the strangest thing: it focused all of the sensation on my swollen glans as it slid through the wet folds of her sex, came to rest against her opening. Every wet sliding sensation seemed amplified. The softness folded around me. The muscular firmness inside those folds, the tight opening cupped around me, holding me poised.

She pulled, drawing my length into her.

I arched my back, slowly driving my pelvis forward, pushing myself inside.

I could feel every movement so intensely. Feel that muscular opening closing around me, sliding down around the length of my shaft until I was buried deep, my pubic bone hard against her soft sex. Pushing harder and feeling that little stiff nub of her clit against me. Holding myself there, balls against her ass, pubic bone against her clit, even the slightest movement making her gasp, making her bite at that pouting lower lip, making her eyes roll and her chest heave and suddenly we were both right on the edge of an explosive climax.

One long, slow thrust was all it had taken to bring us to this point.

One movement, everything so intense, so magnified, so focused on where our bodies came together.

Dark eyes on mine. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised – she looked as surprised as I felt at the intensity of this.

I didn’t dare move, yet somehow that magnified everything even more.

I wasn’t going to last. I...

She raised a finger to my lips, as if to silence me. Had I been groaning out loud, making those animal sounds that I thought were inside my head?

A slight shake of the head.

A delicate flicker of a smile.

And she tipped towards me, pressed her lips to mine.

The roll of her hips as she moved almost took me over the edge, but I held on, clung to her.

Gave in to her kiss and kissed back, so much more tender than our kisses of shortly before.