Page 70 of Shadow Man
“Are you whole?”
“I don’t know,” I gasp out, truthfully. “I just know I can't breathe without this.”Without you.
With a growl, he takes one of my legs and yanks me closer to him. “Don't fucking present yourself like this to me when I can still feel your sweet lips around my cock. I’m trying to do the right thing here.” His good arm comes crashing down next to my head. I can feel him sliding over my entrance and I jerk my hips to claim him myself.
“I need this, Joseph. I need you.”
“Do you now?” The next thing I know he’s pushing between my pussy lips, and then he’s pausing to blast me with his intensity, his handsome face dangerously close to mine.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes!” I lift my hips and he slides in another inch, feeling so good I want to scream.
“Then we do this slow. My pace.”
“No, we won’t.” I tip my head back and dig my nails into the bedsheet. “Bad girls and bad guys don’t fuck like that.”
“You're right. They fuck like this.” His self-control snaps and he slams into me so deep the air is driven from my lungs. I’m soaked. There’s no resistance. He’s everything I ever wanted, and more.
Pulling my body backward, his cock still buried inside me, he falls to his knees by the side of the bed. Wrapping my legs around his waist and jamming his fingers into my mouth to silence my moans, he starts to fuck me exactly how we both need it. Hard, so hard, like he’s pounding all the badness out of me.
I bite down on him as he drives me closer and closer.
When I come for the first time around his cock, I almost believe in heaven.
When I come for the second time, I know I’m already there.
28
Dante
I’m making serious inroads with a bottle of bourbon by the pool when Alejandro Fernandez has the audacity to call me.
“Señor Santiago,” he simpers, his greeting more a threat than civility.No sycophantic Gomez shit from him.“I was just finalizing the funeral arrangements for my son.”
“Please accept my condolences,” I remark coldly, sounding no more sincere than his salutation.
“There will be great justice for this.” He pauses for effect.As if that shit ever works with me.“Gomez will pay heavily for his disrespect.”
What are we? The Mafia?
Technically Gomez wasn’t involved—two naïve, trigger-happy women did the honors—but what’s a little detail like that between cartel rivals? Entire world wars have been started on half-truths... Besides, this shit has been rumbling away in the background ever since I disbanded the Santiago cartel. The killing of Alberto Fernandez was just a catalyst for the final act.
“Gomez isn’t going anywhere,” I tell him, and then I pause, deploying the same techniques as him, driving my declaration home like it was a stake through a fucking vampire as I tip the rest of the bourbon down my throat. “He has the processing plants that I need, and I have my army here to defend them.”
“Then let me take over the plants once Gomez is dead,” he offers smoothly. “You’ll keep your distribution lines to the US and Señor Sanders. You have my word on that.”
His word?
“Do you take me for a fool, old man?” I say, chuckling darkly. “You’re high off the thought of a power change. If you have Gomez’s operation under your control, you’ll favor distribution to the Russians, not the US. I know your sister is married to thePakhanof the Ronov Bratva.”
He tried to hide it from us, but Joseph Grayson can sniff that kind of shit out a mile off.
For me, it’s about keeping the Russians out of the play. Call it a personal preference, mixed with a vengeance that will never die. Stop the drug money flooding the Bratva bank accounts and they have fewer dollars to transfuse their sex trafficking businesses, which I’ve dedicated the last year and a half of my life to bleeding out.
The only decisive way to quell this uprising is to resurrect the old Santiago cartel era, instilling enough fear in Fernandez and the rest ofLos Cinco Grandesto keep them chained to their respective corners of Colombia. But that would mean destroying the fragile equilibrium that I’ve achieved in my personal life. Eve would hate it, and end up hating me. The safety that my private island provides would be replaced with a shitty mansion like this one, and painted red targets on our backs everywhere we go.
I refuse to do that to her.