“Fucking my beautiful wife.”
Turning her so that he could lay her down on the bed, Mac’s lips met hers again in a hungry kiss of passion and for the moment nothing else mattered.
Business and subterfuge could wait.
Their desire for one another could not.
Melina pointed at the far wall of the bottom floor and said, “I want the whole length of that wall to be the bar. Custom-made shelves behind it, floor to ceiling. Mirrored glass behind that, too. It’ll make the bottles shine and stand out on the shelves. Specialty lighting within the shelves and pot lights will help that along as well.”
The man—someone Melina had contacted about renovating and re-designing The Playpen—nodded his head and jotted something down in the notebook attached to the clipboard he held.
“Any specific colors?” the guy asked.
“Black and royal purple,” Mac said before his wife could get a word in edgewise.
It was a classic—if not regal—combination.
Melina paused, giving Mac a thoughtful glance as she considered his one request. He’d actually managed to keep quiet as she walked through the place with the contractor, letting Melina do her thing and make her choices without much of his own input. It was intended to be her place, after all.
But this … this he wanted.
“Black leather and crushed velvet,” Melina said to Mac.
“Perfetto, doll,” he replied.
She just smiled and went back to her task. Mac didn’t mind all that much—he didn’t have very many requests where The Playpen was concerned.
As it were, he hadn’t wanted very much to do with the place at all. But when Luca handed something over to someone—a gift or otherwise—a man couldn’t just tell the Don “no” and be done with it.
The place had been, for all purposes, a whorehouse that couldn’t keep a steady stream of money coming in. It was seedy-looking with its ripped, stained furniture sporting suspicious marks and spots that Mac had little desire in learning how, or rather who, had put them there and which bodily fluids they might actually be. The walls had holes all over, never mind the smell that reeked from the place when the front doors were first opened.
It seemed like no matter where Mac walked in the place, the floor was sticky. And the backrooms and upstairs section with its private rooms and bare, old, and stained mattresses?
Fucking disgusting.
Unfortunately, the women who had worked within The Playpen had been just as rundown and unappealing as the building itself. None had particularly seemed to be forced into the place, but all of them had been working to feed an addiction of some sort, whether it be smoking, shooting, or snorting something into their bodies.
Just a sparse glance at their barely-clothed, unclean bodies with track marks and sunken-in faces had told Mac that story when he visited The Playpen after Luca had handed the deed to the business over.
It seemed that the fool of a man that had been running the joint for Luca was in just as bad of shape—if not worse, than the girls—where addiction was concerned. And he’d certainly had a rampant supply of drugs to use while he should have been doing his job.
Mac figured he might have understood why the place was just pissing out money, instead of turning any kind of decent profit. It was practically impossible to make money in the business of sex and drugs, if a person was too dependent on the business itself to sustain a man’s own addiction.
And so, a random visit to The Playpen to see why one of his many businesses that should have been lucrative and profitable was ready to break, Luca decided to wash his hands of the place.
Now, Mac’s hands were fucking filthy with it all.
He sighed loudly, glancing at Melina across the floor.
Well, he supposed his wife was the one dirtying her hands with it all, but Mac wasn’t quite sure how he could possibly refuse Melina—or if he even wanted to, given her interest in turning the place from a shitty little whorehouse into something that might actually be … goddamn amazing.
Mac certainly couldn’t deny that Melina had more knowledge in the business of sex and money than he did. Even though his wife hadn’t worked as a prostitute, she still had once had her hand in the trade of escorting. She understood what would draw in the right class of men, who would be willing to spend money. She had access to a number of girls who would certainly be willing to do the job. She was capable of doing it all—so he chose to let her.
There was little doubt in his mind that Melina had come across more than enough men that were willing to cut a check to get whatever they wanted, just like she had probably met a few women who had a price waiting for those same men.