“Cadillac,” he mumbled. “Big back seats. Lots of room and all...” He dropped his hands and grabbed her ass, bodily lifting her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on, kissing the base of his neck. “... and all thick, soft upholstery.”
“Mmmmmm,” she purred as he continued down the sidewalk as though she weighed nothing at all. “You’ve done this before!”
He grabbed her hair and pulled hard. She gasped and looked up into his eyes. “I left my virginity in a Cadillac,” he said, and pulled her to him again to kiss her so thoroughly that she whimpered against his mouth, to let him know she needed to come up for air.
She pressed against him, strong legs holding her in place. “Mine was on a mountainside during a thunderstorm.”
He pulled back to look at her and blink. “Okay, that’s hot!” he admitted, and assaulted her lips with renewed passion.
“You’re thinking about that right now, aren’t you?” she asked, breathless and blushing when he finally allowed her to come up for air.
“Come with me to the garage and I’ll show you what I’m thinking!” And this time it was he who laughed.
It was the first laugh she’d heard from him in a long time, and her heart lifted. Crazy, deliriously happy. Maybe she’d take him instead, she felt so giddy. Did it matter which it was at this point? The fact that he’d laughed made her feel happier than she’d been in longer than she could remember.
She leapt down from her perch and knelt right there on the sidewalk, bending forward to kiss the thickness through his pants. He mimed opening the zipper and she grabbed his hand.
“Not yet, people might talk!”
“Only if they’re impressed, so make it look good,” he said, and winked.
Be still her heart. He was a rogue, a genuine rogue. She was lost. Definitely lost. “Goodbye Mrs. Fielding!” Dani called, and waved to a random house.
“What?” Luke turned. “That’s not even...”
But Dani had a head start on him. She was already running down the street to his mother’s house. Luke ran to catch up to her and she flipped her shirt up, giving him a tantalizing view of her back as she ran. “Last one to the garage has to clean the...”
She stopped short across the street from the house. Luke thudded to a stop beside her.
She burned, a pent-up mix of frustration and anger. Was she EVER going to get five minutes alone with the love of her life? You’d think no one respected the whole engagement thing they had going, even if it wasn’t necessarily genuine. Yet.
“Shit.”
She looked at Luke to share in her frustration but Luke stood silent, his eyes wide, his face absolutely drained of all color.
He might as well have seen a ghost.
THERE WAS A SMALL CLUSTER of people gathered around the garage. As Luke and Dani approached the house, she could just make out the image of his mother and her father, but there was a third figure she didn’t know, a man in a suit.
He was... dapper.
It was the only word that fit him. Tailored suit, thick wavy hair, and a ready smile that looked too poised and practiced. Either he was a used car salesman or a politician. He stood in the driveway with his hands clasped in front of him. It could have been a very submissive pose, even should have been. When Marcus or one of his men stood like that, waiting for orders, it screamed “underling”.
But this man made it look like he was a benevolent god accepting the adulation of his worshipers, though adulation was the last thing that either parent was willing to give. Even from a distance, Dani could hear Luke’s mother’s voice. From here it was impossible to hear the words, but her tone was plenty emphatic.
Dani winced; she glanced uneasily at Luke, who still hadn’t moved.
Still, this man was definitely in charge. It was an air he had, a simple statement of fact. Wherever he was, became his territory; he was in charge. Where Benny had been all bluster and noise to ensure that everyone listened to him, this person had no need to establish the pecking order. It was simple and indisputable. He was in charge.
Luke had skidded to a complete stop, his hand in hers going stiff and his breathing seeming to stop.
“Luke?” Dani looked from the man to Luke and back again. “Do you know this guy?”
Luke wasn’t there and that scared her, more than anything had ever scared her in her entire life. And she’d grown up around the mafia. Luke’s eyes showed a healthy display of horror as well.
“LUKE!” Dani hissed, and yanked his arm. His head swiveled around that he might look at her, even if his eyes didn’t seem to register her presence. He could have been staring at the man, or at the open gates of hell for that matter. It was all the same. She waved a hand in front of his face until he blinked, and awareness crept back into his eyes. “Who. Is. That?”
He looked back at the cluster in the distance. Marcus had arrived to turn the trio into a quartet, and he was obviously being introduced.
“My father.” Luke croaked out the words, as though through a dry and rough throat. He tried to clear his throat and ended up coughing instead.
Dani patted his back, not sure what else to do. “I thought he was dead,” she murmured, darting glances between him and the stranger, seeing the resemblances between them now.
“Wishful thinking,” Luke muttered, and shook his head.
His father chose that moment to look past the people on the driveway, straight at him and Dani. He smiled a bright, charming smile that warmed Dani’s heart, and set her into fantasies about what Luke would look like at that age, picturing him as a gentleman rogue, the inveterate ladies’ man. It was a strange and heady thought, and not for the first time Dani wanted to make this engagement real. The idea of growing old with this man at her side was the stuff of fantasies.
I wonder...
Then the stranger turned those eyes on her.
Now it was she who couldn’t breathe. She’d seen men with that kind of look in their eyes before. She found herself reaching again for Luke’s hand, pressing a little closer, though she knew she was being ridiculous. She was standing on a Florida sidewalk in broad daylight. There was absolutely nothing to fear. Yet she had an inkling of how dangerous this man could be. There was something calculating in that gaze that said he knew absolutely everything about her. She felt naked and exposed, and wondered how many people had fallen for that surface charm that captivated from a hundred feet away.
“Well?” his father called. “Are you going to join us, or have you decided to wait there until I’ve left?”
“I’m considering it,” Luke called back, and she felt the tension in his arm, in his hand. She pressed against him a little closer, trying to remind him that she was still there. She could no longer feel her fingers, he was clutching her hand so tight.
If his mother frustrated him, his father left him absolutely enraged.
“Luke...”