Gabriel Fallen, page 6
He lets out a soft moan.
“Who knew a jerk like you’d like kissing so much,” I whisper.
“I don’t. But I like kissing you,” Gabriel admits, his tongue prodding my mouth open to slip inside and stroke mine languidly. But then he pulls back. “But right now I need this sexy mouth of yours elsewhere.”
I try not to appear too eager, shifting to sit on the second step, between his powerful thighs. Gabriel leans back to settle on his elbows, his legs splayed, his dark eyes intense as he watches me lean forward. I tease his tip with my tongue, tasting the saltiness already beading.
“Please, baby,” he begs, his head falling back, his Adam’s apple jutting out. “It hurts.”
“I guess you have been patient.” I close my mouth over his cock and take him in deep with my first dip, sucking hard on the way back up.
“Fuck,” he groans. “How did you get so good at that?”
“You really want me to answer that?” I give his smooth, fat tip another teasing swirl.
“No. Don’t. It’ll just make me really angry and want to kill someone.”
“Careful, or you’re going to start sounding like a jealous boyfriend.”
There’s a moment’s pause and then he asks, “Would that be so bad?”
“That’s not what this is.” I take him in again, opening up my throat.
He lets out a deep, guttural cry that carries into the quiet night, and then reaches down to grasp the back of my head. Normally, I’d smack away the hand of any guy doing this, but with Gabriel, I find that I like his fingers firm and tangled in my hair.
I settle into a steady rhythm, my eyes drifting upward over his sexy naked body, his muscles rippling, his pecs two perfect mounds, to catch his eyes watching me intently, unbridled lust shining in them.
This is what he asked for in the first place, in the parking lot that day that I slapped him. Here I am, giving him what he wanted.
And enjoying it immensely.
Life really is ironic sometimes.
In minutes, the urgency of Gabriel’s hand increases, and his breathing turns ragged and his hips begin their soft thrust, and I know he’s not going to last long.
He lets out a guttural moan a second before the first stream of hot, salty cum shoots down my throat, his length pulsing against my tongue with each stream, filling my mouth.
I release him with a gentle kiss against his tip and let the heavy member fall against his stomach with a slap. He’s still hard.
Gabriel brushes away damp strands of hair plastered across my forehead with a stroke of his thumb before settling his index finger beneath my chin and urging my gaze to meet his. “Swallow me,” he demands softly, following it with a “please.”
I consider denying him, holding on to this last semblance of power, however deluded that notion may be.
In the end, I take him all in.
He lets out a soft sigh of contentment, his massive body shifting down to the second step, then the third, to sit next to me. His gaze is sleepy as he burrows his face into the crook of my neck. “You need to eat dinner,” he murmurs, pressing a sexy, tongue-laced kiss against my collarbone, his one arm curled around my shoulders, his other hand splayed across my belly affectionately.
“I also need to do my assignment.” Right now though, with my limbs wrapped in Gabriel’s strength, I’m in no hurry to move anywhere. It’s been so long since I’ve felt comfort like this.
And I could be mistaken, but Gabriel seems in no rush to go anywhere either.
I tip my head back and study the sky, enjoying the quiet, peaceful moment. It’s too early for stars, but I saw them that first night, as I was trying to drink my predicament away. When they do show themselves, they’ll be spectacular from up here on the mountaintop. “I can see why you and your brother bought this house.”
“Yeah …” He follows my gaze. “I barely ever make it to my condo downtown anymore. I think it’s been about a month now.”
“You have a condo downtown too?”
“I have a few places.”
Of course he does. “Where?”
“Here and there,” he answers evasively. “Mostly vacation properties.”
I sense that’s all I’m getting from him on that topic. “How long have you and Caleb lived in this house?”
He frowns in thought. “Two or three years now?”
“And why’d you move in with him? If you already have your own place in Phoenix, I mean. Are you two really that close?”
“I don’t know. I guess so? Why not live with him up here though? It’d be way too big for just me.” He traces my bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “Why are you asking all these questions all of a sudden?” I could be mistaken but I catch a hint of suspicion in his tone.
I guess someone like him would be naturally suspicious. “Because I’m sleeping with you,” I say matter-of-factly. “I just figured … I don’t know anything about you and maybe I should.” After what I just let the man do to me, I think at least a few questions are fair.
He seems to consider that. “What do you want to know?”
I shrug. “What do you do with your days, besides swim laps and proposition women in prison parking lots?”
“I thought we had a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ rule.”
“Yeah, of course. But I mean, the normal stuff. There must be something normal that you do during the day?”
He trails a light fingertip over my shoulder, making me shiver. “Well, I’m a night owl so I don’t usually come to bed until three or four, and I like to sleep in until ten or eleven.”
“You were up earlier this morning,” I remind him.
“And, damn, was it worth it.” He smiles. “But I also had a nap in the afternoon.”
I snort. “Rough life.”
He laughs, the deep sound making my body tremble with pleasure. There’s a casual air growing around us now. It makes me more comfortable. “Do you have any other family besides Caleb and your father?”
“An uncle and a few cousins. That’s about it.”
“Are you close with them?”
“Not really.” His voice is calm, but I sense the sudden tension in his shoulders. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. A family like his must be fraught with problems. They’re damn criminals!
“What about your mom?”
“What about her?” His tone turns sharp. I’ve clearly hit a nerve. It’s the same nerve I hit when I mentioned their mother to Caleb.
“Just … do you see her often?”
“No. Never.”
Maybe I shouldn’t keep digging for information, but my curiosity gets the better of my judgment. “So, what does she think about your dad being in jail?”
“She doesn’t think anything.” He takes a deep breath, his severe gaze on the length of the pool. “She passed away when I was ten.”
“Oh.” My chest swells with empathy. “I’m sorry.” Because I truly am. I know what it’s like to lose your mother as a child. “Why didn’t you mention that earlier?” Like, when we were talking about dead mothers. It’s one of those things you mention, a natural tendency to try and relate to a new acquaintance. Unless it’s still painful for him to speak about, I guess.
He shrugs. “Not something I talk about.”
I hesitate. “How did it happen?”
His jaw tenses. “Car accident.” He peels himself away, releasing me from his grip. “Go and eat.”
It’s an abrupt dismissal, and one that tells me he doesn’t like talking about his mother’s death, even after all these years. It also makes me wonder if there’s more to the story.
But then he sighs. “Come on, Mercy,” he coaxes, his tone tempered. He urges me up with a hand on the small of my back. “Get that assignment finished.”
With a sigh, I stand.
Gabriel’s gaze skates over my nakedness. “You should walk around like this whenever you’re here from now on. Drop your clothes at the door. That should be a new rule.”
“I guess you should have made that one of your terms then. It’s too late now.”
He smirks. “There’s always next month, when we renegotiate.”
That’s right, I did agree to that. Next month. A whole month of him—of this. “You’ll be bored by then. Besides, do you really want your brother and the twins seeing me naked?” The lights are still off in the house. I wouldn’t be strutting around so freely if there was any chance that Caleb might be home.
“It’d be worth it just to watch them die from jealousy. You are just …” His words fade as his eyes roam shamelessly. “I can’t believe you’re mine.”
I’ve been ogled by men before, but Gabriel’s the first one who makes me feel like this. Like I’m a gift from the heavens above, beyond perfect in every way. He must think so, if he’s willing to pay this much for me.
But he is paying for me.
“My body is yours,” I correct him. “For now. But let’s be clear, I am not yours, and I never will be.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself.” The smile he flashes is infuriating. “But a month from now, the last thing you’ll be thinking about is leaving me.”
I snort. “That would require that I actually care about you.”
“And that would be so impossible? You couldn’t fall for me?” He’s still wearing a smile but there’s something odd in his voice now as his gaze settles on my face.
“Come on, Gabriel. Let’s be real here about why we’re together, how we got together.” Coercion and bribery. Not a healthy start to any real relationship. “I could never love a man like you.”
He chews his bottom lip in thought. “Even if a man like me were willing to change?”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.” And since whatever shady shit he does is below my radar, I’ll never know the difference. No … Gabriel will never have my heart.
He nods, and I can tell he wants to say more about it but decides not to. “You better get moving, or I will make you fail that class and I won’t feel the least bit sorry about it.”
For a split second, I consider sitting back down and discovering what else he has in store for my body. But I don’t have time tonight. I climb out of the pool and wrap my towel around myself.
“By the way,” he calls out after me, “your dad’s out of the infirmary.”
“Really?” My heart rate spikes. “How do you know?”
“I called my contact there today. He’ll be able to take visitors this weekend.”
“Oh, thank God.” I was afraid it’d be weeks before I see him again. “Thank you for checking up on him. It means a lot to me.” That Gabriel was thinking about me, that I didn’t have to ask.
A secretive smile touches his lips. “You’re welcome, Mercy.”
I hesitate. “And Fleet’s cousin? He knows to leave him alone from now on, right?”
Gabriel tips his head back to look up into the night sky, his throat thick, that sharp point jutting in a delicious way, a way that makes me want to drop this towel, climb onto his lap, and drag my tongue along it. While I ride him. “He’s learned his lesson.”
There’s something in Gabriel’s voice—an edge—that sends a shiver down my spine, but I quickly push it aside. It doesn’t matter what they did to warn that bastard off further retaliation. He deserved whatever Gabriel’s “guys” did to him. The important thing is that my dad is safe from being attacked, and he has a kickass lawyer working to get him out.
A deal made with the devil or not, things are finally starting to look up for us.
SIX
GABRIEL
“We should go and see this place.” I scroll through the pictures of the Mage hotel and casino on my laptop. Howard, our real estate agent, has been scouring possible options for an Empire expansion around the Vegas strip for us: vacant spaces, seedier clubs that could use a new owner and renovation.
He’s convinced us to think big. An Empire Hotel and Casino would be huge. The Mage is about to go under, and he thinks we should be ready to jump on it—turn it into the Empire Hotel and Casino, with a club on the rooftop. It’s an older place, and it’s been poorly managed these last few years, the owner too busy filling his nostrils with white powder and fucking anything that fancies him—both male and female—to see the writing on the wall.
Howard hears this guy’s about a month from going bankrupt or overdosing. Possibly both.
It’s a big, risky step, and we’re well aware that Howard would make one hell of a sales commission on this, which is serious motivation for him to push us toward it. But Howard also knows better than to steer us wrong, so I can’t help but give this idea serious thought.
“Dude. A hotel, casino, and club? The Feds are already crawling up our asses. Let’s just invite them up to the penthouse so they can give us a proper rim job,” Caleb murmurs absently, his attention on the front page of today’s newspaper. He’s religious about keeping up with the goings-on around the city—the politics, the crime, the new business ventures. He may play the idiot playboy, but my brother’s actually sharp as a tack.
“Now you’re talking.” I chuckle. Because that’s what opening a Vegas casino would do. Not that there aren’t enough disreputable fucks running those places in Vegas right now. So what’s one more? “It’s not a bad idea though.” Especially given I’m trying to turn over a new leaf, one that won’t land us in prison.
“Start clean, run clean, and we’ve got nothing to hide, right?” is Caleb’s answer, though it’s followed with a small shrug and a sardonic smirk, because the kind of money we’d need to take on a venture like that wouldn’t be clean. A lot of it hasn’t even been laundered yet. It’s sitting in private real estate loans to foreign buyers, waiting for them to either default or sell and clean our money for us. The rest is in offshore accounts, hidden under a multitude of layers and aliases, waiting to be put to good use.
But if we could pull this off, we’d be set for life. A Vegas life, mind you, but it’s not like we aren’t made for it anyway. We were born and raised in the kind of shade that comes with that seedy world—sometimes the gray areas, many times the outright black areas that you have to be able to thrive in.
We wouldn’t need the drug business—let the cartel swim in it—and we could get away from the prison fight circuit. Vegas means gambling and fighting, and gambling on fights. We’re experts at all that.
“You know, Mike’s heart might explode if we ask him to help us.” A club is one thing, but what does the big brute know about hotels and casinos?
“Mike’s dick will explode when he sees the kind of money he’ll be earning, helping us with this,” Caleb throws back. “But taking something this big on would mean one of us living there for a stretch. You willing to live in a Vegas hotel for the foreseeable future? Because I don’t know if I am. I’m pretty set here.”
He’s right, we can’t leave that all to Mike, though he’ll be a big part of getting us up and running. We’d need an entire staff of reliable managers who know what they’re doing, and one of us would need to be there to make sure the millions we’re sinking in gets us the return we need.
“Hotel living isn’t my thing.” I tried it for a summer, back when I was eighteen and floating around Europe. Then again, this would be one location. And we’d own the goddamn hotel. “Plus, I doubt Mercy would be willing to move four hours away while her father is still in prison, which he could be for years.”
Caleb’s head whips toward me. He pushes his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to penetrate me with his high-browed stare. “What. The. Fuck. Gabe?”
Shit.
He’s right. What the fuck, Gabe is right. This is a woman I’ve bribed into fucking me, and somehow I’ve begun planning my life around her?
Last night with Mercy was … Yeah. It was amazing and we didn’t even fuck. And then we sat around and talked, and the truth is, I could have stayed there talking to her all night. Maybe we would have, if she hadn’t brought up my mother. That’s not a story I want to explain to her. How would she take it?
Would it scare her off?
I wouldn’t blame her if it did.
So I sent her away to eat and do her schoolwork, and when I popped my head in later, she was so absorbed with her books and her laptop—looking librarian-sexy with her hair piled on top of her head, the end of a highlighter between her teeth, a studious frown across her forehead—that I did both of us a favor and stayed far away, watching the ball game in the living room.
By the time I ventured in at close to eleven, unable to stay away another minute and hoping for a fuck, she was sprawled out across the bed, passed out. So I didn’t do what I wanted to do—spread her legs wide and wake her up with my dick—and instead collected her things and tucked her in. Then I went and jacked off in the shower.
I’ve been acting like a fucking desperate school boy ever since this woman stepped into my life.
And now I’m suddenly talking like I’m thinking marriage.
Mercy sure as hell isn’t thinking marriage.
I could never love a man like you.
That’s what she said, and even though I expected as much, it stung.
Before Caleb has a chance to lay into me for letting myself get hung up on a woman, the patio door cracks open, and Uncle Peter and Vic stroll out.
“Rosita let us in,” Vic says by way of greeting.
Of course she would. They’re family. Technically. But we’ll need to have a conversation with her about that.
I share a quick glance with my brother and swiftly—but not too obviously—shut my laptop. No need for them or anyone else, namely our father, to catch wind of what we’re looking at doing before we actually commit. They wouldn’t approve. It’s much easier to fly under the radar with a few ma-and-pop storefronts and lackluster wedding halls than a Vegas high-rise. But this place will have nothing to do with them anyway.
“What do we owe this pleasant surprise to, dearest uncle?” Caleb croons in that tone that drips of condescension and annoys the hell out of our uncle and cousins. My brother has always had a hard time hiding his disdain for Peter. It was our father who sparked the feud with Camillo Perri, cutting into the Perri territory in a dangerous, overt way. But it was Uncle Peter who poured gasoline on the flames—literally—by blowing up their third-generation family restaurant. He didn’t know that Camillo’s mother was inside, rolling her handmade gnocchi.
