“How’d I get so lucky?” he sighed at last, leaning over me. His face was inches away as he pressed his crown against my hole, and as he cleaved me open, his lips descended onto mine, capturing my gasps and groans.
He paused to let me adjust, pulling out until I felt my asshole bulging, clutching at the flare of his cockhead, and then he thrust back in, all the way to the base, smiling at the noises I made.
“I’ll never get tired of that,” he whispered into my neck. I wrapped my legs around his waist, letting him in even deeper inside me, and stretched my arms high up above my head. I felt a blissful stretch and burn in my ass as he flexed his cock in my gut.
“Come on, old man,” I demanded. “Yousaidyou were going to fuck me.”
“Mouthy,” he growled, biting at my lower lip, but then he began to move, just like I wanted him to, slow and deep at first, picking up the pace as we worked out our rhythm together. I rocked my ass against him, grasping on to the side of the bed for purchase, thrusting back as hard as he was giving it to me.
“Harder,” I gasped out, arching my back as his cock dragged insistently and firmly over theexactright spot inside me. I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t shoot first.
Angelo grabbed my face, pulling my mouth to his as he jackhammered into me, and then that hand drove down between us and grabbed at my dick. He let me fuck into his tight fingers, cursing and panting. It only took a few seconds before I went rigid, my ass clenching on his dick inside me, and my orgasm came crashing out of me, drenching us both.
He lifted his hand to his mouth as I puffed and gasped under him, licking it clean in slow, meticulous strokes. And then, when I collapsed into shudders, he kept fucking into me, long and deep, until he found his own crescendo, straining up on his arms before he lay down on top of me, trembling and euphoric.
“How was that for an old man, eh?” he bragged afterward, although his bravado was undermined somewhat by the exhaustion in his voice.
We’d cleaned up and crawled back into the dirty sheets, drained but delighted with ourselves.
“It wasn’t bad,” I told him, grinning when he huffed against my neck. “Exceptional, actually.” He snuggled me closer at that. After another beat, I said, “I’m sorry you miss the Morellis. I…know how it feels to miss family.”
All I had left of mine these days was that photo album Angelo himself had retrieved from my New York apartment. He pulled me closer to him in the bed. For a moment he didn’t speak, and I hoped he wouldn’t say it wasn’t the same thing.
It wasn’t.
But in another way, it was.
When he did speak, it was with tenderness. “You’re all the family I need, Bax.”
I clutched at his arms around me, biting my lip as I fought to understand the strange emotions those words churned up in me.
“Same,” I said at last. It was a vastly underwhelming response. But it was all I could manage in the moment.
Angelo squeezed me even tighter, wordlessly showing his understanding. For the first time in a very long time, sleep came easily to me.
Only days later I would look back on that peaceful night’s sleep with envy.
Chapter Seven
The guards at Don Ciro Castellani’s vast house went through the same routine the next afternoon as they had the first time we’d visited, and we were led into the same room.
Angelo and I wandered around while we waited. I began by looking at the bookshelves, but after a moment I realized they weren’treal; all the apparent books in them were merely facades. It troubled me. What kind of man kept a library full of fake books? It said something about his psychology.
Exactly what, though, I couldn’t be sure.
“Bax,” Angelo said softly, and I joined him at the window. We looked out on a tableau: Ciro Castellani and another man stood in the gardens below, squaring off as though they were meeting in a boxing ring instead of between two perfectly-manicured hedges. Castellani, blocking our view of his companion, was shouting in Italian at the other man.
“‘Why must you behave this way,’” Angelo translated for me. “‘You make trouble for the whole Family when you refuse to obey me.’”
A few notes on the piano behind us startled us both, and we whirled around to see a blond man seated there. He was looking down at the keys as he said, “It’s very rude to eavesdrop.” He looked up with a wide smile and added, “So I’ve been told. But it’s sointeresting, don’t you think?”
Angelo had stepped in front of me instinctively, and we were both on high alert. The man smiled away at us as he broke into a tinkling, light tune on the piano. “You’re Angelo Messina,” he said, giving Angelo a head-to-toe appreciative stare that raised my temper. “Which meansyou,” he added, turning his sparkling blue eyes on me, “must be Baxter Flynn. Correct?”
“You have the advantage of us,” Angelo said.
“I suppose I do. Would you like to know my name?”
“Very much,” Angelo replied politely.
